Seth Godin

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Lightburn is my favorite way to control a laser cutter.

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Bitwarden is a well crafted password manager, and it's very cheap.

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Nisus Writer Pro is a delightful word processor for the Mac. Not distracting or showy, it simply works great.

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Ocenaudio is my audio editor of choice. I happily pay for it, but the free version is great.

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Qobuz unlocks millions of tracks of hi-rez quality music. I promise you can hear the difference, especially with headphones.

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Your product might be great, but how do you get it on the shelves of Walmart? Or how do you get it on the shelves of Google? Because if you're not on the shelves of Walmart, you're not on the shelves of Google, you might be invisible. And it's friction that kept you there, not some sort of merit contest.

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a new relationship is like fresh powder. It is new and shiny and exciting but it will not be a new relationship for long. And then you're still stuck with an old relationship and the question is will your old relationship a year from now be better than your old relationship that you currently have is? And if the answer is yes then yes sunk costs completely apply. But if the answer is no then what you're really doing is shopping for novelty not ignoring sunk costs.

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Criticism is what happens when someone with domain knowledge who is not trying to earn status by hurting you is able to help you see the world as it is. And those three pieces are the key, right? Because most of the criticism I've gotten in my life has come from people who felt like they would feel better if I felt worse.

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The only way to learn is by doing things. That we can read about how to swim and we can read about how to make uh uh uh a vegetarian maki roll, but you will not learn how to do it until you do it. And the reading, the listening is important preparation, but learning is the act of failing on our way to mastery.

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A professional makes a promise and then keeps the promise whether or not they feel like it. Amateurs get to be authentic, whatever that means. And amateurs show up when they want to and make what they want to make.

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reassurance is futile. Reassurance that we seek is like a warm bath, it feels great, and then you need more of it. Because the future is unpredictable, and when the future doesn't match what you hoped for, the reassurance you used to have isn't enough. You need more reassurance.

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Quality is not luxury. Quality is not expensive. Quality is not that you love it. Quality is just one thing. It meets spec. So, if I look under an electron microscope at any part of a Lexus, which is by any measure the highest quality car there is, uh under an electron microscope, it's filled with defects. But they're not defects that matter because they're defects that are within spec.

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If you want to exchange or deliver information to a group of people, one of the worst ways to do it is with a live verbal presentation. If your goal is actually to deliver that scientific paper or that insight, then you should either write a book or write a memo and say, here, in an asynchronous way, this is what we know. If you're going to show up live, in person, in real time, synchronized, you are performing. And the goal is to not deliver the information, but to deliver emotion.

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Employees don't want what you want. Customers don't want what you want. Uh you know, that that one of the challenges of the whole stock option thing is entrepreneurs and founders think that other people will be as motivated by owning part of the company as they are. They are not. Not even close.

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the way to be on the hook is to say, "This is only for people who are like this." Because if those people hate it, then you were wrong. Whereas if you say, "This is for everyone," you're allowed to hide behind, "Well, everyone hasn't found it yet."

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Uh Harry Potter, the most successful uh book franchise in history, it made the author over a billion dollars. That book is for almost no one. Right? That book is for precocious 12-year-olds and people who like to remember what was like to be a precocious 12-year-old. That's not everyone. That's a very small group of people.

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nobody has everyone as their customer. Nobody. Maybe the water company, but that's about it. Our goal cannot be to be for everyone. That we have to be for someone. The smallest viable audience, not the biggest possible audience.

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The internet is a micro medium. It is the best medium ever developed to reach specific people, but it is terrible at reaching everyone. There is no homepage. It is impossible to reach a hundred million people in one day on the internet, which is something TV used to do every night.

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My friend Nicole has written a provocative, funny and honest memoir. Nothing Is Missing: A Memoir of Living Boldly. I'll be interviewing her in NYC on October 9.

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Dan Ariely's book Misbelief is a must-listen for anyone trying to understand how social dynamics are changing the way some people see the world.

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Years later, Kafka on the Shore remains one of my favorite all-time audiobooks. It's an extraordinary story, beautifully told.