My wife and I have been going to bookstores about once a weekend and sitting and reading the books together. It’s a cheap date, and it’s fun. Sometimes we go to the library instead, or, if we already have control of something we want to read, we go to a coffee shop or a park and read there. A lot of the time, we end up putting the books aside at the coffee shop and just talk. I think it’s one of the times we really connect. We’re out, and not burdened by the business of being home, and in a lot of ways that allows us to just relax and talk about things. I really enjoy it.
Trips to the bookstore to read leads me to try to pick books that I can read in one or two sittings without buying the book. This is how I read The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team (read my review here). This is, in part, why I chose to read The Dip by Seth Godin. I love Godin’s blog, so picking up one of his books seemed to be a logical step.
The Dip is a very short book. I would estimate that I read it in about an hour. It’s concept is simple – quit the things that you can’t be exceptional at and pursue the things you think you can be exceptional at, even when the pursuit becomes tiresome and difficult. He refers to that time when things seem too hard as “the dip.” This is undeniably good marketing, as I’ve already started to think of that point where things start to get hard as the dip, and I tell myself to push through.
According to Godin, anytime you start something new, like a job or a business, you are filled with enthusiasm and energy to further your success. At some point, however, some of the duties of running your business or doing your job will become something of a grind. They’ll become difficult. You won’t feel inspired every second of every day. You won’t feel invigorated. You might feel like quitting. This is the dip. He offers marathons as an example. No one quits at mile 25, when you can see the finish line and hear everyone urging you on. Most people, in fact, quit at mile 20, when you’ve run a long way and feel like you physically can’t push through.
Of course, Godin says that sometimes you should quit. He says you should quit if you can’t be the best in the world at whatever it is you’re trying to do. Of course, both “best” and “world” are subjective terms in this context. If you’re looking to go to the best barber, you’re world is limited to someone in your town or immediate area. Best is limited to whatever criteria you assign it. Best might mean the quickest, or friendliest, or the person most highly recommended to you by friends and family. If you can’t see yourself being the best in your field, then you should quit immediately.
Godin gives us a couple more clever phrases to refer to where were at in what we’re trying to do: the cul-de-sac and the cliff. The cul-de-sac refers to where you’re at when you realize that you can’t be the best in the world in your field. It’s basically when you can’t go any higher – a dead end job. The cliff occurs when you can’t quit something until you fall off a cliff. Godin doesn’t really go into this with very much detail. The only example he gives are cigarettes. Cigarettes are addictive, he says, and the more you smoke, the more addicted you get. This addiction rises continually until eventually, you get sick from emphysema and die. That’s his example for the cliff. I personally don’t see how that example translates into many other situations – and Godin admits that it’s rare.
The key, then, is to be able to distinguish what situation you’re in. Are you in the dip, in which case you should keep working diligently, or are you in the cul-de-sac, in which case you should abandon your current plight and search for greener pastures. That’s the question. It’s something you’ll have to figure out on your own.
The book is light on hard data. It doesn’t prove anything, but it does offer lots of good examples. One is General Electric (GE). When Jack Welch took over GE, he demanded that they abandon any business division in which they couldn’t be one or two in, even if they were profitable divisions. Why? Because the value in being number one is enormous. Almost 30% of all the ice cream sold in the United States was vanilla. The runner up was chocolate, with less than 8%. To the victor go the spoils. Things tend to go this way. Number 1s tend to win big. Top movies on an opening weekend tend to gross far more than the second place ones.
So how can we deal with the dip? According to Godin, the key is to decide under what circumstances it makes sense to quit. Don’t decide during the dip, because that’s often exactly when you’ll want to quit the most but need to work the hardest. Overall, I think it was an excellent book. Unfortunately, I read it directly after reading Malcolm Gladwell, and I missed having so many assertions being backed up with data, but that doesn’t change the fact that I enjoyed the book. It’s definitely worth the minimal time investment (for many people 1 hour or less) that it would require to read it. If you’ve read it, or any of Godin’s other books, please let me know what you thought by email or in the comments. Thanks for reading.
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