Seth Godin - Tribes - Review and Quotes

Seth Godin – Tribes – Review and Quotes

When the CEO of Beachbody, Carl Daikler recommended this book to us as Team Beachbody coaches I knew it would be a great read and help me out in growing my team and business. I was very impressed with this whole book and will now be reading more books by Seth Godin such as Purple Cow and many others. We had the privilege of listening to Seth Godin speak to us at the 2012 Coach Summit in Las Vegas! I will share with you a few key points and take away things I learned.

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A Tribe needs a shared interest and a way to communicate- There are many ways such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
The marketplace embraces and rewards heretics “It’s clearly more fun to make the rules than to follow them, and for the first time, it’s also profitable, powerful, and productive to do just that.”
Growth for most new businesses comes from those who want to support change, rather than from competing businesses.
Creating a tighter tribe and/or “transforming the shared interest into a passionate goal and desire for change” usually leads to much more impact than trying to make a tribe bigger. beyond public relations and awareness related benefits, measuring the breadth of spread of an idea is not as important as looking at the depth of commitment and interaction of true fans, who end up being the people who recruit most new members.
A movement consists of a story, a connection between the tribe and the leader, and something that needs to be done.
“Life’s too short to fight the forces of change. Life’s too short to hate what you do all day. Life’s way too short to make mediocre stuff. And almost everything that is standard is now viewed as mediocre.” – Life truly IS too short to do something that you are not passionate about. Find your passion and go for it.
“Leadership is scarce because few people are willing to go through the discomfort required to lead. This scarcity makes leadership valuable.”
“Ultimately, people are most easily led where they wanted to go all along.”
“When you fall in love with the system you lose the ability to grow.” Embrace change.
“At first, the new thing is rarely as good as the old thing was. If you need the alternative to be better than the status quo from the very start, you’ll never begin.”
“Being charismatic doesn’t make you a leader. Being a leader makes you charismatic.”

Leaders Make a Ruckus

According to Godin, being a leader is not so much a position of authority. It is using whatever kind of influence you have and leveraging it for the sake of the cause. The cause could be ANYTHING! In order to do this well, leaders must challenge the status quo. He writes, “The business world has a long history of conservative tribes, of groups of people who relish the status quo. The big news is that this has changed. People yearn for change, they relish being part of a movement, and they talk about things that are remarkable, not boring.” (p. 18)

Leaders Tighten the Tribe

Without a leader, a tribe is just a crowd, Godin says (p. 30). Once a leader steps up to lead a tribe, it is his first duty to tighten the tribe: “It’s tempting to make the tribe bigger, to get more members, to spread the word. This pales, however, when juxtaposed with the effects of a tighter tribe. A tribe that communicates more quickly, with alacrity and emotion, is a tribe that thrives.” (p. 52)

Leaders Love What They Do

Godin tells a story of overhearing a couple criticizes him for checking his email at a hotel while on vacation. His response was: “I think the real question, the one they probably wouldn’t want to answer was, “Isn’t it sad that we have a job where we spend two weeks avoiding the stuff we have to do fifty weeks a year?’ It took me a long time to figure out why I was so happy to be checking my email in the middle of the night. It had to do with passion. Other than sleeping, there was nothing I’d rather have been doing in that moment — because I’m lucky enough to have a job where I get to make change happen.”

I can relate to this story 100%. I have been a Team Beachbody coach now for 1 year and even while on vacation I want to check my email and answer questions about health and fitness. Why? It is my passion. I recently returned from a trip to Atlantis in the Bahamas with Beachbody and needed to answer a bunch of messages to catch up. I was going to skip out on our fit club but realized that I LOVE to be around them. This is something I want to do forever and will not be starving for vacation and time away from my job. I love to see change. I LOVE to help people achieve their goals. This is happiness to me. I have a job that I don’t have to try and avoid to be happy.

“A movement happens when people talk to one another, when ideas spread within the community, and most of all, when peer support leads people to do what they always knew was the right thing. Great leaders create movements by empowering the tribe to communicate. They establish the founation for people to make connections, as opposed to commanding people to follow them.”