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Seth Godin

The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) Hardcover – May 10, 2007

by Seth Godin (Author)

2,161 ratings

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A New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestseller

In this iconic bestseller, popular business blogger and bestselling author Seth Godin proves that winners are really just the best quitters. Godin shows that winners quit fast, quit often, and quit without guilt—until they commit to beating the right Dip.

Every new project (or job, or hobby, or company) starts out fun…then gets really hard, and not much fun at all. You might be in a Dip—a temporary setback that will get better if you keep pushing. But maybe it’s really a Cul-de-Sac—a total dead end. What really sets superstars apart is the ability to tell the two apart.

Winners seek out the Dip. They realize that the bigger the barrier, the bigger the reward for getting past it. If you can beat the Dip to be the best, you’ll earn profits, glory, and long-term security.
Whether you’re an intern or a CEO, this fun little book will help you figure out if you’re in a Dip that’s worthy of your time, effort, and talents. The old saying is wrong—winners do quit, and quitters do win.

Print length

96 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Portfolio
Publication date

May 10, 2007
Dimensions

5.2 x 0.6 x 7.3 inches
ISBN-10

1591841666
ISBN-13

978-1591841661
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Yet another easily digestible social marketplace commentary from the blogger/author who penned Purple Cow and Small is the New Big, Godin prescribes a cleverly counter-intuitive way to approach one's potential for success. Smart, honest, and refreshingly free of self-help posturing, this primer on winning-through-quitting is at once motivational and comically indifferent, making the lofty goal of "becoming the best in the world" an achievable proposition-all you need is to "start doing some quitting." The secret to "strategic quitting" is seeking, understanding and embracing "the Dip," "the long slog between starting and mastery" in which those without the determination or will find themselves burning out. As such, Godin demonstrates how to identify and quit your "Cul-de-Sac" and "Cliff" situations, in which no amount of work will lead to success. Godin provides tips for finding your Dip, taking advantage of it and becoming one of the few (inevitably valuable) players to emerge on the other side; he also provides guidelines for quitting with confidence. Quick, hilarious and happily irreverent, Godin's truth-that "we fail when we get distracted by tasks we don't have the guts to quit"-makes excellent sense of an often-difficult career move.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

"A short read that should be on every entrepreneur's book list."—Entrepreneur.com

"Absolutely delightful, combining his wise aphorisms and anecdotes with Hugh MacLeod's darkly brilliant business-card cartoons."—Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Portfolio; First Edition. First Printing. (May 10, 2007)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 96 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1591841666
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1591841661
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 6.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 0.6 x 7.3 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #19,140 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #31 in Human Resources & Personnel Management (Books)
- #36 in Time Management (Books)
- #61 in Personal Time Management

Customer Reviews:
2,161 ratings

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Seth Godin

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Seth Godin is the author of nineteen international bestsellers that have been translated into over 35 languages, and have changed the way people think about marketing and work. For a long time, Unleashing the Ideavirus was the most popular ebook ever published, and Purple Cow is the bestselling marketing book of the decade.

He's a recent inductee to the Marketing Hall of Fame, and also a member of the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame and (go figure), the Guerrilla Marketing Hall of Fame.

His book, Tribes, was a nationwide bestseller, appearing on the Amazon, New York Times, BusinessWeek and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists. It's about the most powerful form of marketing--leadership--and how anyone can now become a leader, creating movements that matter.

His book Linchpin came out in 2008 and was the fastest selling book of his career. Linchpin challenges you to stand up, do work that matters and race to the top instead of the bottom. More than that, though, the book outlines a massive change in our economy, a fundamental shift in what it means to have a job.

Since Linchpin, Godin has published two more books, Poke the Box and We Are All Weird, through his Domino Project. He followed these with The Icarus Deception via Kickstarter, which reached its goal in less than three hours. Joined by Watcha Gonna Do With That Duck and V is for Vulnerable, those books are now widely available. In late 2014, he announced his latest, What To Do When It's Your Turn, sold directly from his website.

In addition to his writing and speaking, Seth was founder and CEO of Squidoo.com,. His blog (find it by typing "seth" into Google) is the most popular marketing blog in the world. Before his work as a writer and blogger, Godin was Vice President of Direct Marketing at Yahoo!, a job he got after selling them his pioneering 1990s online startup, Yoyodyne.

You can find every single possible detail that anyone could ever want to know at sethgodin.com

Customer reviews

5 star		67%
4 star		16%
3 star		9%
2 star		3%
1 star		4%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Drew Knox

A dippy little book

Reviewed in the United States on October 17, 2018

Verified Purchase

I reached the dip by page 33 when I realized that the shallow waters Godin is treading weren't going to get any deeper. About then Godin asks, "are you angry." Darn right! I'm mad at Godin for spewing pop psychology; I'm mad at other reviewers who treat this as revelatory; and I'm at myself for buying this book. That's a lot of anger for such a little book.

78 people found this helpful

Helpful

basalawarmi

Useless dreck

Reviewed in the United States on June 17, 2019

Verified Purchase

Possibly one of the worst self- help books I've ever read. It's like paying to read an insufferable egomaniac's incoherent drivel of a blog. Godin urges you not to be an "average loser" but the "best in the world", but then insists that the meaning of the word "world" can be flexibly scalable. Not to mention the illustrations all look like something sketched by a preschooler in less than five minutes flat. Seriously just an attempt to use a few select buzzwords over and over again as chargeable filler. Take a hard pass; you're better than this, trust me.

51 people found this helpful

Helpful

Durden

Lazy Book with Cherry-Picked Anecdotes

Reviewed in the United States on January 2, 2020

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I'm not sure what book all the other 5-star reviewers read and why this book has such glowing reviews. Perhaps I'm not supposed to question it because it was written by Seth Godin? The (minimal) substance in this book could be summarized in a blog post or podcast episode without losing impact. It's a thought exercise rather than an answer to a question. It's almost like someone took a question on Quora and wrote a book on it to capitalize on the search traffic.

This book tries to address a major challenge that I've faced: How do you know when to quit vs. keep pushing through? The issue I have with this book (and others like it) is that much of the advice is anecdotal and cherry-picked to fit the narrative. 1: Capitalize on the "quit-fast, quit-often" mantra. 2: Find someone who became incredibly sucessfull and attribute it to because they knew how to quit working on the wrong things (never mind all the other factors at play). 3: Find someone who quit too early and didn't stick it out. 4: Find someone who quit too late and wasted time. One example here is snowboarding - why start when you won't be the world's best. Really?

While you will get a lot of anecdotes, you won't find a process or formula to help you determine if you're in a dip vs a "cul-de-sac". I'm actually surprised that there isn't an upsell here to help find it for you through a network of private coaches, webinars, or additional online quizzes with one-time use codes. Next time!

My own anecdote to add to this steaming pile:
“Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

33 people found this helpful

Helpful

Amazon Customer

Some good information, but limited and hyperbolic

Reviewed in the United States on January 20, 2021

Verified Purchase

This book was recommended to me by a work colleague, and it's a short, quick read. The main point of the book seems to me to circle around an idea that is common sense: when people approach a task - marketing a new product, picking up a new skill, and so on - they need to persevere through the dip. The dip is that period of time when the work involved feels difficult and overwhelming, and the temptation to quit becomes pressing. The author contends that the difference between people who succeed, and those who fail, can be traced back to whether or not they pushed through the dip. If they make it through that slump, then they are rewarded with the money or recognition or expertise that most other people never achieve.

The reason a lot of this felt like common sense to me was because I believe most people recognize that after the excitement of starting on a new project, there inevitably comes a time where the gloss of starting something new wears off, and we hit a slump. To me, that slump is the dip. The work feels harder, and it's easy to just stop. Most of this book is encouragement to not stop, using rhetoric such as anecdotes and hyperbole. The book also notes that the steeper the dip - the harder it is to finish, the greater the odds that are stacked against you are - the more success that awaits for those who get through it. I think all of this sounds reasonable, and matches what I've personally experienced when it comes to taking on new challenges. I also thought it was interesting that Godin provided descriptions of two other paths that might seem like a dip, but aren't: the cul-de-sac and the cliff. The cul-de-sac describes work that will never go anywhere no matter how hard people work, and the cliff describes work that seems to be going well before it abruptly collapses in failure.

It's important to recognize that these other scenarios exist, because it's naive to believe that if things aren't going well, it's just the dip, and if you work hard enough you'll eventually succeed. However, very little time is devoted to how people can distinguish between the dip, a cul-de-sac, or a cliff. Considering that the main advice of this book is to keep going when things get tough, I would have appreciated much more explanation of how to tell if I actually am in the dip, or if my hard work isn't going to go anywhere after all. Also, I was put off by the book's voice and style. The author uses a lot of hyperbole, along the lines of: if you're not number one, then you fail! If you're not a winner, you're a loser! This kind of pep talk does not motivate me; on the contrary, it actually distances me from the message. Also, the book incorporates fake math graphs - no numerical data on the x and y axis, no explanation of the research that informed the graphs. In fact, at one point, the book declares that if someone were to create a graph about a certain subject, it would probably look like ... Basically, the graphs are just made up based on how the writer thinks they should look, and that kind of nonsense data bothers me. If you don't have actual numbers, use a different kind of visual device. To sum up, I agreed with the book's main premise, but I wanted it be more fully explained in a more objective manner, and I find the style of the book jarring.

11 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Lendrick

A very short book with not much to say

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 18, 2021

Verified Purchase

The Dip has 80 sparsely filled pages of content, word for word it's probably the most expensive book I have ever purchased. It wasn't worth it.

In essence it says, sometimes it's important to stick with things when the going gets tough because the rewards will be worth it, and sometimes it is better to quit. There is some quite generalised advice on how to tell the difference. Oh, and apparently we can all be the best in the world (by redefining 'the world' to mean our immediate context).

Essentially this is a blog post masquerading as a book, a short work that should be even shorter.

6 people found this helpful

Esmerelda

Poorly written, jumbled messages, sweeping generalisations

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 18, 2021

Verified Purchase

I bought this book on a recommendation and was sorely disappointed. The author makes sweeping generalisations and snap judgements about a range of markets and businesses with no justification. He uses graphs that are ill thought out (I think you meant the x-axis to be "cumulative effort", not just the level of effort). The book is made up of a lot of short, snappy sentences that do not hang together and that contradict each other (just a few pages after arguing for staying in a market but adapting your product he says you should quit the news industry because sales of newspapers are declining). Total waste of money. I won't be buying another self help book any time soon if this is the level of quality to be expected.

2 people found this helpful

Jem_777

Short, but well worth reading...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 27, 2016

Verified Purchase

I enjoyed this book. It was short, concise and gave me plenty of ideas regarding my own goal planning. Sometimes I found the writing a little jumbled and had to read the paragraph a couple of times to understand the point that the author was trying to make.
The books' central idea is that each goal is easy to start with, but then hits a "dip" of difficulty which we need to push through. We must therefore "give up" on goals unless outweighed by the longtime benefits of pushing through the dip; or not start the pursuit of goals to which we know in advance we will not commit when the path becomes difficult.
Recommended and worth the price.

3 people found this helpful

Rob Peach

QUICK, EASY AND MUST READ

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 12, 2019

Verified Purchase

This tiny book is full of huge nuggets of wisdom. The author is worldly-wise clearly from the authorities he cites, he has friends in high places. Media, marketing and mega-corporations to name but three of these places.

Quitters never Win and Winners never Quit; "Wrong" abruptly says Godin, winners do quit all the time. tactically rather than strategically he infers. My simplification rather than Godin's.

The wisdom in this book is from several (NOT TOO MANY) real-life examples that he gives.
AND - he writes less, less in this particular case is definitively more.

Robert Peach

12th April 2019

Simon Dunant

Excellent book!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 7, 2017

Verified Purchase

Really insightful book from Seth Godin. Quite simply we all spend too much time on things that don't work out, and this book tells you why. It will help you understand what the absolute best use of your time is when working on projects, jobs, businesses and more. If you can't get through the dip don't start. When you're investigating what your next step is in life, this is a great book that will stop you wasting years of your life on something that didn't suit you. This book will help you focus on leading a purposeful life. Be the best or not at all is the theme of this book. Everyone is capable of being the best at something. Find that something and use this book to navigate through the dip to life long success.

Many people might at first think this is a short book when receiving it. Don't be fooled, every single page is gold dust. It's as long as it needs to be. Quality over quantity is the order of the day here.... Brilliant book!

One person found this helpful

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