Seth Godin

Art...is the intentional act of using your humanity to create a change in another person...Passion is caring enough about your art that you will do almost anything to give it away, to make it a gift, to change people.

If you wait until you are ready, it is almost certainly too late.

I do not think you can get rid of the fear... but you can dance with it.

Marketing used to be what you say _x000D_ _x000D_ Now, marketing is what you do. What you make. How you act. The choices you make when you are sure no one is looking.

Playing the game is a form of winning the game. In those competitions, we win by being resilient.

The essence of marketing today is to tell a story to people who want to hear it, in a way that resonates with them so they are likely to either respond or connect to you, or tell their friends.

Those that spend the most effort in search of shortcuts are often the most disappointed and the least successful.

Quit or be exceptional. Average is for losers.

The only path to amazing runs directly through not-yet-amazing

We don't need to be taught to make art, but sometimes we need permission to do so. Following instructions is overrated.

The innovator creates a business where they are making money, even when they sleep.

More time [to decide] without more information just creates anxiety, not insight.

In a long distance race, everyone gets tired. The winner is the runner who figures out where to put the tired, figures out how to store it away until after the race is over. Sure, he's tired. Everyone is. That's not the point. The point is to run.

Not changing your strategy merely because you're used to the one you have now is a lousy strategy.

Blaming the system is soothing because it lets you off the hook. But when the system is broken, we wonder why you were relying in the system in the first place.

Anxiety is practising failure in advance. Anxiety is needless and imaginary. It's fear about fear, fear that means nothing.

Instead of working hard to keep their share of a shrinking pie, or working even harder to make sure the industry stays as is, I think the most essential thing legacy book industry players can do is set up independent ventures with great people and little interference and work really hard to put themselves out of business by starting at the bottom, not by reinforcing the top.

Courage doesn't always involve physical heroism in the face of death. It doesn't always require giant leaps worthy of celebration. Sometimes, courage is the willingness to speak the truth about what you see and to own what you say.

I was amplifying the negative at the expense of the positive, not to serve any useful function, not to make my writing better, but to destroy it. The lizard brain, so attuned to people laughing behind our backs, was on high alert for this sort of criticism and would do anything it could to stop me from writing again. I haven't sought out and read a review or a tweet since.

You don't make art after you become an artist. You become an artist by ceaselessly making art.

It's clearly more fun to make the rules than to follow them.