Seth Godin’s books have unquestionably changed the way I think about business - and, in many ways, the direction of my life. I started reading him when I was young, and there really is nobody quite like Seth. In his original bestseller Purple Cow, he encourages businesses to be remarkable rather than simply fitting in, and that philosophy runs through so much of his work.
He has one of those wonderfully unusual brains - Edward de Bono comes to mind - but what makes his ideas so compelling is how accessible he makes them. Short chapters, simple language, big ideas. You can read a few pages in minutes and then spend the next hour thinking about them. Better still, Seth isn’t just writing about marketing and business from the sidelines - he’s built businesses, launched projects and spent decades successfully putting his own ideas into practice.
So you can imagine my excitement when I spotted Seth’s new book The Knot sitting on the new release table in our new bookshop. I’ve been so consumed with getting our new home up and running that I’d completely missed the fact he had a new book coming!
Naturally, I immediately grabbed a copy and devoured it while pretending to look busy in the shop.
As expected, it’s brain food. It’s packed with passages that stop you in your tracks, challenge the way you’ve been thinking and send your mind off in completely new directions. That’s what I’ve always loved about Seth’s books. They don’t necessarily give you a neat list of instructions to follow. Instead, they give you ideas - the sort that hit you halfway through a chapter, make you put the book down for a moment and start thinking about how they might apply to your own work, business or life.
Unsurprisingly, I’ve made sure Book Hero has a great range of Seth’s books on the shelves (we have at least 10 of his best sellers!), including Purple Cow, We Are All Weird, The Dip, Tribes and This Is Marketing. They’re all brilliant. If you haven’t discovered Seth Godin yet, start with one and work your way through them - your brain will thank you!
— Dylan
PS: And if you don’t want to take my word for it, take it from Mel Robbins, bestselling author of The Let Them Theory and creator of Mel Robbins Podcast: “Seth is the person who has taught me more about marketing, decision making, leadership, and being influential than anyone else on the planet.”
The Knot
Problems Can Be Solved
By Seth Godin
In The Knot, Seth Godin offers a clear, practical framework:
- How to tell the difference between problems you can solve and situations you need to accept
- How to see systems, understand what people actually want, and create conditions for change rather than simply hoping for it
- A practical guide to entanglements—time-based (sunk costs, premature optimisation), social (phantom audiences, borrowed scorecards), and identity-based (who we were, who we promised to become)—each named, examined, and shown to be removable