In conversation with Seth Godin

Seth Godin very kindly sent me a copy of his new book and he also included me in his list of quitters. Now normally, the book thing would be a nice thing to do and the, "Nyah nyah, you're a quitter" thing would not. But there is method to Seth's madness here ...

I had the pleasure of chatting with the man himself last week for an Irish newspaper. We talked of sailing ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings; but mostly about Dips - because that is the subject of Seth's excellent new book - The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When To Quit (And When To Stick).

The "Dip" of the title refers to the demanding period that most people experience having commenced something but before getting to the high-point of becoming really good at that something. Godin gives numerous examples of successful people who have either pushed through the Dip, or who have recognised that their particular Dip is, in fact, a cul-de-sac and who have then "strategically quit" and concentrated their efforts elsewhere to great effect.

Seth variously refers to The Dip as, "The long slog between starting and mastery," or "... the long stretch between beginner's luck and real accomplishment." In Seth's world, the worst thing you can do is to settle for being average. It appears to be an acceptable solution for a lot of people in a lot of situations, but it never is. Extracts from our chat:

RM: You have said, "The worst thing you can do is to be average." Shana Alexander wrote, "Excellence makes people nervous." How do you reconcile the two?
SG: She's right, of course. The reason so many people end up being average is precisely that. It's scary to go to the edges. Society conspires to keep us from going there. Which is precisely why it's so valuable.

RM: Have you ever experienced a Dip that you pushed through or walked away from in your life?
SG: I confront Dips all the time, sometimes every day. When I was building Yoyodyne, the internet company that eventually got sold to Yahoo, we experienced a Dip that lasted for months. We came very close to hitting the wall, but our ability to see to the other side (or our ability to delude ourselves that we could see the other side) of the Dip enabled us to get through it. The work on my blog today is a similar path. It was two years of daily blogging before I had the beginnings of an audience.

RM: Applying the Dip to everyday life, how can parents help their kids spot the Dip? How can they help them through the Dip?
SG: Let me address that as someone who used to co-direct a Summer Camp. Here's what I learned from that experience. What I learned is that you can either expose kids, teach kids, and encourage kids to get hooked on the idea of 'mastery' or you can give in to their fear. Most kids, indeed most adults, have never mastered anything and, as a result, they’re not willing to sacrifice in order to master something else. But someone who has been exposed to mastery, who understands what it's like to play a Chopin concerto or to attain a black belt in karate or to write an essay that wins a prize - those kids get hooked on it, and for the rest of their lives, they understand the benefit of getting through the Dip.

RM: I searched “The Dip” and “Seth Godin” as a string on Google a month before publication and got 53,000 hits. I don’t foresee a dip for this book! (it's closer to 80,000 now)
SG: Hopefully not, but for me this is all about starting conversations, not selling books. If what I write gets people are thinking and talking, then I’m a happy man.

The full interview and more thoughts on The Dip will be published shortly here in Ireland and I will blog it when it goes live. In the meantime, you can access Seth's fascinating blog on The Dip here.