The best of Seth Godin

I’ve got a bit of a love/hate relationship with Seth Godin’s books.

A lot of it is fluff, but there are some pearls of wisdom.

Penguin Magic

Seth calls PenguinMagic.com the “Amazon for magic tricks.”

So, how did this family-run site achieve such a feat?

Well, by leveraging the curiosity gap.

Humans are drawn to incomplete information, we love cliffhangers and click on clickbait.

Penguin Magic must know this.

Their website contains thousands of tricks, each with individual videos showing the trick.

But to find out how the trick works, you must buy the product. Classic curiosity gap in action.

In New York State, if the school budget is defeated twice, the state takes over. They cancel, cut, and rip things to pieces. It’s not good.

So, about a week before the second vote, a local group of parents started canvas for votes.

The typical approach is a petition, but names on a sheet aren’t too persuasive.

So, parents made their support more visible.

Each parent hung a ribbon on tree branches around the town.

The result? Thousands of ribbons on every tree act as a constant reminder of their support.

And the parents won enough votes to secure the budget.

Seth supported an Indian social enterprise that offered prescription glasses for affordable prices.

The team would test the recipient’s eyes, prescribe the correct lenses, and offer ten frame options.

The problem was very few accepted the glasses.

Seth couldn’t understand why. The glasses were incredibly cheap and could change the recipient's life.

One afternoon, running low on stock, the team removed the ten options and only offered one set of frames.

Glasses were being handed out faster than ever, and customers queued around the block.

Reducing the options made the deal more desirable.

Fans of Nudge will know why. When there are too many choices, we can feel paralysed.

It's hard to decide what to watch on Netflix when scrolling through an endless stream of content. Picking between Elf and Home Alone is easy.

Removing the choice removed the choice paralysis.

I don’t always recommend Seth’s books (not just because he won’t come on Nudge), but these stories are golden.

Cheers!

Phill