Small Is the New Big
As one of today's most influential business thinkers, Seth Godin helps his army of fans stay focused, stay connected, and stay dissatisfied with the status quo, the ordinary, the boring. His books, blog posts, magazine articles, and speeches have inspired countless entrepreneurs, marketing people, innovators, and managers around the world. Now, for the first time, Godin has collected the most provocative short pieces from his pioneering blog—ranked #70 by Feedster (out of millions published) in worldwide readership. This book also includes his most popular columns from Fast Company magazine, and several of the short e-books he has written in the last few years. A sample: • Bon Jovi And The Pirates • Christmas Card Spam • Clinging To Your Job Title? • How Much Would You Pay to Be on Oprah's Show? • The Persistence of Really Bad Ideas • The Seduction of "Good Enough" • What Happens When It's All on Tape? • Would You Buy Life Insurance at a Rock Concert? Small is the New Big is a huge bowl of inspiration that you can gobble in one sitting or dip into at any time. As Godin writes in his introduction: "I guarantee that you'll find some ideas that don't work for you. But I'm certain that you're smart enough to see the stuff you've always wanted to do, buried deep inside one of these riffs. And I'm betting that once inspired, you'll actually make something happen."
Stats for nerds
4recommend
8mentions
6people
2007–2010years
50% recommend25% neutral25% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Here's a few I've really liked that have a broader subject matter than only what you asked for. I figure that if you like to read you'd like these books.
--- NON-FICTION ---
Darkness Visible
A Mathemematician's Apology
Omnivore's Dilemma
Fermat's Enigma
The Code Book
Born to Run
Judgement of Paris
Siddhartha
Killing Pablo
The Victorian Internet
Lone Survivor
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman
Papillon
Into Thin Air
Born on a Blue Day
Touching the Void
Got Fight
The Conquest of Happiness
--- FICTION ---
Switch Bitch
Lost Horizon
The Cuckoo's Egg
The Simlarillion
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Alchemist
The Count of Monte Cristo
A Canticle for Leibowitz
Neverwhere
My Uncle Oswald
Stories of Your Life and Others
Invisible Cities
Life of Pi
Atlas Shrugged
--- WALL STREET / FINANCE ---
When Genius Failed
Liar's Poker
Buffett (Lowenstein)
Bull!
Black-Scholes and Beyond (textbook)
Fixed Income Securities (textbook)
The Road to Serfdom
The Smartest Guys in the Room
Fortune's Formula
The Fourth Turning
Inside the House of Money
--- ENTREPRENEURSHIP / COMPUTERS (non-textbook) ---
Masters of Doom
It's Not About the Bike
Dot. Bomb
Founders at Work
The PayPal Wars
Coders at Work
The Mousedriver Chronicles
Leaving Microsoft to Change the World
The Soul of a New Machine
Startup
The Hypomanic Edge
Small Giants
Small is the New Big
Four Hour Work Week
The Boy who Harnessed the Wind
Four Steps to the Epiphany
Pour your Heart into it
Beyond Software Architecture
Setting the Table
--- DESIGN / UX ---
On Writing
The Design of Everyday Things
Understanding Comics
The Elements of Typographic Style
Don't Make me Think!
A Pattern Language
--- PROGRAMMING ---
Programming Pearls
Effective Java
The Algorithm Design Manual
Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment
The Pragmatic Programmer
Refactoring
Java Concurrency in Practice
Java Puzzlers
Expert C Programming
--- COOKING ---
The Secrets of Cooking Revealed
Cooking for Geeks
The Bread Baker's Apprentice
The Brewmaster's Table
--- MISC ---
Robot Building for Beginners
Mountaineering - The Freedom of the Hills
A First Course in Coding Theory
The Computational Beauty of Nature
Total Control
The Ashley Book of Knots
Make: Electronics
- To get fundamentals and theory foundation, drop the "internet" part of your requirement. The internet is just another way to connect people.
All successful marketing comes down to a fundamental understanding of people, how we like to be spoken to, what captures our attention, and what messages stick.
Read my notes and excerpts on some of these books to get an idea if they're what you're looking for:
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Small is the New Big - by Seth Godin
A "best-of" collection of small essays about marketing. Seth writes in general terms meant to give you perspective, change the way you think about marketing, and inspire you to actions, no matter how small, that make all the difference. Read anything by Seth Godin (as others here have said), but this is his best overview.
http://sivers.org/book/SmallIsTheNewBig
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Made to Stick - by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
A deep analysis of what makes certain ideas or stories memorable.
http://sivers.org/book/MadeToStick
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You, Inc - The Art of Selling Yourself - by Harry Beckwith
Harry Beckwith is amazing. Read everything by him. This is just his newest. He's the best at reminding you how basic human consideration translates into marketing.
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Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got - by Jay Abraham
Jay Abraham is an absolute marketing genius from an angle the others here don't cover. This gets you into his mindset, seeing profitable aspects in your business you never noticed before, and how to communicate them to your audience. Sorry I don't have notes on this one:
- Seth's job, in his own words, is to remind you of things you already know. It's hard to explain why people love Seth so much. All I can really do is point you to some of his best stuff.
* This Is Broken: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4101280286098310645
* Hard Work: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/69/sgodin.html
* All his books, especially All Marketers are Liars, Permission Marketing, and Free Prize Inside.
* His best blog posts are collected in the book Small Is The New Big. I love all of Seth's vintage stuff, but my personal favorite is probably his post Clean Fire Trucks: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/12/clean_firetr...
- Seth Godin operates one of the most famous blogs in the world. To be honest, I don't think his posts warrant the popularity his blog receives. Seth is a great guy, but his ideas are somewhat redundant.
Books by Seth that I highly recommend:
1. Permission Marketing
2. All Marketers are Liars
3. Purple Cow
4. Small is the new big
Books by Seth that I do not recommend:
1. The Big Moo
2. Free prize inside
3. Idea virus
4. The Bootstrapper's Bible (I am not finished reading this one, so don't take my advice on it)
I ended up writing him an email explaining my frustration over "The Big Moo" and "Free prize inside".
- No, business books sell well because of the fantasy aspect.
Business books are overwhelmingly bad - and still sell - because it's very difficult to verify anything said empirically. Most of the time, business isn't treated as a science (a mistake), and a lot of business books are written by people who are good salesmen, but not much else.
Good business books are very rare. They don't have marketing titles like "small is the new big", they don't feature the author's face on the front cover (where else but ego-centric business books does that happen?) and they don't endorse moronic checkbox routines like "Decide, before you start, that you’re going to change three things about what you do all day at work. ".
Seth Godin is very much a junk author.
- Understood and I definitely agree - to a point. I get ALL my news and entertainment online. Sometimes I just need to get away from the computer screen.
I read Seth Godin's blog everyday, but I still bought Small Is the New Big. I still bought and read The Long Tail although half the book was online.
