Seth GodinModify

2026-04-17 17:03:00

What do your supporters tell their friends?

That’s the unseen force behind every successful brand, movement or idea.

Most people don’t care about you. They’re not listening to you, not wondering what you’re up to, and certainly not taking the time to seek you out. All you have is a small circle, your supporters.

And yet, we spend most of our time treating people like customers, not supporters. We try to turn strangers into people who do business with us, taking the friends and supporters we’ve earned for granted.

Instead, with planning and focus, you can create the conditions where your efforts strike a chord. When your customers become fans, they spread the word. When your story is true, relevant, focused, and sticky, new fans arrive. Not because it matters to you, but because it matters to them.

The second circle is out of your direct control, and it’s tempting to ignore it. But the second circle unlocks the change you seek to make.

2026-04-16 17:03:00

That’s the appeal of it, of course. There isn’t a definitive study. There can’t be.

Even if we created a forty-year-long, double-blind twin study, there’d be room for someone to ask “what about?…”

It doesn’t matter that the peer-reviewed and consistent results we have are clear to those who read them with an open mind.

The attraction of simple stories about complex phenomena is that we get to make them up and imbue them with whatever reassurance, solace or threat we choose. Human beings didn’t evolve to be rational decision makers. We’re creators and consumers of stories, seeking status and affiliation, and prioritizing short-term feelings over long-term evidence.

It’s nice when a story that’s precious to us is reinforced by evidence, but it’s rarely essential. Belief isn’t dependent on facts, that’s why we call it belief instead of facts.

It’s helpful to wonder who benefits from sharing a particular story with us, and what it costs us to believe it.

2026-04-15 17:03:00

What does it mean for us to own something?

If we own a piece of land and the rain washes the topsoil downstream, do we go and get the topsoil back?

Do we own our reputation? We have influence over it, but some of it was gifted to us without our knowledge, and other parts are influenced by forces out of our control.

Do we own responsibility? Is it something we take or acquire or accept?

We can try to own our past, but the best we can do is influence our future.

Ownership is a shared understanding, a construct that can shift depending on where we stand. It’s not always up to us, but it often works better if we acknowledge it.

2026-04-14 17:03:00

• Pricing is an exchange of value. This for that.
  
  But price is also a story.
  
• When you have competition, your story doesn’t have to justify the absolute price, simply the difference between you and the next-best option.
  
• Price is based on value, not on the cost of production.
  
• Thanks to Baumol’s cost disease, productivity doesn’t always correlate with the price of labor.
  
• Luxury goods are worth more because they cost more. If you sell a luxury item, raise your price and then improve the story to make it a bargain.
  
• It’s better to explain your fair price once than to apologize for low quality over and over.
  
• Asking, “what’s your budget?” is lazy and selfish. Your job is to figure out what your client wants, what they’re afraid of, and what sort of story they are eager to buy.
  
• When everything else is equal, we always want the cheapest option. But everything else is rarely equal.
  
• When someone says, “that’s too expensive,” what they mean is that the story you’ve told them so far (and the reputation you’ve earned) doesn’t match the price you’re charging. You probably don’t need a lower price, but you might need to earn a better story.
  
• “It might not be for you,” is almost always part of “we make the best (for someone).”
  
• Bargains, sales and coupons are a sport and a narrative. They’re not just a discount, they create their own sort of value and expectation.
  
• Convenience is often underappreciated as a component of value.
  
• The customers you get because you are the cheapest are the first ones to leave when someone else is even cheaper.
  
• The problem with racing to the bottom is that you might win.
  
• The most resilient slogan you can earn is, “you’ll pay a bit more, but you’ll get more than you paid for.”

2026-04-13 17:03:00

Some vegans don’t eat avocados.

They’re concerned that the bees that are trucked in to pollinate the trees are mistreated, and so they choose to not support this practice.

But we live in community, and someone running a vegan restaurant or serving a meal to vegan friends, concerned that they might offend, doesn’t serve avocado. A few strong opinions change the culture.

And so the cycle continues.

Humans care about status and affiliation, and both are at play in a purity loop.

One can earn more status by caring more about the issue that others are adjacent to. And so the loop gains momentum.

Once a few people make it clear that they’re more orthodox or progressive or concerned or strict or unhypocritical or obedient, others seek to claim the same status. And that becomes a point of affiliation.

Just about every tribe goes through these loops.

Four hundred years ago, neck ruffs became popular among the aristrocracy in Europe. The neck ruff began as a modest collar but evolved into enormous pleated confections that could span two feet across. At their peak, ruffs became so large that special eating utensils with extended handles were invented to allow wearers to get food to their mouths. Some ruffs were so tall and stiff that wearers couldn’t turn their heads and needed help eating.

The instinctual response is to criticize the newest form of purity as absurd. But of course, the absurdity is part of the status on display.

Perhaps it makes more sense to see the loop at work and get back to the work at hand.

“Shut up and drive” is the answer to an argument about what song is playing on the radio. We can tune the radio as we go, but we’re here to drive this thing to where we’re headed.

Enrollment is at the core of the mission. Where are we going and why? If it’s not helping with that, let’s drive and work on it as we go.

Everyone is entitled to their own take. But when we focus on purity and status at the expense of the journey, the distraction costs all of us.

We’re going. Come if you’d like.

2026-04-12 16:24:00

Sometimes it pays to accept and celebrate what we get.

And sometimes, we only get something because we settled for it.

It helps to be able to discern the difference between the two.