Seth Godin

I did think about changing the title of this post to “My Man, Seth Godin” but that may have come across as strange and awkward, plus, he really needs no further embellishment to his name to make you want to keep reading.

Three things I want to share about Seth – this is going to be short and sweet!

1. Most important!  Read his education manifesto.  Seriously.  He has lovingly prepared in in pretty much any format you could possibly desire.  I would like him to read it aloud to me (not an option at this point) but you can have an onscreen version, html version, printable edition, plus multiple e-reader editions and a few other goodies thrown in for good measure!  His work is good.  Understatement. Awesome.  Really thought provoking in so many different areas.  I found it so easy to read that I read it twice in the same day!

2. When you finish reading that, read his book Linchpin.  The thing that got me reading Linchpin was a plea from Seth himself on his website after you scroll down a bit from Stop Stealing Dreams.  He said:

If I could have every administrator, teacher and parent read just one of my books…it would be this one.

Lucky for me, I happen to have a parent at school who owns the book and loaned it to me that same afternoon.  I threw it in my bag on the last day of Snow School to read in the bus on the way to and from the mountain and that was almost enough time to finish it.  Later that night, when I had finished it, I wrote to Seth to thank him for his work.  Cool thing – he wrote back!  I know!  Awesome!   What I love about this book is that it really challenges you to ask questions like “What do I believe in?”, “What do I want to be doing?”, “How can doing what I want to do also help others?”.  It is great.  Read it.

3. Transforming speech or text to graphics is hugely popular these days.  I experienced it first hand as a participant at the NAIS Annual Conference.  Whilst people were giving their address, artists were off to the side transforming their words and ideas into works of art the size of a bed sheet!  This trend continued at the SXSW conference via Ogilvy Notes.  They went a step further and printed out copies for participants to pick up the next day.  A Facebook group about Stop Stealing Dreams was started and one of the members posted the visual summary (above) as a graphic summary of the manifesto.  That person was Lynne Cazaly  – a creative from Melbourne, Australia who does this for a living.

Here is a video of how the live transformation of verbal to visual works via Image Think who were hard at work during SXSW:

This whole new ‘craze’ of drawing what we are saying and thinking in pictures makes me realize why I love the new app Draw Something.  A word guessing game, players pick a level one, two or three word and take their turn to draw it for their partner.  Gold coins are your reward if they are able to guess it. Aside from the spoil sports who simply write the word instead of drawing it, it is actually very cool to see how different people’s brains visualize different things.  Give it a go – I am always up for a game!