Thoughts on Seth Godin’s “Purple Cow”
Photo by Tiago Fioreze on Unsplash
Purple Cow was where it all started for me. It was my introduction to Seth’s work, when I read it back in 2007.
Purple Cow was one of those books that made parts of the world make more sense to me. Why did I want to tell other people about the shoes I just bought, but not others? Why did I gift friends a pledge to a KickStarter campaign I found? Why did I buy copies of books that influenced me for others?
In some way, I found them all remarkable, and my “remark” was usually me sharing a copy of them (if I could) or at least telling them about it if not. Remarkable products and services made me sneezer, and I started to spot the same in gifts I was receiving. It also made me realise how many products and services that I used that I didn’t bother to think much about.
At the time I read it, I was busy building one of Irelands latest family festivals, the Street Performance World Championship. We had done 2 of the festivals at that stage, and the Purple Cow helped make sense of why they were becoming popular. Our feedback had a lot of people saying things like “It’s so good, I can’t believe it’s free!”. The content (the best street performers from all over the world including world-record-holding sword swallowers, award-winning clowns, world-class magicians etc) had other people marveling at what was possible. They themselves were remarkable. These and many other factors formed the backbone of the growth we sustained over the years. Understanding the “Purple Cow-ness” of what we had built, made us pay more attention to those things. Some we stumbled upon, some were designed into the festival, some failed and were left behind. Understanding more about that lens of remark-ability was what mattered.
Its been 15 years between that first book of Seths that I read, and his most current book, This is Marketing. As a seed idea of how to approach marketing, Purple Cow is an excellent primmer and motivator to put the work in at the beginning to ensure success by making sure people talk about you and your product, not because they want to, but because they have to.
Having spent all of 2018 reading Seth’s books, Purple Cow is an interesting place to end up. Seth himself is the original Purple Cow. His body of work (including 19 bestsellers, world-class workshops such as the altMBA, The Marketing Seminar and Bootstrappers Workshop to mention a few). Seth has never settled for what’s normal, but has always strived to be different, not for the sake of it, but to follow his own compass and help lead the way for others. His life is the embodiment of innovation, of walking the walk, of going to places there “this might not work” and dancing with the fear, over and over again. His life could have taken a predictable path, and stayed inside the confines of what felt normal, but instead he pushed to the edges, and went in totally new and ambitious directions.
2018 for me has been a fascinating deep-dive into Seth’s work, and it’s the first time I have gone all-in with a single author like this. Reviews of Seth’s work online largely focus on the application of his ideas to work and business, however being a coach allowed me to put a different lens while reading it, and I found myself asking a different set of questions, about applying it to people…
What if this is about how people see the world?
What connects us all together?
How are we the same? How are we different?
What does better look like?
If you weren’t holding anything back, what would you be doing?
Why does it mean to be empathetic?
Where is the fear?
Where are you hiding?
…and a 1,000 others.
Seth’s generosity in putting so much of himself into his books is a gift to the world, and I have yet to find a body of work that is so broad but that that deals with the particular in such a caring way.
A year’s reading well-spent.
