Author Seth Godin advises that you find your faith, “…finding the faith – and I think the word “faith” is appropriate here – is to walk up to your market, your world, your tribe, your community and say, here I made this.”
It is not how poor you were born or in which part of the world you were born that decides your future now. The internet has brought us closer and says Godin, “…the challenge of our future is to say, are we going to connect and amplify positive tribes that want to make things better for all of us? Or are we going to degrade to warring tribes that are willing to bring other groups down just so they can get ahead?”
Godin has a new book coming out titled “This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Till You Learn To See”. He says, “In those days, if you were really rich, you bought a fancy expensive car… you would value something that was physical. But now the things we pay extra for are connection, for what are other people using, what networks can we be part of, what conference can we go to, who can we be with? And the people, the products and services we choose to talk about are all interesting and unique and human and real, as opposed to industrial and cheap and polished and normal. So as individuals what we have to see is a shift has gone on from the days of Henry Ford when one creative person had 50,000 people acting on their wishes. That you designed the car and then a whole bunch of people followed your instructions. Now one person working by themselves can make an idea, a product, a service, something in the world. And that shift in leverage means that you’re not going to make it as a worker bee; you're going to make it as someone who is figuring out what to do next…”
Godin cautions, “…you can’t make a substantial impact on everyone anymore. It’s almost impossible. But what you can do is go to the edges, and go to the few people who care deeply, and make a big impact there.”
In terms of evolution Godin says, “ … times change, not just our stories about ourselves and our expectations – but they actually are changing our brain. When the Industrial Revolution came, everyone in Manchester, England, was an alcoholic. Instead of having coffee carts, they had gin carts that went up and down the streets. Because it was so hard to shift from being a farmer to sitting in a dark room for 12 hours every day doing what you were told. But we culturally evolved to be able to handle a new world order. So when we talk about evolution as a metaphorical thing where we have memetics and ideas laid on top of this idea of survival of the species and things changing over time… And yet, we ignore this bottom-up thing when in fact it’s the thing we are most likely to be able to touch and change.”
