Index
Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us (Godin, Seth)
Generous and authentic leadership will always defeat the selfish efforts of someone doing it just because she can.
Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating change that you believe in.
Marketing used to be about advertising, and advertising is expensive. Today, marketing is about engaging with the tribe and delivering products and services with stories that spread.
New rule: If you want to grow, you need to find customers who are willing to join you or believe in you or donate to you or support you. And guess what? The only customers willing to do that are looking for something new. The growth comes from change and light and noise.
One man with no authority suddenly becomes a key figure. Tribes give each of us the very same opportunity. Skill and attitude are essential. Authority is not. In fact, authority can get in the way.
The movement happens when people talk to one another, when ideas spread within the community, and most of all, when peer support leads people to do what they always knew was the right thing. Great leaders create movements by empowering the tribe to communicate. They establish the foundation for people to make connections, as opposed to commanding people to follow them.
viral activity, or a virtuous cycle. The better you do, the better you do. Connections lead to connections. Great ideas spread.
Just a few can change everything. What they
Fans, true fans, are hard to find and precious. Just a few can change everything. What they demand, though, is generosity and bravery.
Organizations that destroy the status quo win.
Whatever the status quo is, changing it gives you the opportunity to be remarkable
the levers are here. The proof is here. The power is here. The only thing holding you back is your own fear. Not easy to admit, but essential to understand.
When you are leading a tribe, a tribe that you belong to, the benefits increase, the work gets easier, and the results are more obvious. That’s the best reason to overcome the fear.
I realize what a badge of honor it is to get a bit of criticism at all. It means that I confounded expectations—that I didn’t deliver the sequel or the simple, practical guide that some expected. It means that, in fact, I did something worth remarking
They’re generous. They exist to help the tribe find something, to enable the tribe to thrive. But they understand that the most powerful way to enable is to be statueworthy: by getting out front, by making a point, by challenging convention, and by speaking up. Those are brave acts, and bravery begets statues.
When you identify the discomfort, you’ve found the place where a leader is needed.
Leaning in or backing off, but not doing nothing.
trying to lead everyone results in leading no one in particular. This leads to an interesting thought: you get to choose the tribe you will lead.
Almost all the growth that’s available to you exists when you aren’t like most people and when you work hard to appeal to folks who aren’t most people.
Change isn’t made by asking permission. Change is made by asking forgiveness, later.
It is merely about developing the faith that it’ll work.
“Merely,” of course, is a huge step. It’s nothing but a few neurons’ worth of faith, just the knowledge that you can do it. But without faith, the leap never works.
When you fall in love with the system, you lose the ability to grow.
Training a student to be a sheep is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep?
“Isn’t it sad that we have a job where we spend two weeks avoiding the stuff we have to do fifty weeks a year?”
“Life’s too short” is repeated often enough to be a cliché, but this time it’s true. You don’t have enough time to be both unhappy and mediocre. It’s not just pointless, it’s painful. Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you ought to set up a life you don’t need to escape from.
micromovement consist of five things to do and six principles:
insights per polymath movement
The secret of being wrong isn’t to avoid being wrong! The secret is being willing to be wrong. The secret is realizing that wrong isn’t fatal. The only thing that makes people and organizations great is their willingness to be not great along the way. The desire to fail on the way to reaching a bigger goal is the untold secret of success. I’ve been waiting for you to ask for the shortcut, the error-free, failure-free way to get people to do what you want, to make change happen without risk or fear, to magically alter the status quo. That, after all, is the best way to sell you on the ideas here. If I could just give you the answer, you’d be leading a tribe right now. The honest answer is: There isn’t an easy way.
The secret of leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there. People will follow.
to switch sides is to admit that we made a mistake.
they get when they’re part of a vibrant, growing tribe, but who are still looking for that feeling.
Because, of course, it has nothing to do with knowing how the trick is done, and everything to do with the art of doing it. The tactics of leadership are easy. The art is the difficult part.
Your tribe communicates. They probably don’t do it the way you would; they don’t do it as efficiently as you might like, but they communicate. The challenge for the leader is to help your tribe sing, whatever form that song takes.
The idea wasn’t the point. Organizing the tribe was.
The secret, Reagan’s secret, is to listen, to value what you hear, and then to make a decision even if it contradicts the very people you are listening to. Reagan impressed his advisers, his adversaries, and his voters by actively listening. People want to be sure you heard what they said—they’re less focused on whether or not you do what they said.
Tribes grow when people recruit other people. That’s how ideas spread as well. The tribe doesn’t do it for you, of course. They do it for each other. Leadership is the art of giving people a platform for spreading ideas that work.
It’s a myth that change happens overnight, that right answers succeed in the marketplace right away, or that big ideas happen in a flash. They don’t. It’s always (almost always, anyway) a matter of accretion. Drip, drip, drip. Improvements happen a bit at a time, not as grand-slam home runs that are easy to get.
Part of leadership (a big part of it, actually) is the ability to stick with the dream for a long time. Long enough that the critics realize that you’re going to get there one way or another . . . so they follow.
There’s no record of Martin Luther King, Jr., or Gandhi whining about credit. Credit isn’t the point. Change is.
Once you choose to lead, you’ll be under huge pressure to reconsider your choice, to compromise, to dumb it down, or to give up. Of course you will. That’s the world’s job: to get you to be quiet and follow. The status quo is the status quo for a reason. But once you choose to lead, you’ll also discover that it’s not so difficult. That the options available to you seem really clear, and that yes, in fact, you can get from here to there.