What to Do When It's Your Turn by Seth Godin

What to Do When It’s Your Turn (and it’s always your turn) by Seth Godin, The Domino Project, 160 pages, $34.00, Paperback, December 2014, ISBN 9781936719310

We’ve always felt a little closer to Seth Godin than most people we work with. I imagine a lot of people do. Seth is always incredibility generous with his time and ideas. He actually gave us one of our websites, ChangeThis, after starting it with a band of interns in 2004. That’s right, the man has so many ideas that he’s literally giving them away—already fully built.

So we’re obviously not going to say a bad word about the man. But I sometimes wish he would stop writing books. Not because we don’t love them. We do. But Seth never lets us get comfortable; His books are always a challenge. And you always feel as if Seth is talking directly to you in his work, because he is. And in his new book he’s doing it in full color, more a high-end magazine format than traditional hardcover.

What to Do When It’s Your Turn is about a lot of things, but…

Most of all, it’s about freedom and our almost automatic insistence to avoid it at all costs.

That’s the challenge, and it’s a profound one. Seth is always there to remind me I could be, we all could be, doing so much more—that, really, the world depends on it. We need to “make something that matters.” And after we do it once, we have to do it again, and keep doing it, and then do it again, which Seth admits is not easy:

The thing is, there’s no easy way to do this. No simple way to quiet the noise in your head, no proven method to earn the respect and applause of your family and friends, no guaranteed approach that’s going to insulate you from heartache.

 

This might not work.

It might not be fun.

I hope you’ll do it anyway.

When I first picked it up, I thought “I wish someone gave this book to me when I was 17.” Then I realized that I have a niece and nephew around that age I can give the book to. And then I realized that I still have a proverbial 17-year-old locked inside me, that every moment in life can be as transformative as those that are scripted to be—like when we leave our parents’ home or head off to college—that we can “venture out” or “leave the nest” any time we want, and that the time is always right.

It gets back to the most basic point that life is not only about business, but that business is very much about life, and we should make it one that matters.