These are some notes that I made when I was reading through Seth Godin’s book, The Dip, which I highly recommend. You can buy it HERE.
Quit the wrong stuff.
Stick with the right stuff.
Have the guts to do one or the other.
Scarcity makes being at the top worth something.
Anyone who is going to hire you, buy from you, recommend you, vote for you, or do what you want them to do is going to wonder if you’re the best choice.
Best as in: best for them, right now, based on what they believe and what they know. And in the world as in: their world, the world they have access to.
People who are the best in the world specialize at getting really good at the questions they don’t know. The people who skip the hard questions are in the majority, but they are not in demand.
Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations. Reactive quitting and serial quitting are the bane of those that strive (and fail) to get what they want.
The Dip is the long slog between starting and mastery. A long slog that’s actually a shortcut, because it gets you where you want to go faster than any other path.
The Dip is a long stretch between beginner’s luck and real accomplishment.
Scarcity is the secret to value.
The Dip creates scarcity; scarcity creates value.
The people who set out to make it through the Dip – the people who invest the time and the energy and the effort to power through the Dip – those are the ones who become the best in the world. They are breaking the system because, instead of moving on to the next thing, instead of doing slightly above average and settling for what they’ve got, they embrace the challenge. For whatever reason, they refuse to abandon the quest and they push through the Dip all the way to the next level.
In a competitive world, adversity is your ally. The harder it gets, the better change you have of insulating yourself from the competition. If that adversity also cause you to quit, though, it’s all for nothing.
The reason we’re here is to solve the hard problems.
It’s not enough to survive your way through this Dip. You get what you deserve when you embrace the Dip and treat it like the opportunity that it really is.
A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand different trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty thousand times on one tree and get dinner.
It’s human nature to quit when it hurts. But it’s that reflex that creates scarcity.
Simple: If you can’t make it through the Dip, don’t start. If you can embrace that simple rule, you’ll be a lot choosier about which journeys you start.
Quitting creates scarcity; scarcity creates value.
If you can get through the Dip, if you can keep going when the system if expecting you to stop, you will achieve extraordinary results. People who make it through the Dip are scarce indeed, so they generate more value.
I’d rather have you focus on quitting (or not quitting) as a go-up opportunity. It’s not about avoiding the humiliation of failure. Even more important, you can realize that quitting the stuff you’re mediocre at or better yet quitting the Cul-de-Sacs frees up your resources to obsess about the Dips that matter.
Worse, when faced with the Dip, sometimes we don’t quit. Instead, we get mediocre.
Not just survive the Dip, but use the Dip as an opportunity to create something so extraordinary that people can’t help but talk about it, recommend it, and, yes, choose it.
