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Book Review: The Dip by Seth Godin

I talked with friends recently about the end of Body Boss, and the air of “unfinished business”. They noted my tone of disappointment. In my book, Postmortem of a Failed Startup, I noted a number of reasons why we failed. However, there were signs of turning a corner. One of my friends was curious if that was indeed the case, and mentioned Seth Godin’s The Dip.
The Dip recognizes the importance of pushing through challenging moments and when not to (“quit”).
Take-aways:
  • Dip vs. cul-de-sac. In any endeavor, after the initial novelty and possible early success, there follows a challenging period. Godin refers to this as the “dip”. In these situations, there’s a lift after the dip towards “success”. Godin is quick to point out that there’s also the “cul-de-sac”. The cul-de-sac refers to the situation where there is no lift, no emergence to success. A dip is temporary. Cul-de-sac is forever (or too extensive). It’s important to recognize if one is in one or the other.
  • Be the best in the world. Godin points out how culture celebrates being the best – from sports professionals to actors. Being the best means digging in deep on what one is best at. This means quitting what one is not good at and cannot be the best at, or if possible, not even trying from the get-go. Quitting enables focus. Being the best means emerging from the dip and avoiding cul-de-sacs.
  • Know when to quit before starting. Easier said than done. The recommendation is to quit before starting a cul-de-sac situation – effort, thus, not wasted. But if starting, Godin suggests writing down the conditions that would be necessary to quit. Writing down the extreme conditions that would lead to quitting means any lesser conditions mean continuation.

The Dip is less than 100 pages – a quick read that may help the reader recognize life situations that may be playing out today – dip or cul-de-sac?

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Make Imperfect Perfect

Seth Godin’s got a great post titled “While waiting for perfect”. From his blog:

You’ve permitted magical to walk on by. Not to mention good enough, amazing and wonderful. 

Waiting for the thing that cannot be improved (and cannot be criticized) keeps us from beginning. 

Merely begin.

He’s got another titled “Abandoning perfection”.

I really enjoyed these posts for their writing simplicity and their messages. I speak to many friends and new contacts who all admire entrepreneurs. They share daydreams of doing their own thing. Many of them are waiting… they’re waiting for a big client… they’re waiting for a great idea… they’re waiting to find a partner who can code. 

Everyone’s waiting for perfection when there are so many ways enabling them to act now. They can act now, build something simple, and start learning. Waiting for perfection stops us from learning. Stops us from finding out if our idea even works. It stops us from potentially learning of an even greater opportunity. 

I like Seth’s writing… a lot. I like that his blog is a bit philosophical, and I’ve been playing with the idea of posting my own stream of consciousness posts. So to that end, I’ll say this and add to Seth’s post: “We make imperfect perfect.” 

That is, we may start an entrepreneurial endeavor short of our grander vision. We’ve launched a simple MVP (or maybe MLP?), but by doing so, we’re able to test traction sooner. When we do that, we learn, and we iterate. We put our names out there rather than sitting quietly with no notice. We pursue something that has been eating at us for so long.

As we iterate, we gauge traction, and we grow or pivot the idea… perhaps reaching the limits we once dreamed of, or perhaps greater. We make the endeavor perfect. We make some seemingly ordinary person that perfect someone. We make do with our situations and create perfect opportunities. 

At that point, we’ll probably look back at our starts and laugh how it was all imperfect, but to get to where we are and who we are, we wouldn’t change a thing. We made those imperfect opportunities… perfect.
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