Seth Godin is the master of motivation

Submitted by Patrick Grote on Wed, 10/08/2008 - 12:16pm.

I've spoken about luck as a factor in success before, but Seth Godin has a post today entitled, "Is effort a myth?" that discusses this thought.

In Seth's piece he takes it a step further and very cleverly gets people to think about the effort they put towards things. While some of Seth's pieces int he past have been, well, part of lala land, this one is actually right.

Why?

I've done it and it works.

Seth's list includes grabbing 2 hours of time and doing the following:

Exercising
Reading
Thank you notes
Learning
Volunteering
Blogging
Public speaking

Don't pay attention to the specific items. They are just Seth's way of setting you up for the payoff and the understanding of what is coming.

Seth says:

It's entirely possible that this won't be sufficient, and you will continue to need better luck. But it's a lot more likely you'll get lucky, I bet.

Bingo. You make your own luck through the effort you put forth. The key is to always be efforting at what is important to you and your family.

As I said in my last post on luck:

So does luck play a part in success? Sure does. But there are two kinds of luck. One where things happen to you out of the blue and the other where you're laying the ground work for things to happen to you out of the blue.

Seth is very, very good at making points by changing focus. This is another great example of his motivating techniques.