Drinking the Seth Godin … Milk

Drinking the Godin Koolaid

Motivator Manipulator Maven

Which is he?

I’m going with maven.

Maven may be one of those words we’ve lost sight of, like integrity. Integrity means “wholeness” but we’ve reduced it to “honesty.” So too mavenwhich means “connoisseur” — has been ironicized, demeaned really, into something like “one who condescends” referring to someone looking down his nose at the rest of us plebes on some item or issue.

Actually, the first two words maintain that relationship we have with the third. We’re either looking up to someone to get us to do … the thing … we need to do, or we’re imagining them looking down at us as they try to make us do … the thing … they want us to do.

I’m speaking mainly here of responses to his books, in the form of Amazon reviews. I’ve read bits of Permission Marketing free online. Heard Tribes as audiobook, read All Marketers are Liars and … one other book whose title I can’t remember just now. Not being able to remember it plays right into the critics’ side, the ones who’re voting manipulator in the multiple choice question above.

His books are all the same, they’d say, and do. He says nothing new, or nothing at all, in each one.

Well the other one is Poke the Box, but though I’ve recalled it, their criticism sometimes seems valid. At least, his books can sound like a whole lotta li’l nuthin’, just blowsy and bullshit and no help at all. I’m on Linchpin now, though, and it’s finally start to make sense, the differences between those books, the very specific counsel he does give … and I still see, having been there, why some don’t get him.

The motivator voter will say (and they do) that Godin’s a god, or the bomb, or whatever the kids say these days. They can see how this one book is about this and how that other book is about that.

Repeat. Etc.

But the two voting blocs disagree about the repetition and the et cetera.

What they miss, or rather each get a part of, is that Mr. Godin is very good at saying things direct and well. Many of us get one or the other; most people get neither.

Consider the sentiment, You’re a jackass. Say it needs to be said.

There’s a way to say that direct or well or neither. And there’s a way to say it both and he does. We can be smacked with the two-by-four and wanting to murder the man who did it. Or we can hear someone gone all flowery on us, no substance, but we know what’s really going on (well, sometimes) and we want to spit on the man who won’t say what he means. The guy who does the first is direct; the one going with flowery is trying (and failing) for well.

Seth Godin does both. He can annoy us but his words help. That’s why he’s a maven. He appreciates — in the classical sense — what he’s doing. It matters not one whit what we think — and not either way, I’ll add.

Objections one way or t’other aren’t jealousy or envy (I can never remember the difference), though they may be both. You’re pissed because you don’t have it, haven’t figured it out, aren’t committed … and pissed because he does and has and is. And in addition to jealousy or envy, it is a pile of ignorance or carelessness. And the problem is, you have to care.

Or you won’t get him at all.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent

Coyotes and Christians

I am not saying Christians are like coyotes. [For that, some could cut caustically to coyotes are like Christians — tricksters, roaming in the dark, feeding on the dead … ] Simply noticed — somewhat in passing, as it’s said, having attained, apparently … achieved? … some kind of state where nearly anything I hear,

Read More »

And Did Dostoevsky Say ‘Beauty Will Save’

Short answer: he did not. Neither did Prince Myshkin, that we know of. Likely both believed it. Beauty — in the person of Christ — will do so. And clearly D wrote of M in The Idiot to explore art and beauty and ugliness and salvation. But did he say it, and did he believe that

Read More »

What I Recalled Watching Netflix

[Television is educational.]   One Saying the same stuff over and over looks like you have different things to say. Two If you’re ever in a below-average film or streaming series, and you beat the tar out of a guy, in a house, and you gaze down in both some shock as also a certain

Read More »

Seeking the King

A line everywhere misattributed to Chesterton reads thus: The young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God. This line is not from the great [several senses of the word] man who recently celebrated his 150th birthday, but the mid-century most unmodern novelist Bruce Marshall. The words — which do

Read More »

Random

Drudge Report

Babies need not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly, woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren’t. It would be odd if she

Read More »

Semi Stuff

Here’s a way to say it — I pay attention, I notice things, I remember, I make connections; my mind moves fast — and long, on the connections. Draw the well deep, carry far the water. [The semi-colon technically ‘replaces’ the period but artfully between the two a difference wd be how a semi-colon can

Read More »

Ensamples

Among the worst things about The Slap is how it has fed self-righteousness in all but the two participants, and they already had it or it wldn’t have happened. But there is Solzhenitsyn, again, with the line between good and evil that cuts through every human heart, and there is Dostoevsky, always, reminding us via

Read More »

Can We Tawk?

Comedienne Joan Rivers’ catchphrase was, ‘Can we talk?’ with all that that entails — its rhetorical nature, the Jewish thing, an implication that at least one of the parties will be better off for having done so … Like God. T’other day a priest spoke of ontological remembrance, the immediate and ongoing memory of past-present-future

Read More »

Related

You’re Doing It Wrong

A friend once recounted how a mutual acquaintance of ours had told her God spoke to him, which he meant both literally and verbally. It’s enough on one point to note the gent didn’t say God spoke with him — which wd seem to be preferred, all things taken together — but that isn’t what I’ll

Read More »

Too Old For This

You know the line. Usually spoken by an ersatz Bruce Willis type, it is well past cliché, sliding in safely but awkwardly beyond its years to self-parody, as predictable as the pablum in which it appears. [And note, I like every other Die Hard movie.] And yet, here I am: Too old for this. I

Read More »

Ship of Friend

Two dynamics characterize the practice of contemplation: deepening concentration and expanding awareness. These two are one. They give birth to twins: inner solitude and loving solidarity with all. Martin Laird, A Sunlight Absence This post started a little rando, but its contents aren’t … heh — especially where its contents aren’t mine. Elsewhere — possibly

Read More »

The Weighty Beauty of the IBM Selectric III

As Annie Dillard might say, I didn’t write this, I typed it. In fact, I typed it on a black 15″ IBM Selectric III — correction, a Correcting Selectric III, which began production, I am informed, in 1980. It’s the one I learned to type on and, I know now, began to learn to write.

Read More »