Interview: Seth Godin on Achieving Greatness

We talk with Seth Godin about his view of the 10,000 hour rule, his own concept behind achieving greatness, The Dip, and his personal journey to success.

After leaving Spinnaker in 1986, he used $20,000 in savings to found Seth Godin Productions, primarily a book packaging business, out of a studio apartment in New York City. He then met Mark Hurst and founded Yoyodyne. After a few years, Godin sold the book packaging business to his employees and focused his efforts on Yoyodyne, where he promoted the concept of permission marketing.

Yoyodyne, launched in 1995, used contests, online games, and scavenger hunts to market companies to participating users. In August 1996, Flatiron Partners invested $4 million in Yoyodyne in return for a 20% stake. At Yoyodyne, Godin published Permission Marketing: Turning strangers into friends and friends into customers. In 1998, he sold Yoyodyne to Yahoo! for about $30 million and became Yahoo's vice president of direct marketing.

In March 2006, Godin launched Squidoo. In July 2008, Squidoo was one of the 500 most visited sites in the world.

Godin is the author of over 18 books. Free Prize Inside was a Forbes Business Book of the Year in 2004, while Purple Cow sold over 150,000 copies in more than 23 print runs in its first two years. The Dip was a Business Week and New York Times bestseller; Business Week also named Linchpin among its "20 of the best books by the most influential thinkers in business" on November 13, 2015. In the early 1990s, he curated a 10-book series for children titled Worlds of Power. Each of the book's plots is based on a video game.

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