Comments on: Review of Seth Godin’s Linchpin

By: TheOtherHobbes

TheOtherHobbes — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 22:40:26 +0000

Ah. Well.

You have to be the right kind of different/remarkable/unconventional.

Which means the carny-artist kind of different/etc who can fool people into wasting months of time on something like Squidoo in the unrequited hope that it will make them rich.

if most of the population became truiy different/etc - kind to people and animals, non-authoritarian, intellectually independent, generous, non-acquisitive, not just out for a quick buck or any related consonant - Godin's WorldOfMarketing would implode messily.

We can all hope, I suppose.

By: carlon

carlon — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 09:36:40 +0000

Duff,

A good point.

If the personal development blogosphere is nothing but telling people to "be different/remarkable/unconventional", then perhaps it is you who is being "different/remarkable/unconventional" by NOT parroting this kind of message.

I mean what’s so different/remarkable/unconventional about saying the same thing as everyone else?

By: Duff_McDuffee

Duff_McDuffee — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 09:17:04 +0000

The main thing people do in response to Seth Godin's message “be different/remarkable/unconventional” is to proclaim to others “be different/remarkable/unconventional.” The best make a living doing this.

This, in a nutshell, is the personal development blogosphere.

By: carlon

carlon — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 18:39:03 +0000

Thanks for the comment, Eric. I have read Duff's view on Godin, but not yours. I agree with you that a lot of books are telling you WHAT to do and not really HOW to. Actually, I don't mind some books that simply tell you what to do if it offers an original idea or an interesting prospective. Linchpin had neither.

I thought Godin was known for his thought-provoking ideas and originality, but when I read Linchpin, I felt like I had read it already..like in the early '90s. No original ideas at all. It's recycled stuff I've heard before, just Godin is calling it by a different name and presenting it as a new idea.

Based on this book, I have no idea why he is so popular.

By: carlon

carlon — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 18:29:19 +0000

I'm glad you enjoyed it. It was fun to write…but repeating myself got pretty hard even for a short blog post. I don't see how I could do it over the course of a book.

By: Eric Schiller

Eric Schiller — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 09:32:18 +0000

Carlon, Thanks for this post. Godin is one of those gurus who offer notions of techniques, but does so in generalities. There tends not to be very much deep instruction as to how exactly to make yourself indispensable, just that you do it. While this is common throughout all self-help, these gurus are selling ideas of what you *could do* and very infrequently offer techniques to learn how to do exactly those things. I believe that this is one of the primary reasons that personal development and marketing books fail to stick with their readers. I wrote about this in a post on BG a while back:

"the most pivotal and important assumption is the belief that understanding how technologies of the self-function translates directly into the ability to effectively use them in the world. This is where I split from most of the personal development paradigm. I think that technologies of the self must be synthesized by the self in a subjective manner."
http://beyondgrowth.net/technology-of-the-self/...

By: Liberation

Liberation — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 09:14:11 +0000

You have certainly achieved you goal of expressing creativity. This review had me literally laughing out loud because it sounds exactly like a Seth Godin book. Thank you for bringing some hilarity to my day.

By: Eric Schiller

Eric Schiller — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 00:32:18 +0000

By: Liberation

Liberation — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 00:14:11 +0000

By: Liberation

Liberation — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 10:20:51 +0000

RT @carlon: New blog post: Review of Seth Godin's Linchpin http://bit.ly/cnThoc #linchpin#sethgodin