Seth Godin’s Thoughts on ‘the Office’

Seth Godin’s post today on saying goodbye to the office is worth a read if you’re unhappy with your current job.

• If you have a laptop, you probably have the machine already, in your house.
• If you do work with a keyboard and a mouse, the items you need to work on are on your laptop, not in the office.
• The boss can easily keep tabs on productivity digitally.
• How many meetings are important? If you didn’t go, what would happen?
• You can get energy from people other than those in the same company.
• Of the 100 people in your office, how many do you collaborate with daily?
• So go someplace. But it doesn’t have to be to your office.

If we were starting this whole office thing today, it’s inconceivable we’d pay the rent/time/commuting cost to get what we get. I think in ten years the TV show ‘the Office’ will be seen as a quaint antique.

When you need to have a meeting, have a meeting. When you need to collaborate, collaborate. The rest of the time, do the work, wherever you like.

The gain in speed, productivity and happiness is massive. What’s missing is #7… someplace to go. Once someone figures that part out, the office is dead.

If you have the type of job that requires more than just a laptop and you’re not happy you may want to reconsider that role. If you do work from a laptop 99% of the time then I suggest meeting with your boss this afternoon. You won’t regret it.

1 year ago

Seth Godin’s Thoughts on TV

I would have just linked to Seth’s post entitled “But it’s better than TV”, but I love it so much that I had to share the entire article.

But it’s better than TV
from Seth’s Blog by Seth Godin

At the local health food store lunch buffet, they offer stir fried tempeh.

I never get it. Not because I don’t like it, but because there are always so many other things on the buffet that I prefer.

That’s why I don’t watch TV. At all. There are so many other things I’d rather do in that moment.

Broadcast TV was a great choice when a> there weren’t a lot of other options and b> when everyone else was watching the same thing, so you needed to see it to be educated.

Now, though, you could:

Run a little store on eBay

Write a daily blog

Write a novel

Start an online community about your favorite passion

Go to meetups in your town

Volunteer to tutor a kid, in person or online

Learn a new language, verbal or programming

Write hand written thank you notes each evening to people who helped you out or did a good job

Produce small films and publish them online

Listen to the one thousand most important operas

Read a book or two every evening

Play a game of Scrabble with your family

None of them are perfect. Each of them are better than TV.

Clay Shirky has noticed the trend of talented people putting five or six hours an evening to work instead of to waste. Add that up across a million or ten million people and the output is astonishing. He calls it cognitive surplus and it’s one of the underappreciated world-changing stories of our time.

1 year ago

Seth Godin on Craigslist

Sort of like the iTunes vs. Napster effect. Free music is great, but if the MP3 is garbage quality or the file contains a virus, then $1 is a small price to pay for a superior product. Quality always wins over quantity.

If Craigslist cost $1 Some things are better when they’re not free.

If Craigslist charged a dollar for every listing, what would happen?

Well, the number of bogus listings and repetitive listings would plummet, making the site far easier to use.

The number of scam artists using the site would go down, because it’s more difficult to be anonymous when money changes hands.

The revenue of the site would soar, which means that the people running the site could get (far) richer, or fund digital journalism or change the economy of an emerging nation.

Money creates a sort of friction. In the digital economy, magical things can happen when there is no friction. You can scale to infinity. On the other hand, sometimes you want friction.

If you lead a group that allows anyone to join, for free, your group might be large, but it’s not tight, it’s not organized to make important change. Commitment slows things down in the short run, but ultimately aligns interests. - Seth Godin

2 years ago

Seth Godin on Resumes

I was just going post that one quote (posted before this one) from this Seth Godin article on resumes but the whole darn thing was quotable. 

In the last few days, I’ve heard from top students at Cornell and other universities about my internship.

It must have been posted in some office or on a site, because each of the applications is just a resume. No real cover letter, no attempt at self marketing. Sort of, “here are the facts about me, please put me in the pile.”

This is controversial, but here goes: I think if you’re remarkable, amazing or just plain spectacular, you probably shouldn’t have a resume at all.

Not just for my little internship, but in general. Great people shouldn’t have a resume.

Here’s why: A resume is an excuse to reject you. Once you send me your resume, I can say, “oh, they’re missing this or they’re missing that,” and boom, you’re out.

Having a resume begs for you to go into that big machine that looks for relevant keywords, and begs for you to get a job as a cog in a giant machine. Just more fodder for the corporate behemoth. That might be fine for average folks looking for an average job, but is that what you deserve?

If you don’t have a resume, what do you have?

How about three extraordinary letters of recommendation from people the employer knows or respects?
Or a sophisticated project they can see or touch?
Or a reputation that precedes you?
Or a blog that is so compelling and insightful that they have no choice but to follow up?

Some say, “well, that’s fine, but I don’t have those.”

Yeah, that’s my point. If you don’t have those, why do you think you are remarkable, amazing or just plain spectacular? It sounds to me like if you don’t have those, you’ve been brainwashed into acting like you’re sort of ordinary.

Great jobs, world class jobs, jobs people kill for… those jobs don’t get filled by people emailing in resumes. Ever.

3 years ago