Thought provoking content, daily

I have enjoyed following Seth Godin's blog for the last several months. He is point of view is refreshing, eye-opening and uplifting. Here is an example of one email update (slightly longer than average) I received that got me thinking. His book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? is one of my favorites. Follow the link to check out the book, or buy anything you want at amazon. It helps support my blogs, and costs you nothing extra.

How to succeed

You don't need all of these, and some are mutually exclusive (while others are not). And most don't work, don't scale or can't be arranged:

1. Be very focused on your goal and work on it daily
2. Go to college with someone who makes it big and then hires you
3. Be born with significant and unique talent
4. Practice every day
5. Network your way to the top by inviting yourself from one lunch to another, trading favors as you go
6. Quietly do your job day in and day out until someone notices you and gives you the promotion you deserve
7. Do the emotional labor of working on things that others fear
8. Notice things, turn them into insights and then relentlessly turn those insights into projects that resonate
9. Hire a great PR firm and get a lot of publicity
10. Work the informational interview angle
11. Perform outrageous acts and say obnoxious things
12. Inherit
13. Redefine your version of success as: whatever I have right now
14. Flit from project to project until you alight on something that works out very quickly and well
15. Be the best-looking person in the room
16. Flirt
17. Tell stories that people care about and spread
18. Contribute more than is expected
19. Give credit to others
20. Take responsibility
21. Aggrandize, preferably self
22. Be a jerk and win through intimidation
23. Be a doormat and refuse to speak up or stand up
24. Never hesitate to share a kind word when it's deserved
25. Sue people
26. Treat every gig as an opportunity to create art
27. Cut corners
28. Focus on defeating the competition
29. When dealing with employees, act like Steve. It worked for him, apparently.
30. Persist, always surviving to ship something tomorrow
31. When in doubt, throw a tantrum
32. Have the ability to work harder and more directly than anyone else when the situation demands it
33. Don't rock the boat
34. Rock the boat
35. Don't rock the boat, baby
36. Resort to black hat tactics to get more than your share
37. Work to pay more taxes
38. Work to evade taxes
39. Find typos