Godin - We Are All Weird: the Rise Of Tribes And The End Of Normal

Seth Godin

---

WE ARE ALL WEIRD

The Rise of Tribes and the End of Normal

UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
India | New Zealand | South Africa

Portfolio Penguin is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published in the United States of America by Portfolio/Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2015
First published in Great Britain by Portfolio Penguin 2015

Copyright Seth Godin, 2015

Cover design: Zoe Norvell
Cover images: andromina / Shutterstock

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-241-97348-6

Seth Godin may be the ultimate entrepreneur for the information age BusinessWeek

Its easy to see why people pay to hear what he has to say Time

Embarkable
Annie Duke, world poker champion, author, and talk-show host

Rut reversing
Sarah Jones, playwright

Essential
Jill Greenberg, photographer, manipulator.org

Seth Godin is the author of eighteen international bestsellers including Purple Cow and Tribes that have changed the way people think about marketing, leadership, change and the way ideas spread. He founded Yoyodyne and Squidoo, is a successful (and unsuccessful) entrepreneur and is a very popular lecturer. He publishes inspiration daily on his blog, consistently ranked as one of the hundred most popular in the world.

Let the conversation begin...

Follow the Penguin Twitter.com@penguinukbooks

Keep up-to-date with all our stories YouTube.com/penguinbooks

Pin Penguin Books to your Pinterest

Like Penguin Books on Facebook.com/penguinbooks

Listen to Penguin at SoundCloud.com/penguin-books

Find out more about the author and
discover more stories like this at Penguin.co.uk

Read this book slowly and read it again, for the lessons are rich and wise Jacqueline Novogratz, founder, Acumen

This is a book about giving a damn. Its about caring about what you do and (as important) who you do it for. Professional apathy is a relic of a dead era and, as Seth teaches brilliantly, a mentality you cling to at great peril. Everyone with a pulse and a pay check should be living We Are All Weird Chris Taylor, founder, ActionableBooks.com

This book will resonate with anyone who wants to lead a tribe, be authentic, dance to the beat of their own music and make a difference in the world. If your inner critic (the resistance) has been telling you that you are not enough, your work is not good enough and who do you think you are to make a difference, then buy this book. Let your freak flag fly high! Sherold Barr, master coach and freedom fighter

Seth has done it again. Open this book to almost any page. Read it, and change your thinking, your work, your life, or better express your art. Weird how he does this, isnt it? Rob Berkley, executive coach, VisionDay.com

Also by Seth Godin

Permission Marketing

Unleashing the Ideavirus

Survival Is Not Enough

Purple Cow

Free Prize Inside

The Big Red Fez

Meatball Sundae

Small Is the New Big

All Marketers Are Liars

Tribes

The Dip

Linchpin

V is for Vulnerable

The Icarus Deception

Watcha Gonna Do with That Duck?

What to Do When Its Your Turn

Poke the Box

To Helene, Alex & Mo.super weird.

Ad legend Linda Kaplan Thaler tells the story of a zoo in Belgium, down on its luck. The crowds had stopped coming.

With the emergence of so many alternative amusements, diversions, and novelties, the zoo had fallen on hard times. Attendance was down, but the animals still needed to get fed.

Then their elephant got pregnant.

Alert ad agency geniuses leapt into action. They put a sonogram of the baby elephant on YouTube. They ran polls and contests (girl or boy?). Attention was paid. Hoopla was generated. The zoo was back on track, and attendance climbed.

The elephant gave the zoo its mass back. Mass reach, mass excitement, mass crowds. An apparent triumph for new media.

The story is told because it harks back to a happier time, to an era when ad agencies could easily do what they were paid to do: get the attention of the public. It reminds us that our economy is built on the back of mass, on public amusements, on factories organized to create widgets or services or entertainment for anyone (and everyone) with money to spend.

Marketers can be forgiven their nostalgia. Mass is no longer a scalable, predictable way to engage with the public. Success like the zoos is rare (because pregnant elephants are an oddity). From now on, mass market success will be the exception, the black swan.

Mass is dead. Here comes weird.

This is a book about four words and how the revolution were living through demands we change our understanding of what they mean.

MASS is what allowed us to become efficient. Mass marketing and mass production and mass compliance to the rules of society have defined us. Mass is what we call the undifferentiated, the easily reached majority that seeks to conform and survive.

NORMAL is what we call people in the middle. Normal describes and catalogs the defining characteristics of the masses. Normal is localizedbeing a vegetarian is weird in Kansas but normal in Mumbai. Whats normal here is not whats normal there. Finding and amplifying normal is essential to anyone who traffics in mass. Over time, marketers have made normal a moral and cultural standard, not just a statistical one.

WEIRD is what we call people who arent normal. Your appearance or physical affect might be unusual by nature or by birth, but, like me, youre probably mostly weird by choice. Different by nature isnt your choice, and its not my focus here. Weird by choice, on the other hand, flies in the face of the culture of mass and the checklist of normal. Im interested in this sort of weird, people who have chosen to avoid conforming to the masses, at least in some parts of their lives.

RICH is my word for someone who can afford to make choices, who has enough resources to do more than merely survive. You dont need a private plane to be rich, but you do need enough time and food and health and access to be able to interact with the market for stuff and for ideas.

The swami I met in a small village in India is rich. Not because he has a fancy house or a car (he doesnt). Hes rich because he can make choices and he can make an impact on his tribe. Not just choices about what to buy, but choices about how to live.