Give me the chills

I’ve read some books of Seth Godin and read many of the posts on his blog.
In all of them, there’s something interesting you might not have noticed, all of them are the results of an avid observation of reality, of how things (and people) work.

For some people Seth Godin might just be a marketer and write books that try to sell you the american dream, but there’s much more than that.

Let’s take the last blog post, “If you want“, in that post Seth describes many of the interactions between people in various fields.
The opening is clear

“If you want employees to go job hunting in order to leverage you into giving them a raise to keep them, then by all means, only give them a raise when they go job hunting.”

It’s simple, but yet it reveals a part of how our society thinks and acts.
We are not just talking about the american dream here, we are talking about people, about me and you, about the choice you do in life.

Chances are you have also been on the wrong side of the fence, the one where you were trying to get more than what you gave.

In the “If you want” post you can see and read a part of the reality that surrounds us, a reality where we live in every day.
We are part of that reality, in fact we shape it sometimes.

Sometimes we are the bad ones, sometimes the victims, etc.
This attention to how things works, to how people react is what make Seth Godin so great, it’s  because he can reveal the “obvious you didn’t notice”.
This is what Seth gets right almost every time.

Want to read more from him? 
Here’s a list of posts I shared because I loved them

• The Dorm Room Startup
• If you want
• The problem with problems
• On teaching people a lesson
• Those people
• How to listen

The best advice I learned from reading one of Seth Godin books (The Icarus Deception) was “keep a private blog you write every day”.

Sound silly right?
But thanks to that semi-hidden blog, now I write more, and this blog exists also because of that.