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“If you’re good, people will read it. If you’re not good, you’ll get better” (Seth Godin)

Marketing guru Seth Godin’s comment on blogging could be a mantra for my own work as a blogger, but also for the nature of art (in Godin’s broadest sense), as original work done in any field that “ships” to an audience, on whose acceptance its creator relies.

As I earlier referred to in my blog postings, I am changing the format of my blog to shorter, more pointed, copy (modelled in part on Godin’s own blog), that I’ll upload every two weeks. In particular, the blog will address clients and prospects, instead of addressing fellow freelancers and writers, or an unclear mix of all of these groups, as has occurred in previous postings. Remarkablogger Michael Martine, whom B2B specialist Ed Gandia refers to, comments that freelancers’ blogs should aim to generate leads, and not to generate followers, as in “pro-blogging standards.”

I start this posting with Seth Godin, since Godin continues to inspire me and to make me think about my prospects and leads, particularly in Linchpin: Are You Indispensable (hereafter LP) and, more recently, in The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly? (hereafter ID). In both of these volumes, Godin challenges us to overcome our own inner-resistance to creating good, original art, that forces us to ask questions and demand action from ourselves, when we’re most afraid or intimidated to speak and act (cf. the concept of the primitive “lizard brain.”) This “remarkable” work is not to be confused with “perfection” or critical acclaim, both of which he sees as irrelevant to creating and disseminating art. Continue reading “Someone Who Inspires Me . . .”

In this week’s closing post on Seth Godin’s The Icarus Deception, I want to focus on his argument that the new criterion for art is “connectedness.” I think of an Alice Munro short story, where metaphor and diction connect (yoke together) the most apparently different people and things—not to deny difference, but to consider contrast, distinction, and paradox. The world economy (now that Industrialism is long-dead) demands that we create art that connects with others. But what does Godin really mean by that?

The Internet is a connection machine, he notes, and he says that “the connection economy rewards the leader, the initiator and the rebel” (13). The connection economy “enables endless choice and endless shelf space and puts a premium on attention and on trust, neither of which is endless” (13-14). And above all, a connection economy has “made competence not particularly valuable and has replaced it with an insatiable desire for things that are new, real and important” – “three elements that define art” (14).

Bridges that connect people are built by art. And this, according to Godin, is where we should be doing our creative work.

Assets that matter are “trust, permission, remarkability, leadership, stories that spread and humanity (connection, compassion, and humility)” (39). Suffering and trauma may well be involved, as stories are often about standing out and “not fitting in” or merely copying what has come before.

Godin argues that you cannot connect with a device or automaton. But you can connect with a person and acknowledge their dignity. The “safe place” is no longer where we got a good wage from the Industrialist, but where we look others in the eye and see them (57), with all of their complexity and difference.

If you want to go on creating, Godin says, you have to change the worldview that you bring to your work. You can’t stay in a comfort zone and overlook the reality that the safety zone has moved (15). Continue reading “Provocations on Art: Reading Seth Godin’s _The Icarus Deception_ Final Part . . . (Portfolio Penguin, 2012)”

My thinking about blogging has been evolving, as I read and learn new theory. So the next two posts will close this digest of marketing guru Seth Godin’s arguments on art. I have been blogging for the past year by pitching ideas widely, to fellow copywriters and other writers, as well as to prospects. Increasingly, this spring, I will be using the blog to engage better with clients and prospects, in content and tone. More on that to come, in future postings.

In my previous blog posting,  however, I reviewed marketing author Seth Godin’s challenge in The Icarus Deception, that since we are well past the Industrial Age, why are we still settling for so little in our art? Today I’ll look at what Godin prescribes—as another approach to art, in an economy of “connection.”

In the last decade, Godin writes, the door to the “connected economy” has been open.  The move is from an “industrial economy that cherishes compliance to a connected economy that prizes achievement” (22). From making stuff, we now try to make meaning, he says.

The challenge of the 21st Century’s economy isn’t to build more and better and faster and cheaper (after the capitalist Industrial model), but to optimize “this brief moment in time . . . when connection is easier to find and cherish than it will . . . be again. While some people are [still] polishing their systems and honing their spreadsheets, an ever-growing cadre of artists is busy creating work that’s worth connecting to.”

For some, even contemplating flying that high is terrifying, because we overestimate the risk or threat of creating new things and underestimate our ability to cope or grow with the challenges we meet.

The challenge of our 21^st C times is “to find a journey worthy of your heart and soul.” Continue reading “Provocations on Art: Reading Seth Godin’s _The Icarus Deception_ Part Three . . . (Portfolio Penguin, 2012)”

In my last posting, I introduced Seth Godin’s theory that we need to work in ways subversive to the status quo. In The Icarus Deception, he discusses comfort and safety zones. He says that for centuries, we have equated the concept of a “comfort zone” with a “safety zone.” We navigate our lives between these two zones, learning when to go and when to stop, and backing off when danger feels near. But because in the 21^st century, we lack the time to re-evaluate the “safety zone” each time we make a decision, we forget it and focus on “its sister, the comfort zone.” We “assume that what makes us comfortable also makes us safe” (3).

Godin argues that the safety zone has changed, but the comfort zone hasn’t, so we are lulled into accepting a day-job, occupying the corner office, attending a famous college—all safe places. In the face of life’s challenges, “We hold back, waiting for a return to ‘normal,’ but in the new normal you can’t be resistant to change. . . . We settled for a safety zone that wasn’t bold enough, that adhered to authority and compliance. And we built a comfort zone around being obedient and invisible, so that,” to refer to the Greek myth of Icarus and Daedalus, “we’re far too close to the waves” (4). This is the outcome of the death of the Industrial Age.

Godin’s title refers to the Greek myth of Icarus, who was instructed by his inventor father (and prison escapee) Daedalus, not to fly too high, too close to the sun, or his wax wings would melt. Both knew that it also wasn’t safe to fly too close to the sea, “because the water would ruin the lift to his wings.” Godin’s central provocation here is that it’s more dangerous to fly too low than it is to fly too high, because the “low” feels safe and something to “settle” for. What we settle for is small dreams, so that we shortchange ourselves and others, who “depend upon or could benefit from our work.” Godin argues that the path forward is to “be human,” to do art and “fly higher than we’ve been taught is possible.”

In this context, Godin says that there’s still a “safety zone,” but that it is no longer where you feel comfortable. Instead, it’s the place “where art and innovation and destruction and rebirth occur. The safety zone is the never-ending creation of ever-deeper personal connection” (4). The Industrial age should give way to the “art of connection” (which I’ll discuss in a later posting).

To become “comfortable with the behaviours that make you safe as you progress, you need to create change, be restless with what stands still and disappointed when you haven’t failed recently” (5). There must be room to fail, as writers Smith and Kuipers and Slaunwhite suggest, from their very different perspectives (see my last post, “part one” of this series). Since artists are never invulnerable (we necessarily take things “personally”), the “new safety zone isn’t as comfortable as the last one was.” Continue reading “Provocations on Art: Reading Seth Godin’s _The Icarus Deception_ . . . Part Two (Portfolio Penguin, 2012)”

In his blog on April 12, 2013, Seth Godin observes: “Every day, I get letters from people who found The Icarus Deception at just the right moment in their careers. It has opened doors for people or given them the confidence to keep going in the face of external (and internal) resistance. . . . I tried to create a foundation for people willing to do a better (and scarier) sort of work.”

Godin is speaking of many kinds of “creatives,” including freelance copywriters, on whom MarCom executives often rely to promote their products and services.

In his other best-selling books, Godin’s argues that we should treat our work of marketing as art. And by art, he’s not referring to a “gene” or a “specific talent” for original thought, but to an “attitude available to anyone who has a vision that others don’t have, and the guts to do something about it.” He advocates for a different way of working and a different way of thinking about the work that we do.

At this late time in history, he believes that art “is the truly human act of creating something new that matters to another person. The only refuge left, the only safe path, is to be the one who makes art” (xiii). I remember, for instance, English novelist Zadie Smith saying in an interview that she’d rather write novels that are “loose” and “baggy” and maybe not entirely coherent, if they accomplish a new way of speaking to the reader, or of exploring something previously ignored, that the reader finds valuable. Saskatoon-based novelist Alice Kuipers similarly said in a recent interview that she wants to use the format of the novel to ask questions and explore possibilities, without having to be “perfect” or critically acclaimed. As Godin says, “the opposite of coherent is interesting” and “art is almost never coherent.” Continue reading “Provocations on Art: Reading Seth Godin`s _The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly?_ . . . .Part One (Portfolio Penguin, 2012)”