Books from Seth Godin

Traction

Most startups don’t fail because they can’t build a product. Most startups fail because they can’t get traction. Startup advice tends to be a lot of platitudes repackaged with new buzzwords, but Traction is something else entirely. As Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares learned from their own experiences, building a successful company is hard. For every startup that grows to the point where it can go public or be profitably acquired, hundreds of others sputter and die. Smart entrepreneurs know that the key to success isn’t the originality of your offering, the brilliance of your team, or how much money you raise. It’s how consistently you can grow and acquire new customers (or, for a free service, users). That’s called traction, and it makes everything else easier—fund-raising, hiring, press, partnerships, acquisitions. Talk is cheap, but traction is hard evidence that you’re on the right path.Traction will teach you the nineteen channels you can use to build a customer base, and how to pick the right ones for your business. It draws on inter-views with more than forty successful founders, including Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Alexis Ohanian (reddit), Paul English (Kayak), and Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot). You’ll learn, for example, how to: ·Find and use offline ads and other channels your competitors probably aren’t using·Get targeted media coverage that will help you reach more customers·Boost the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns by automating staggered sets of prompts and updates·Improve your search engine rankings and advertising through online tools and researchWeinberg and Mares know that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution; every startup faces unique challenges and will benefit from a blend of these nineteen traction channels. They offer a three-step framework (called Bullseye) to figure out which ones will work best for your business. But no matter how you apply them, the lessons and examples in Traction will help you create and sustain the growth your business desperately needs.
Seth Godin
Entrepreneur
"The latest, most specific tactics from the red-hot center of the internet marketing universe. From someone who has done it. Twice." - Seth Godin
Books recommended by Seth Godin
15 books

Seth Godin Book Recommendations - 15 Amazing Reads

Seth Godin book recommendations. 15 books Seth Godin suggests reading. It is a Seth Godin book list of his favorite reads that he has mentioned recently.
Seth Godin
Entrepreneur
Seth Godin book recommendations. 15 books Seth Godin suggests reading. It is a Seth Godin book list of his favorite reads that he has mentioned recently.
Books from Seth Godin

Poilâne

Epicurious' "New Fall 2019 Cookbooks We Can't Wait to Cook From" Food & Wine 18 Essential New Cookbooks for Fall Amazon's pick for Biggest Cookbooks of Fall Chowhound's Best New Cookbooks and Best New Baking Cookbooks for Fall 2019 "In many ways, the good bread we have now in the United States exists thanks to Poilâne. Poilâne bakery and the Poilâne family have revolutionized the way we think about bread, and it is deeply important that we preserve and learn from their legacy." --Alice Waters,from the foreword To food lovers the world over, a trip to Paris is not complete without a visit to Poilâne. Ina Garten raves about the bread's "extraordinary quality." Martha Stewart says the P in Poilâne stands for "perfect." For the first time,Poilâneprovides detailed instructions so bakers can reproduce its unique "hug-sized" sourdough loaves at home, as well as the bakery's other much-loved breads and pastries. It tells the story of how Apollonia Poilâne, the third-generation baker and owner, took over the global business at age eighteen and steered it into the future as a Harvard University freshman after her parents were killed in a helicopter crash. Beyond bread, Apollonia includes recipes for pastries such as the bakery's exquisite but unfussy tarts and butter cookies. In recipes that use bread as an ingredient, she shows how to make the most from a loaf, from crust to crumb. In still other dishes, she explores the world of grains: rice, corn, barley, oats, and millet. From sunup to sundown,Poilâne traces the hours in a baker's day, blending narrative, recipes, and Apollonia's philosophy of bread.
Seth Godin
Entrepreneur
Her new book, her first in English, is out this week. Her dad changed my life, and her bread and the way she talks about it might change yours.
Books from Seth Godin

Reboot

One of the start-up world’s most in-demand executive coaches—hailed as the “CEO Whisperer” (Gimlet Media)—reveals why radical self-inquiry is critical to professional success and healthy relationships in all realms of life.Jerry Colonna helps start-up CEOs make peace with their demons, the psychological habits and behavioral patterns that have helped them to succeed—molding them into highly accomplished individuals—yet have been detrimental to their relationships and ultimate well-being. Now, this venture capitalist turned executive coach shares his unusual yet highly effective blend of Buddhism, Jungian therapy, and entrepreneurial straight talk to help leaders overcome their own psychological traumas. Reboot is a journey of radical self-inquiry, helping you to reset your life by sorting through the emotional baggage that is holding you back professionally, and even more important, in your relationships.Jerry has taught CEOs and their top teams to realize their potential by using the raw material of their lives to find meaning, to build healthy interpersonal bonds, and to become more compassionate and bold leaders. In Reboot, he inspires everyone to hold themselves responsible for their choices and for the possibility of truly achieving their dreams.Work does not have to destroy us. Work can be the way in which we achieve our fullest self, Jerry firmly believes. What we need, sometimes, is a chance to reset our goals and to reconnect with our deepest selves and with each other. Reboot moves and empowers us to begin this journey.
Seth Godin
Entrepreneur
Jerry Colonna, the quiet coach of so many successful leaders, has his first book out, publishing tomorrow. It’s raw, personal and life-altering. It’s called Reboot.
Books recommended by Seth Godin
10 books

Seth Godin Fresh Reading List - 10 Important Books

This spring Seth shared a list of books he believes to be important for everyone. Take a look at the inspiring Seth Godin 10 book recommendations!
Seth Godin
Entrepreneur
This spring Seth shared a list of books he believes to be important for everyone. Take a look at the inspiring Seth Godin 10 book recommendations!
Books from Seth Godin

Caste

'Required reading for all of humanity' Oprah Winfrey'An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.' Dwight Garner, The New York Times'The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power - which groups have it and which do not'Beyond race or class, our lives are defined by a powerful, unspoken system of divisions. In Caste, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson gives an astounding portrait of this hidden phenomenon. Linking America, India and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson reveals how our world has been shaped by caste - and how its rigid, arbitrary hierarchies still divide us today. With clear-sighted rigour, Wilkerson unearths the eight pillars that connect caste systems across civilizations, and demonstrates how our own era of intensifying conflict and upheaval has arisen as a consequence of caste. Weaving in stories of real people, she shows how its insidious undertow emerges every day; she documents its surprising health costs; and she explores its effects on culture and politics. Finally, Wilkerson points forward to the ways we can - and must - move beyond its artificial divisions, towards our common humanity.Beautifully written and deeply original, Caste is an eye-opening examination of what lies beneath the surface of ordinary lives. No one can afford to ignore the moral clarity of its insights, or its urgent call for a freer, fairer world.
Seth Godin
Entrepreneur
Great non-fiction helps us see the unseen, plants and nurtures ideas that matter, and, sometimes, can leave us better than we were. Isabel Wilkerson’s new book Caste does all of those things. It uses language, analogy and history to pull together disparate threads into a coherent, devastating whole. Highly recommended.
Books from Seth Godin

In Search of Excellence

The "Greatest Business Book of All Time" (Bloomsbury UK), In Search of Excellence has long been a must-have for the boardroom, business school, and bedside table.Based on a study of forty-three of America's best-run companies from a diverse array of business sectors, In Search of Excellence describes eight basic principles of management -- action-stimulating, people-oriented, profit-maximizing practices -- that made these organizations successful.Joining the HarperBusiness Essentials series, this phenomenal bestseller features a new Authors' Note, and reintroduces these vital principles in an accessible and practical way for today's management reader.
Seth Godin
Entrepreneur
There are not so many books that I wish I had written that I hadn't written, but this is one of them. (8 m 00 s)
Books from Seth Godin

The Pursuit of Wow!

Organized into more than 200 thought- and action-provoking elements—from the importance of clean trucks and bathrooms to conversations with entrepreneurs creating new markets—Tom Peters, bestselling management guru offers a practical guide to impractical times. In The Pursuit of Wow!, Tom Peters offers readers the words, the tools, to survive in tumultuous business environments. In his groundbreaking book, In Search of Excellence changed the way business does business. Now it’s time to take the next leap into the cyberstage era. Getting to a place called excellence is no longer the idea. You’ve got to take that leap, then leap again—catapult their imaginations, blow their mindsets—in a word, wow! them. Once more the unconventional Peters stimulates corporate thought processes. Along with the best of his columns, Peters includes questions and rebuttals that come from readers and listeners, as well as his own candid responses. A must-read for every business person.
Seth Godin
Entrepreneur
You don't have to read many books that I've written, if you just read The Pursuit of Wow. What Tom is talking about in this book, and he is not afraid to use exclamation points, underlines, bold and occasional illustrational photo, is that people who care can make a difference. (7 m 00 s)
Books from Seth Godin

The Gift

“A manifesto of sorts for anyone who makes art [and] cares for it.” —Zadie Smith“The best book I know of for talented but unacknowledged creators. . . . A masterpiece.” —Margaret Atwood“No one who is invested in any kind of art . . . can read The Gift and remain unchanged.” —David Foster WallaceBy now a modern classic, The Gift is a brilliantly orchestrated defense of the value of creativity and of its importance in a culture increasingly governed by money and overrun with commodities. This book is even more necessary today than when it first appeared. An illuminating and transformative book, and completely original in its view of the world, The Gift is cherished by artists, writers, musicians, and thinkers. It is in itself a gift to all who discover the classic wisdom found in its pages.
Seth Godin
Entrepreneur
The Gift by Lewis Hyde. It's not about the hustle, it's not about getting or giving gifts. It's about the muse, being a genius. It's about culture, it's about society. (5 m 50 s)
Books from Seth Godin

Little Rice

Almost unknown to the rest of the globe, Xiaomi has become the world's third-largest mobile phone manufacturer. Its high-end phones are tailored to Chinese and emerging markets, where it outsells even Samsung. Since the 1990s China has been climbing up the ladder of quality, from doing knockoffs to designing its own high-end goods.Xiaomi its name literally means "little rice" is landing squarely in this shift in China's economy. But the remarkable rise of Xiaomi from startup to colossus is more than a business story, because mobile phones are special. The common desiderata of the global population, mobile phones offer the kind of freedom and connectedness that autocratic countries are terrified of. China's fortune and future clearly lie with "opening up" to the global market, requiring it to allow local entrepreneurs to experiment.Clay Shirky, one of the most influential and original thinkers on how technological innovation affects social change around the world, now turns his attention to the most populous country of them all. The case of Xiaomi exemplifies the balancing act that China has to perfect to navigate between cheap copies and innovation, between the demands of local and global markets, and between freedom and control.
Seth Godin
Entrepreneur
Clay Shirky has a short book about a massive transformation you might not be noticing.
Books from Seth Godin

Stone Age Economics

Since its first publication over forty years ago Marshall Sahlins's Stone Age Economics has established itself as a classic of modern anthropology and arguably one of the founding works of anthropological economics. Ambitiously tackling the nature of economic life and how to study it comparatively, Sahlins radically revises traditional views of the hunter-gatherer and so-called primitive societies, revealing them to be the original "affluent society." Sahlins examines notions of production, distribution and exchange in early communities and examines the link between economics and cultural and social factors. A radical study of tribal economies, domestic production for livelihood, and of the submission of domestic production to the material and political demands of society at large, Stone Age Economics regards the economy as a category of culture rather than behaviour, in a class with politics and religion rather than rationality or prudence. Sahlins concludes, controversially, that the experiences of those living in subsistence economies may actually have been better, healthier and more fulfilled than the millions enjoying the affluence and luxury afforded by the economics of modern industrialisation and agriculture. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new foreword by David Graeber, London School of Economics.
Seth Godin
Entrepreneur
One of the books I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is a book called Stone Age Economics by Marshall Sahlins. It made his career in the 1960s. He’s an anthropologist. Basically, what he was able to show is that cavemen didn’t work very hard. Our vision of cavemen is that they were always foraging; that they were always hunting; that it was a frantic, long tooth-and-claw, dramatic lifestyle. But he says actually, about four hours a day, and then they could get back to the business of living.
Books from Seth Godin

TED Talks

'This is not just the most insightful book ever written on public speaking-it's also a brilliant, profound look at how to communicate' - Adam Grant, author of ORIGINALSIn Ted Talks Chris Anderson, Head of TED, reveals the inside secrets of how to give a first-class presentation. Where books like Talk Like TED and TED Talks Storytelling whetted the appetite, here is the official TED guide to public speaking from the man who put TED talks on the world's stage. 'Nobody in the world better understands the art and science of public speaking than Chris Anderson. He is absolutely the best person to have written this book' Elizabeth Gilbert.Anderson shares his five key techniques to presentation success: Connection, Narration, Explanation, Persuasion and Revelation (plus the three to avoid). He also answers the most frequently asked questions about giving a talk, from 'What should I wear?' to 'How do I handle my nerves?'.Ted Talks is also full of presentation tips from such TED notable speakers as Sir Ken Robinson, Bill Gates, Mary Roach, Amy Cuddy, Elizabeth Gilbert, Dan Gilbert, Amanda Palmer, Matt Ridley and many more. This is a lively, fun read with great practical application from the man who knows what goes into a truly memorable speech. In Ted Talks Anderson pulls back the TED curtain for anyone who wants to learn how to prepare an exceptional presentation.
Seth Godin
Entrepreneur
Chris Anderson's much awaited book on TED Talks comes out. I've just finished reading it, and it's well worth a pre-order.
Books from Seth Godin

Pattern Recognition

“Pattern Recognition is William Gibson’s best book since he rewrote all the rules in Neuromancer.”—Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods“One of the first authentic and vital novels of the 21st century.”—The Washington Post Book WorldThe accolades and acclaim are endless for William Gibson's coast-to-coast bestseller. Set in the post-9/11 present, Pattern Recognition is the story of one woman's never-ending search for the now...Cayce Pollard is a new kind of prophet—a world-renowned “coolhunter” who predicts the hottest trends. While in London to evaluate the redesign of a famous corporate logo, she’s offered a different assignment: find the creator of the obscure, enigmatic video clips being uploaded to the internet—footage that is generating massive underground buzz worldwide. Still haunted by the memory of her missing father—a Cold War security guru who disappeared in downtown Manhattan on the morning of September 11, 2001—Cayce is soon traveling through parallel universes of marketing, globalization, and terror, heading always for the still point where the three converge. From London to Tokyo to Moscow, she follows the implications of a secret as disturbing—and compelling—as the twenty-first century promises to be...
Seth Godin
Entrepreneur
If you’re a marketer, you really need to read Pattern Recognition, which I think will get under your skin. It’s chock-full of images and ideas that will stick with you for months.
Books from Seth Godin

Debt - Updated and Expanded

Now in paperback, the updated and expanded edition: David Graeber’s “fresh . . . fascinating . . . thought-provoking . . . and exceedingly timely” (Financial Times) history of debt Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: he shows that before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it.
Seth Godin
Entrepreneur
The most fascinating book I’ve read all year is Debt.
Books from Seth Godin

Call to Action

Call to Action includes the information businesses need to know to achieve dramatic results from online efforts. Are you planning for top performance? Are you accurately evaluating that performance? Are you setting the best benchmarks for measuring success? How well are you communicating your value proposition? Are you structured for change? Can you achieve the momentum you need to get the results you want? If you have the desire and commitment to create phenomenal online results, then this book is your call to action.Within these pages, New York Times best-selling authors Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg walk you through the five phases that comprise web site development, from the critical planning phase, through developing structure, momentum, and communication, to articulating value. Along the way, they offer advice and practical applications culled from their years of experience "in the trenches."
Seth Godin
Entrepreneur
If you have a website, don’t wait even one minute before checking out Call To Action. The book is straightforward and gives you direct, clear insight into what’s wrong with your site and what to do about it. No fancy metaphors or engaging banter. Just the nuts and bolts and the facts to back them up.
Books from Seth Godin

What Technology Wants

From the author of the New York Times bestseller The Inevitable— a sweeping vision oftechnology as a living force that can expand our individual potential This provocative book introduces a brand-new view of technology. It suggests that technology as a whole is not a jumble of wires and metal but a living, evolving organism that has its own unconscious needs and tendencies. Kevin Kelly looks out through the eyes of this global technological system to discover "what it wants." He uses vivid examples from the past to trace technology's long course and then follows a dozen trajectories of technology into the near future to project where technology is headed. This new theory of technology offers three practical lessons: By listening to what technology wants we can better prepare ourselves and our children for the inevitable technologies to come. By adopting the principles of pro-action and engagement, we can steer technologies into their best roles. And by aligning ourselves with the long-term imperatives of this near-living system, we can capture its full gifts. Written in intelligent and accessible language, this is a fascinating, innovative, and optimistic look at how humanity and technology join to produce increasing opportunities in the world and how technology can give our lives greater meaning.
Seth Godin
Entrepreneur
Kevin Kelly is three for three; his new book, What Technology Wants, is an absolute must-read and will change the way you see the world.
Books from Seth Godin

The Peter Principle

The classic #1 New York Times bestseller that answers the age-old questionWhy is incompetence so maddeningly rampant and so vexingly triumphant?The Peter Principle, the eponymous law Dr. Laurence J. Peter coined, explains that everyone in a hierarchy—from the office intern to the CEO, from the low-level civil servant to a nation’s president—will inevitably rise to his or her level of incompetence. Dr. Peter explains why incompetence is at the root of everything we endeavor to do—why schools bestow ignorance, why governments condone anarchy, why courts dispense injustice, why prosperity causes unhappiness, and why utopian plans never generate utopias.With the wit of Mark Twain, the psychological acuity of Sigmund Freud, and the theoretical impact of Isaac Newton, Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull’s The Peter Principle brilliantly explains how incompetence and its accompanying symptoms, syndromes, and remedies define the world and the work we do in it.
Seth Godin
Entrepreneur
I probably read four or five nonfiction books a week—everything from The Peter Principle, which I started reading 35 years ago when I was just a kid, to books that have shown up lately that make me sit up straight.
Books from Seth Godin

The Diamond Age

Vividly imagined, stunningly prophetic, and epic in scope, The Diamond Age is a major novel from one of the most visionary writers of our timeDecades into our future, a stone’s throw from the ancient city of Shanghai, a brilliant nanotechnologist named John Percival Hackworth has just broken the rigorous moral code of his tribe, the powerful neo-Victorians. He's made an illicit copy of a state-of-the-art interactive device called A Young Ladys Illustrated Primer Commissioned by an eccentric duke for his grandchild, stolen for Hackworth's own daughter, the Primer’s purpose is to educate and raise a girl capable of thinking for herself. It performs its function superbly. Unfortunately for Hackworth, his smuggled copy has fallen into the wrong hands.Young Nell and her brother Harv are thetes—members of the poor, tribeless class. Neglected by their mother, Harv looks after Nell. When he and his gang waylay a certain neo-Victorian—John Percival Hackworth—in the seamy streets of their neighborhood, Harv brings Nell something special: the Primer.Following the discovery of his crime, Hackworth begins an odyssey of his own. Expelled from the neo-Victorian paradise, squeezed by agents of Protocol Enforcement on one side and a Mandarin underworld crime lord on the other, he searches for an elusive figure known as the Alchemist. His quest and Nell’s will ultimately lead them to another seeker whose fate is bound up with the Primer—a woman who holds the key to a vast, subversive information network that is destined to decode and reprogram the future of humanity.
Seth Godin
Entrepreneur
Back when Neil Stephenson was good, Snow Crash and The Diamond Age were two of the best books ever.
Books from Seth Godin

Snow Crash

One of Time’s 100 best English-language novels • A mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous, you’ll recognize it immediately Only once in a great while does a writer come along who defies comparison—a writer so original he redefines the way we look at the world. Neal Stephenson is such a writer and Snow Crash is such a novel, weaving virtual reality, Sumerian myth, and just about everything in between with a cool, hip cybersensibility to bring us the gigathriller of the information age. In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo’s CosoNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metaverse he’s a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that’s striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about infocalypse.Praise for Snow Crash“[Snow Crash is] a cross between Neuromancer and Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. This is no mere hyperbole.”—The San Francisco Bay Guardian “Fast-forward free-style mall mythology for the twenty-first century.”—William Gibson “Brilliantly realized . . . Stephenson turns out to be an engaging guide to an onrushing tomorrow.”—The New York Times Book Review
Seth Godin
Entrepreneur
Back when Neil Stephenson was good, Snow Crash and The Diamond Age were two of the best books ever.
Books recommended by Seth Godin
5 books

5 Audiobooks that Seth Godin Puts on Repeat

I find that I don’t have patience for the typical audiobook because the reader doesn’t read fast enough for me. There are certain audiobooks that I listen to on a regular basis over and over again.
Seth Godin
Entrepreneur
I find that I don’t have patience for the typical audiobook because the reader doesn’t read fast enough for me. There are certain audiobooks that I listen to on a regular basis over and over again.
Books from Seth Godin

Replay

Jeff Winston's life is not how he imagined it would be. An unhappy marriage and unrewarding job - and then he died. Aged forty-three. And woke up again, back in his college room, in 1963, aged eighteen. With all his memories intact. If he applies those memories, he can be rich - he can have anything he wants - in this new chance at life. Until he dies at forty-three and wakes up in his eighteen-year-old body again . . . and again in a continuous twenty-five year cycle each time starting from scratch at the age of eighteen to reclaim lost loves, make a fortune or remedy past mistakes. And then, in one replayed life, he meets a woman who knows all too well what he is experiencing.REPLAY is a novel of gripping adventure, romance, and fascinating speculation on the nature of time, Replay asks the question: 'What if you could live your life over again?'
Seth Godin
Entrepreneur
I will tell your readers that even if they don’t like science fiction, there’s a book called Replay by Ken Grimwood that will stick with them for the rest of their lives and I encourage them to read it.