SETH GODIN AND HIS PURPLE COW
I’ve just started reading Seth Godin’s book ‘Purple Cow: Transform Your Business By Being Remarkable’. I currently have about eight books on my bedside table but I just keep ordering more and more from Amazon, starting them, then getting distracted by another. It’s a bad habit that hopefully I’ll rectify when I have more time to read non-academic texts.
I digress.
If you’re not familiar with Seth Godin – his self-described one line bio reads as follows:
Seth is a writer, a speaker and an agent of change.
I’m not far enough into ‘Purple Cow’ to make any kind of assessment of its content, but I wanted to pick it up a) because it was a New York Times and Wall Street bestseller that got an unfathomable amount of press and b) because Jay Z name-checked it as a book that had a big impact on him. To what extent these two facts are related, we can only speculate. And even though it’s about ‘changing your business by being remarkable’ and I am patently not a businessowner, I find that, on a personal level, there’s usually something to be taken from these funny little branding and marketing bibles.
I stumbled across Godin’s blog the other day, by way of my friend T.Magic’s site and I particularly liked this post, regarding the state of the publishing and media industries:
Who will save us?
Who will save book publishing?
What will save the newspapers?
What means ’save’?
If by save you mean, “what will keep things just as they are?” then the answer is nothing will. It’s over.
If by save you mean, “who will keep the jobs of the pressmen and the delivery guys and the squadrons of accountants and box makers and transshippers and bookstore buyers and assistant editors and coffee boys,” then the answer is still nothing will. Not the Kindle, not the iPad, not an act of Congress.
We need to get past this idea of saving, because the status quo is leaving the building, and quickly. Not just in print of course, but in your industry too.
If you want to know who will save the joy of reading something funny, or the leverage of acting on fresh news or the importance of allowing yourself to be changed by something in a book, then don’t worry. It doesn’t need saving. In fact, this is the moment when we can figure out how to increase those benefits by a factor of ten, precisely because we don’t have to spend a lot of resources on the saving part.
Every revolution destroys the average middle first and most savagely.
As an aspiring journalist, I spend a lot of time contemplating the future of print media and how I can possibly make a living in a dying industry. This short post made me look at things from a slightly different angle – which I suppose is what Godin is all about.
Check the rest of his stuff here.