Eleven minute podcast for eBay sellers
About the dip and the haystack and getting found. Ina did it.
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May 2007
Q&A: Brandweek
A short interview about the Dip and brands: Q&A: Seth Godin Says 'Know When To Bail'.
But are you really serious about it?
I did a gig in New York today about the Dip and it went really well. Afterward, someone asked me a question about his new business.
I asked back, "if you accomplish that, will you be seen by your audience as the best in the world, or will you be seen as doing your best?"
He didn't have to answer. He got it.
If you're doing your best, only your AYSO soccer coach cares. If you're the best in the world, the market cares. The secret, if you have limited resources (don't we all) is to make 'world' small enough that you can actually accomplish that.
My favorite line from my favorite reviewer
Here's what Richard Pachter wrote about the Dip today:
The one possible weakness of this otherwise terrific little volume is that it is aimed solely at people who are creative, intelligent and want to succeed. Those who are mediocre, unmotivated or just coasting through life will probably not get much from Godin. He is not an elitist, but his message is squarely aimed at those who want to succeed or at least achieve excellence.
Beyond the Dip
Ernie really comes up with some winners here: Dips, Dead Ends, Joyrides, Lotteries, and Quests � iHack, therefore iBlog.
Here's a taste:
Joyrides are things you do just for the fun of it, without caring if you’re getting anywhere. Seth himself said (roughly) that “if you play the flute just because you enjoy it, not because you’re trying to make a living as a flautist, then The Dip doesn’t matter.” It is worth noting that for some people college is Joyride, not a Dip!
Lotteries are a particularly seductive variant of Dead End that looks like a Dip, in that we periodically see people who do make it out into the Good Life. Unlike a Dip, though, there is nothing we can do to ensure we make it through to the other side; we are at the mercy of external forces. Thus, even thought there is a non-zero chance we might win the Lottery, for most of us it really is a Dead End, and a complete waste of our potential for greatness. This is particularly true for Talent- (rather than Skill-) based disciplines, where the Lottery took place before we were born.
Quests, on the other hand, are Dips that look like Dead Ends. Seth encourages us to pursue Dips where we can make measurable progress towards a well-defined goal. However, he admits that this doesn’t apply to things like cutting-edge scientific research, where there there are no guarantees or guidelines; fortunately, he says people like that won’t be discouraged by anything he says in his book. :-)
However, I think he overstates the case when he says Quests (like Crick & Watson’s search for DNA) don’t have measurable progress. They do, but it is a matter of personal growth and accumulated wisdom, not the usual business metrics. Even though we may not reach what we thought we were aiming for, a worthy Quest enobles us and ends up benefiting humanity.
First riffs from the Dip Tour
There's a million things I want to share about last week, but I may need to get some sleep first.
In the meantime, some things you might enjoy:
Ann Arbor riff
Utah recap (and a bonus)
Tempe, too
and the Valley.
More soon.
Silly dips
Brad sent me a note about a guy who's running a campaign to make himself come up on the front page of Google when people type in his name. (Try 'seth'. If you've got a weird name, it's sort of cool.)
This is hard work if your name is something like Bill Wilson or John Woo. And the question is: why bother?
Sure, climbing a mountain just because it's hard is a great hobby. But too often we get caught up in the tactics of getting through the Dip just because we can. Difficulty is not the only thing that makes a Dip worth pursuing. The end result matters too. Seeing the destination and valuing the outcome can make a huge difference in having the ability to push through.
Podcast interview for small businesses
Courtesy of John and Duct Tape Marketing.
Images from the book
Dip listeners were promised that this site would have the images from the book. So, here they are!
Confronting the Dip at church
Here's an interesting series of posts about churches stuck in the Dip.
Sharp, not a spoon
Here's a great riff from Derek:
Imagine the world's attention as a big foggy cloud. So thick you could cut it with a knife.
You want to cut through that foggy cloud, to call attention to your music.
Only problem is, if you're well-rounded, you can't cut through anything. You need to be sharp as a knife. Sharply defined.
Example: Your name is Mary and you put out an album called “My Songs”, and the cover is a picture of your face. The music is good quality, songs about your life, and when people ask what kind of music you do, you say “Oh, everything. All styles.”. You send the album out to be reviewed and nothing much happens. Doors aren't opening.
Imagine instead: Your name is Mary and you write 9 songs about food. You put out an album called “Sushi, Souffle, and Seven Other Songs about Food”. Maybe you recorded your vocals in the kitchen. Maybe you quit cooking school to be a musician. Yes it's a silly example, you see how this would be MUCH easier to promote.
You may be thinking, “But I have so much to offer the world, I can't just limit myself like that!” If you want to increase your chances of the world hearing your music at all, though, strongly consider stretching-out your musicial offerings to the world, and keeping each album focused clearly on one aspect of your music.
Notice the long careers of David Bowie, Madonna, Miles Davis, Paul Simon, and Elvis Costello to name a few. Each went through sharply-defined phases, treating each album as a project with a defined mission.
Here's some top-sellers at CD Baby:
Eileen Quinn. She's a full-time sailor. She writes songs about sailing. That's it. Five albums of them. And sailors LOVE it. She gets written-up in sailing magazines all the time.
Rondellus. Sabbatum. A traditional medieval music group from Estonia doing an album of Black Sabbath songs played on medieval instruments and sung in Latin.
4th25. American soldiers in Iraq wrote and recorded an album in their barracks on a cheap computer with a $100 mic, about what it's like to be over there at war.
Each of these albums got a LOT of press and a lot of sales, because they were sharply-defined, newsworthy, interesting to write about, easy to tell friends about.
Jidoka
The punchline of the Dip book is that it's not about quitting at all. It's about mastery. Hal has a great blog about production thinking. He taught me the phrase Jidoka, which describes part of how Toyota creates mastery and high quality. I'll quote something he sent me:
[Toyota calls] stop and fix the problem "jidoka". It's a process where people are asked to identify every instance where the situation doesn't match the expectation. They do that by "pulling the cord" to activate an "andon" -- a signal. There are three signals: green (all fine), yellow (come look at this), and red (I need help). Operators in the Georgetown, KY plant pull the cord up to 1000 times/day. But the line only fully stops about a handful of times each day.
Tour update
The event in Philadelphia yesterday was a milestone for me. The crowd was amazing... energized, smart and focused. It was a speaker's/author's dream. Thanks to everyone who came and to helped make it happen. I'm delighted (but not surprised) that people are finding things in the Dip that I didn't even realize were there. One more reason to write a short book.
The Chicago event is now officially sold out. There will be some tickets at the door, but not many. All details on the rest of the tour are here. Then I'm going to need a long, long nap.
How long is best?
The Royal York Hotel, at one point (for a few weeks) was the tallest building in the entire British Empire.
It hardly needs an elevator, but for a while, it was the 'best'. Best if we define best as standing out, at exceeding expectations along some axis, at being remarkable.
The thing about being the best is that someone else is always trying to top you.
Philly and NY are now sold out
Thanks for the enthusiasm and feedback about the Dip Tour.
Why people love bestseller lists
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Bestseller lists are everywhere, mostly because they work.
They work because deep down, many people want to do what other people are doing. Things are popular because they're popular. Hits sound better.
It's a Catch-22 of course (you can't be a hit until you're a hit). If you're in an industry with no bestseller list, do your best to create one.
The Dip just hit #1 on the CEO READ daily bestseller list, by the way
Cover bands don't change the world
In fact, cover bands rarely sell out the Beacon Theatre.
That's part of what we covered in this podcast. Creative professionals have an imperative, and that's to challenge the status quo. For the status quo, clients don't need you, do they?
Building a bigger valley of death
In this interview, I talk about ways entrepreneurs and others can make it more difficult for competitors to follow in their footsteps.
The Dip Manifesto
Just published today, you can get the PDF right here.
It's free and it's sharable. I hope you enjoy it.
Aside: the changethis.com website was started by a few interns and me several summers ago. And we got caught in a Dip. Not because the site isn't great (I think it stands up to this day) or that it isn't a great idea (we broke books like Blink and Freakonomics and Guy Kawasaki's Art of the Start) but because we didn't push hard enough after we'd done all the 'hard' work. The folks at CEO READ are doing a great job of stewardship and the site continues to grow, but that Dip--becoming the most popular way to distribute short manifestos--still looms.
The Dyson vacuum
37 Signals has a nice review of James Dyson's autobiography. He's a bit of a nut, but he truly understands the Dip.
Starbucks and their first Dip
I visited the world's first Starbucks today (there are more than 12,000 of them now). It's a little surreal, because you can see the original elements still poking out from under the splashy current veneer. The best part of the visit, though, wasn't the really cool people that worked there... it was seeing the stores that are just down the street. There were two or three other coffee shops, a juice bar, a french bakery, a scone shop and a pierogie stand. Any one of them (well, except for maybe the pierogies) could have become Starbucks. But didn't.
Why?
Because of the Dip. Howard Schultz took a really good (but my no means unique) coffee shop and pushed it through a Dip that got it to 100 stores. That Dip eludes almost every small businessperson. It's too scary. The end of the tunnel is just a little bit too far away, a little too intimidating. So most people don't try.
This intimidation is exactly why getting through the Dip is so valuable. Starbucks succeeds largely because they're Starbucks. Ubiquity is their friend. If everyone could be ubiquitous, it wouldn't be worth anything at all.
An interview with Tim Manners
You can find the PDF right here.
Dave on the Dip
Dave talks about his experiences facing the Dip: B2Blog: Writer's Dip: stuck in a cul-de-sac.
Entrepreneurs can't afford not to quit
Here's the interview I did with Entrepreneur magazine.
The Dip Interview with Michael Port
A lot of fun, and free. Find it here. The comments are interesting too.
Was the DaVinci Code any good?
Depends on what you mean by good.
If you read a lot of literary fiction, probably not. If you read a lot of thrillers, even then, probably not the best you've ever read. But if you are a marketer measuring return on investment, then sure, it was better than good. It was fantastic. One of the bestselling books of the last twenty years...
The Dip that Dan Brown got through had not a lot to do with some objective measure of the quality of his work and everything to do with good fortune, hard work, excellent timing and the power of the right ideavirus. The short version: The DaVinci Code was popular because it was popular.
The last 75% of its sales were made to people who never ever buy books. They bought it because 'everyone else was buying it.'
I don't believe that this is a Dip you can easily seek out or set yourself up for. But I think it's a fascinating lesson in the power of being the best in the world. There is a pot of gold at the end of most rainbows, except most people never get there. The mistake, of course, is to believe that following the path of the person that went before is the way to get through this Dip. It doesn't work that way when it comes to culture. Just like old jokes, what worked yesterday probably isn't going to work tomorrow.
Pop hits work precisely because they are hits. And marketers can work hard to create an environment where the book or movie or song or restaurant they create moves through the most challenging part of the Dip... the gulf between the organic, natural audience for a product and the much bigger, hyper-excited pop audience.
