“…that’s not “a no,” that’s a “no for now.” That’s not a “this will never work.” That’s a “this didn’t work.”

“…And yet we ignore this bottom-up thing when in fact it’s the thing we are most likely to be able to touch and change.”

“…The Internet wasn’t built by 30 people who are working for a boss. It was built by 300,000 people, many of whom have never met each other.”

“And that this protocol and that technology work together even without a central organizing force. And that’s happening to every industry. And it’s happening even to the way our communities organize and the spiritual organizations that we get involved in.”

“…now the things we pay extra for are connection. Right? The things we pay extra for are what are other people using — what networks can we be part of — what conference can we go to — who can we be with? And the people we choose to be with, the products and services we choose to talk about are all interesting and unique and human and real…”

“…one person working by themselves can make an idea, a product, a service, something in the world. And that shift in leverage means that you’re not going to make it as a worker bee — you’re going to make it as someone who is figuring out what to do next. And more important finding the faith, and I think the word faith is appropriate here. To walk up to your market, your world, your tribe, your community and say, here I made this.”

“…And so that shows that we’re keeping score of the wrong thing. Ben Graham, the great stock investor, has a quote where he said, you know, at the beginning the market is a voting machine. So that the goal is to see how many people are going to vote for you. How many people are going to raise their hand and say, I like that. But in the long run, the market is a weighing machine. It’s a scale of how much impact you had. And what this age we’re living in is doing, is it’s dividing the mass market, which is basically dead now, into hundreds or thousands of micro-markets — little markets of interest. So you can’t make a substantial impact on everyone anymore. It’s almost impossible.”

“But what you can do is go to the edges, and go to the few people who care deeply and make a big impact there.”

“…what the Internet has done is meant that we don’t have to get on a plane anymore to meet strangers who like us.”

“…the winning strategy of giving customers a platform to be their best selves. …”

“…in an abundance economy we, the thing we don’t have enough of is we don’t have enough connection — we’re lonely. And we don’t have enough time. And if people can offer us connection and meaning and a place where we can be our best selves — yes, we will seek that out. No, it probably doesn’t help you build a big profitable public company, but yes, it helps you make a better difference to the community that you’ve chosen to live in.”

“…number one in a small market is way more interesting, more fruitful and fun than being number three in a large market.”

“…if you look at the list of the most popular TED Talks, it’s a silly list, because very few people have seen all of them.”

“art is the act of making something where you forget the name of what you’re seeing. And what we see among everybody who is managing to do this kind of work is that they’ve noticed things. They have learned how to see the difference between good and bad.”

“…in a media-saturated world, we want to get picked. So like you, every day people show up to me and say, pick me, put me on your blog. If you would just talk about me, then my art will reach everyone I want to reach. But if we distinguish that from Darwin, you know the first lizard that crawled out of the mud and started walking on legs didn’t say to the media, please pick me so that more for walking lizards could come along. That’s not the way it worked.”

“So tell 10 people — there are 10 people who trust you enough to listen. And if you tell your thing to 10 people — if you send your e-book to 10 people — if you do your sermon to 10 people or show your product to 10 people and none of them want to tell their friends, and none of them are changed — then you failed. That you didn’t really understand what was good. But if some of them tell their friends, then they’ll tell their friends, and that’s how ideas spread. So it’s this 10 at a time — 10 by 10 by 10. How do you put an idea in the world that resonates enough with people if they trust you enough to hear it. That then it can go to the next step and the next step.”

“I don’t have employees, so that way I don’t have meetings.”

“…But it wasn’t to raise money; it was to raise a tribe,”

“..it’s precisely when you are doing something that no one has done before that you are not going to get the loudest applause.”

http://www.onbeing.org/program/seth-godin-the-art-of-noticing-and-then-creating/transcript/7080