Customer Reviews

The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)

5 star:		(92)
4 star:		(56)
3 star:		(28)
2 star:		(21)
1 star:		(19)

 

 

The Dip, by Seth Godin, is a very small book (80 pages) that says, in short:


- Winners quit (regroup. cut their losses, switch gears) whenever necessary on the path to winning.

- Be the best, and the world comes knocking at your door.

- Work through the pain, because the reward is waiting for you further down the road.


If any of these comments/suggestions seem unclear, take at look at The Dip.

If you understand already, you've just saved $12.95.


This is not a "how-to" book. It is meant to be a motivational piece of writing. Work hard... the financial rewards are greatest for the hardest worker. Work through "the dip," or that period where the gains don't seem to be coming as quickly as you'd like. Don't stop running the marathon at mile 25.

Look, the very successful don't read these books. The barely successful can't read these books. So it is written for the somewhat successful, or the person who is looking for "something" else. Here's the shortened version: "Work and study hard. Don't give up. Persevere. However, consider alternatives. Share this book with others."

Don't get me wrong... this is not, in any sense, a bad book, or a book giving bad advice. To me, the advice seems pretty obvious.

Work hard, play hard, and be well.

Much of Godin's advice makes sense, although it's not especially original. Know when you're going to quit and have an exit strategy. Don't get stuck in a cul-de-sac: a dead end.

Those who focus on a market or skill do reap greater rewards than those who generalize. Among scholars, picking a tiny slice and expanding will reap big rewards. Remove distractions from your life.

Godin's power curves are very convincing. There is a huge difference between Number 1 and Number 2 when you look at ice cream flavors and box office sales. But sometimes a decision to rank lower can be strategic. Some gurus advise against aiming to be Number 1 or 2 on a search engine, because you'll get more tire-kicking clicks.

Much of Godin's advice makes sense for individual as well as corporate career planning. Most careers have dips. Many people find themselves in cul de sacs. What he calls "the cliff" resembles a comfort zone: "The longer you do it, the harder to quit." As a career consultant, I think the cliff is far more common than Godin suggests.

Two problems with this book:
(1) In real life, it's often hard to distinguish between a cul de sac and a dip and careers often morph from one to the other without warning.

In fact, the book's examples inadvertently demonstrate this ambiguity. On page 38, Godin suggests that the helpful mailroom clerk might rise to CEO. On page 62, Doug gets branded because he's been with the company too long: everyone remembers when he started.

We should note that Jeffrey Pfeffer's book, What Were They Thinking, actually contradicts Godin's tips on pages 38-39: Pfeffer suggests that CEO wannabes *not* suck it up but instead stand out. He argues that the behaviors needed to climb to the top are not those needed to succeed once you've arrived, specifically adding that climbers tend to be disliked by their peers along the way.

(2) I almost stopped reading when I read about Hannah, the law student who became a Supreme Court justice presumably because she worked hard and stayed focused. On page 8, Godin writes that any of 42,000 law graduates could have become Supreme Court justices. Hannah worked hard and made sacrifices to reach this goal.

This statement is simply not accurate. A simple Internet search would have revealed the fact that nearly all Supreme Court clerks tend to come from the top 5 or 6 law schools. As recently as 1998, journalists reported that few women and even fewer minorities were chosen. I suspect age makes a difference as well.

(3) This book is a pithy prescription, deliberately simple so as not to obscure the message. But are we better off when those who want to succeed have to jump through artificial hoops? Do the hoops really encourage the best and the brightest? For example, many experts suggest that education courses discourage many potential teachers, who turn to other fields.

Finally, there really is no happily ever after. Sometimes you can work hard, do everything right and get caught up in mergers and events that are completely unrelated to your performance. Other times you make a casual, easy choice because it sounds like fun and you reap major rewards.

OK, I keep buying Godin's books expecting more. But, all I get is content that seems like a well constructed blog posting. Seth is a very good writer and communicator, but this book added zero to my life. It is a very short book about quitting stuff you're not good at and sticking with (or starting) things you're not good at. Life is short. The longer you dwell in mediocrity, the longer it will take you to become exceptional. Contrary to the book's claim, it doesn't really teach you WHEN to quit or when to stick...other than when the goal is worthwhile. Such an examination takes more than just reading some words. There is very little thought-provoking content here. It seems like a summarized rip-off of Marcus Buckhingham and the "strengths" books...which are excellent and unlike this book...may change your life. Godin is well respected in marketing, but how many more collections of blogs (small is the new big), other people's works (purple cow), and short discourses about the obvious can he keep putting out? It's like people who compile ezines.

Seth Godin has an uncanny ability of delivering the right information at the right time on his blog, in his books, and live.

In the late 1990s as I was struggling to understand the impact of Web marketing, he published his classic Permission Marketing. I immediately applied those ideas in my role as VP marketing at a reasonably large NASDAQ traded technology company.

Soon after, as the Internet bubble was wearing thin and I was in a professional dip, Seth published a remarkable little essay on his blog about the benefits of quitting your job. That was exactly what I needed to hear at that moment and before long I was a scared entrepreneur starting up my own business. The first few years were great: I was building something and it was refreshing not to have to run ideas through the corporate machine. I made the decisions. But soon the little things started to bug me: buying the printer paper and dealing with mundane nonsense like Web hosting and booking airplane trips. I wasn't as engaged as when I started and business wasn't as good. I had hit another dip. But it was a different kind of dip than the one where I quit my job. This was not a dip that required quitting. Fortunately I powered through that second dip.

In a smart and small package, Godin's The Dip lays out everything you need to understand about dips: How to identify the times that it's best to quit and move on and the ways to recognize when, if you just stick it out, you can become the best in the world.

Powerful stuff. But Godin's work always is.

Read The Dip. Then wait a few days and read it again. You'll appreciate the words of wisdom even more the second time.

I ran across this very thin little tome while wandering through a local bookstore and thought it looked just interesting enough to give a second look. Ostensibly about quitting (which I'd done recently, and was still quite excited about), it had also been marked down 20%, so I thought what the heck, and picked it up.

Even as thin as it is, though, and as small, and with an additional 20% off the cover price, it managed, somehow, to end up a complete waste of time. While I agree with its main tenet -- there are actually two of them: "Quitting Is Okay, So Long As You Know When to Do It" (the main one) and "Be the Best in the World" (another one that gets somehow diluted for all the talking of dips, cul-de-sacs, and so on) -- I was hoping for a somewhat deeper explanation than what I ended up getting.

Godin's thesis can be summed up almost completely in four short sentences: "There's good pain, then there's bad pain. Running is good pain (it's valuable); chewing brokwn glass is bad pain (it's worthless). If your job is good pain, you should stay. If it's bad pain, you should quit." And that's it -- that's prety much all there is to it.

I think what Godin's trying to do here is create a new personal business philosophy meme, but it just doesn't work -- it's way too trite. There are a couple of paragraphs on opportunity cost that I found somewhat valuable, but otherwise, I'd suggest skipping it. And it's a shame, too, because I happen to believe pretty passionately in a number of concepts that it advocates -- it's just that Godin doesn't give any of them any more than the gloss-over treatment. Pass on it.

When I read the title of this book I couldn't help but checking it out. What I found made me think for a little while. The gist of Godin's "The Dip" makes for more than a good theory, more than a self-help title: it's some great advice in a world where quitting is something that others typically frown upon. Yet, according to him, it may be the best thing to do, given certain conditions are met. He suggests that you decide in advance what those conditions will be, so that you don't choose to leave some unfinished business in the midst of an emotional burst.

In general, while the book doesn't take too much time to process (you will hardly need to spend more than a couple of hours on it), you end up feeling the message could have easily been relayed in a shorter format (long blog posts, anybody?). If you can, check it out in the library or (cough, cough!) while sipping a nice Latte (or two) at your local bookstore.

I read the entire book, and feel it could have been a great book if it deliver on the promise of the title of knowing when to quit and knowing when to stick with something. It does not. The Dip is about the place between the exciting new start of something, and the slump before mastery, or what Godin says "Being the best in the world."

This book in my opinion is in the dip. It had a good start, but is far, far from being the best in the world on this important life changing subject. What the book needed badly is tools for evaluating when you should quit and when you should stick it out. This book felt like more of a rant then a serious study from an expert on the subject who has real life experience or who has worked through the process with a good number of people and learned effective tools to share with others.

It seem like Godin quit while still in the dip with writing this book. Maybe he should have followed his own advise and stuck it out and created something great, or quit before he published this book.

I hadn't read any of Seth Godin's other books but to be honest, after reading this one I don't think I will. As an entreprenuer, I was anxious to read this book to see what hidden secrets Seth uncovered, but was disappointed to find a confusing and extremely repetitive text. One of the other comments on Amazon got it right - how it is possible to have so little useful information in such a little book. I would highly recommend the 4 Hour Work Week in place of this one.

Seth Godin's advice is simple:
1. Discover what you can do best.
2. Know when to quite and when to persevere.
3. Quit everything that distracts you from becoming the best.
4. Quit everything that you cannot become the best at doing.
5. If you can become the best at it, keep pushing through the dip!

Everything worth doing is worth enduring the hard times to reach. No CEO, no sports great, no "overnight success" has reached the point where they are without having to push through the "dip." The dip is where the joy and success of learning or getting started wears off and the hard work of reaching for success begins.

Seth points out that quitting is okay as long you quit the right things. Too many people quit long before they reach the benefits on the other side. You have to know when to quite and when to persevere.

The sub-title says it all, in fact, for some, that may be all you need to read: when to quit and when to stick. That's Godin's simple message.

Some may find it profound--the truth that some people quit too soon while others don't quit when they should. Given that we are all always told never to quit and that we are guilting into thinking that a quitter is a loser, the message is an important one for people easily swayed by common advice.

"The Dip" is not a how-to book. If you read it hoping to know how to determine the difference between quitting too soon or too late, you'll likely be frustrated. If you read it hoping to determine whether your dip is a dead end or a short cut, you'll likely be frustrated.

"The Dip" is a motivational book that encourages readers to think long term before making the decision to quit or endure. It makes sense--common sense. For the business person lacking common sense--this is a helpful book. But then again, the business person lacking common sense likely needs a lot of help.

Reviewer: Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., is the author of "Beyond the Suffering," "Soul Physicians," and "Spiritual Friends."