In his last post of the year, Seth Godin visits the archives to pull out a piece of encouragement that has never rang more true in our industry until this year. Read his whole post and get excited about 2008.
From Seth’s post on Why not be great?
Are these crazy times? You bet they are. But so were the days when we were doing duck-and-cover air-raid drills in school, or going through the scares of Three Mile Island and Love Canal. There will always be crazy times.
So stop thinking about how crazy the times are, and start thinking about what the crazy times demand. There has never been a worse time for business as usual. Business as usual is sure to fail, sure to disappoint, sure to numb our dreams. That’s why there has never been a better time for the new. Your competitors are too afraid to spend money on new productivity tools. Your bankers have no idea where they can safely invest. Your potential employees are desperately looking for something exciting, something they feel passionate about, something they can genuinely engage in and engage with.
You get to make a choice. You can remake that choice every day, in fact. It’s never too late to choose optimism, to choose action, to choose excellence. The best thing is that it only takes a moment — just one second — to decide.
Before you finish this paragraph, you have the power to change everything that’s to come. And you can do that by asking yourself (and your colleagues) the one question that every organization and every individual needs to ask today: Why not be great?
Andy Kaufman says:
Thanks for digging that post up. I missed it the first time and it definitely rings true, especially in this current market.
After reading the RE Zebra’s Live Twitters of Godin’s talk at NAR, I decided to dust off my old copy of the Purple Cow and once again discovered how good that book really is.
December 28, 2007 — 7:57 pm