User Profile

Your goal as an artist is to make art that moves the audience of your choice. If your efforts fail to move the audience you've chosen, then you should learn what worked and what didn't and incorporate that knowledge into your next effort. Interact with the audience if it helps you learn to do better next time, but not if it gives the resistance an excuse to destroy your future art. Only a self-negating artist reads his Amazon reviews and the Twitter feedback on his work. He will learn nothing and will amplify his lizard brain's certainty of his worthlessness. Figure out who your art is for, get better at connecting with that audience, and ignore the rest.

— The Icarus Deception How High Will You Fly by Seth Godin (Page 113)

The watchword of the sane artist: Shun the nonbelievers. First you must pick yourself, and then you choose your audience. After you've created your art, whatever it is--a service, an idea, an interaction, a performance, a meeting it's done. What the audience does with it is out of your control. If you focus your angst and emotion on the people who don't get it, you've destroyed part of your soul and haven't done a thing to improve your art. Your art, if you made it properly, wasn't for them in the first place.

— The Icarus Deception How High Will You Fly by Seth Godin (Page 112)

One way the community responds to a courageous act is by seeking to shame the courageous one. Instead of rewarding you for caring enough to try, they work to silence you by creating shame. Shame is the soul killer, the enemy of those who would have courage. Shame is the emotion that is handed to you when you are called out for what you've done or what you've said. The easiest way to avoid shame (which is something that every single breathing human wants to do) is to lie low. If you don't speak up and don't act out, it's unlikely that you'll be singled out to be shamed. But lying low is now a recipe for ending up far outside your safety zone. The industrial economy sold you on the bargain that avoiding attention meant avoiding shame and that obedience led to stability. While you can still avoid shame by hiding, you won't find happiness or even stability that way.

— The Icarus Deception How High Will You Fly by Seth Godin (Page 110)

We don't work for the applause, and we'd be foolish to read the anonymous comments on Amazon or the tweets coming from the back of the room. When your restaurant gets a lousy review on Yelp or a stranger yells something out the window, that attempt to get you to quiet down and conform doesn't belong to you unless you want it to.

— The Icarus Deception How High Will You Fly by Seth Godin (Page 108)

The value of art is in your willingness to stare down the risk and to embrace the void of possible failure. Change is powerful, but change always comes with the possibility of failure as its partner. "This might not work" isn't merely something to be tolerated; it's something you must seek out.

— The Icarus Deception How High Will You Fly by Seth Godin (Page 95)

When the critic pushes you to make better art, art that you are capable of, then her response is worth cherishing. But the critic who pushes you to fit in or dumb down your work take that criticism with caution.

— The Icarus Deception How High Will You Fly by Seth Godin (Page 86)

When your art fails, make better art.

— The Icarus Deception How High Will You Fly by Seth Godin (Page 83)

The hubris involved in this decision is extraordinary. "Maybe this will work," we wonder. Or even, for the particularly committed, "This might not work." We've been taught that only a mythological god has the right to approach the world with that sort of confidence confidence that no matter what happens, the journey itself was worth it. Unfortunately for those considering a timid step into the world of art, the odds of external success start small and grow slowly. So we can't just commit to one act of kamiwaza, one bold emotional risk, and be done with it. We have to commit to a lifetime of them. It's a process, not an event. You don't do a little art and then go back to work. Your work is your art (and vice versa).

— The Icarus Deception How High Will You Fly by Seth Godin (Page 83)

Do not expect applause. Accept applause, sure, please do. But when you expect applause, when you do your work in order to get (and because of) applause, you have sold yourself short. When your work depends on something out of your control, you have given away part of your art. If your work is filled with the hope and longing for applause, it's no longer your work the dependence on approval in this moment has corrupted it, turned it into a process in which you are striving for ever more approval.

— The Icarus Deception How High Will You Fly by Seth Godin (Page 66)

It's what we wrestle with every single day. The intersection of comfort, danger, and safety. The balancing act between vulnerability and shame. The opportunity (or the risk) to do art. The willingness to take responsibility for caring enough to make a difference and to have a point of view. Moving your comfort zone when the safety zone changes isn't easy, but it's better than being a victim.

— The Icarus Deception How High Will You Fly by Seth Godin (Page 65)

The economy we live in today is very different from the one our parents grew up in. We have a surplus of choice, a surplus of quality, a surplus of entertainments to choose from. We have big-box stores and big-box storage units and big-box debt. But we're still lonely. And we're still bored. The connection economy works because it focuses on the lonely and the bored. It works because it embraces the individual, not the mob; the weird, not the normal. The connection economy revolves around the linchpin, the artist we can't live without, the individual who chooses to do work that matters, because without her, why connect?

— The Icarus Deception How High Will You Fly by Seth Godin (Page 56)

Julie Logan at the Cass Business School found that entrepreneurs are three times more likely than the general public to have dyslexia. And many entrepreneurs credit their ADHD with giving them an edge in making their businesses successful. I'm not sure it's because their mental differences give them a performance edge. It's not like there's a secret code that only dyslexics can read. No, I think it's because their outlier tendencies made it clear to them early on that they would be less likely to be picked. Less likely to be at the top of their class or chosen by the fancy college or recruited by P&G. Precisely because they didn't fit in, they had little choice but to pick themselves. And once that choice is made, it becomes a habit.

— The Icarus Deception How High Will You Fly by Seth Godin (Page 52)