Book Summary of The Dip by Seth Godin
The Dip by Seth Godin looks at the inevitable down turn that anything we do eventually goes through. This ‘Dip’ occurs as we make our way past the first easy phase of any project and begin to face, and realise, the difficulties that lay ahead. By preparing for this dip ahead of time we can greatly influence our chances of successfully passing through it.
Related Book Summaries:
The War Of Art – Steven Pressfield
Quotes from The Dip by Seth Godin:
A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner.
The Dip creates scarcity; scarcity creates value.
Never quit something with great long-term potential just because you can’t deal with the stress of the moment.
The Dip Book Summary Notes
The Inevitable Dip
No matter what it is you try your hand at in life, whether as apart of your job or recreation, you’ll eventually experience the dip.
The dip is a period of time when whatever your working on transitions from the easy beginner stages to the harder slog of the intermediate ones.
Occasionally the dip can even be used as a screening tool, higher education facilities do it all the time. By putting even one of the ‘harder’ subjects within the first year of a degree and using it as a prerequisite, the university can create an artificial bottleneck. A bottleneck designed to weed out those who will quit when they reach the dip and force the rest to get through it to continue on. Particularly useful for desirable fields like medicine and law.
Some companies use similar tactics when hiring. Scheduling multiple interviews or asking for certain things alongside your application can cause some people to quit, simply because they can’t be bothered.
Zipf’s Law
Zipf’s Law, usually used for assessing the frequency of words spoken in a language has some interesting takeaways which can be applied to the concept of the dip. The largest of which is that there is usually a significant gap between first and second place in the data.
The author illustrates this point well using sales data of ice cream. In the US 30% of all ice cream sales are accounted for by the most popular flavour, vanilla, while second place goes to chocolate which only accounts for 10% of the market. A staggering drop between first and second place! Chocolate would need to roughly triple its sales to close the gap on vanilla.
Holding the number one spot also tends to come with outsized rewards as well. But to get there requires a great deal of time and effort dealing with the dip that accompanies the road to number one.
Quitting and Specialisation
Being good at everything is usually not as good as being great at just one thing. Success in a given field is often tied to specialisation.
Specialisation early can have significant advantages in your life, for example many people struggle with the choice of what to pursue in life. If you are already specialised then that makes this choice far simpler, continue down the path your already and work towards becoming that number one in your field.
Becoming specialised also requires mastering the skill of knowing when and what to quit. People are taught to stick to projects they begin and see them through, the truth is if it’s not furthering your goals, sometimes it’s better to strategically quit to free up some more of your time. This goes double if the pursuit or project is particularly time heavy.
Everyone Dips
But at least you know to expect it. Knowledge like this gives you the ability to plan ahead and make preparations for your coming dip.
The dip you experience is unique to your field or passion. Some common examples include; the dip of a business that outgrows a home operation, or a business that expands and needs to increase its workforce.
Personal projects and even relationships will all experience dips as well. Learning a new language is a prime example. It will start of simple and relatively easy but after the initial few weeks or months of learning, the complexity will pick up and take years to become conversational or fluent.
Push Through
Success would be meaningless without the hard work required to get there. The resistance you feel along the path of learning something is what makes the thing valuable to begin with. Not everyone can or will push through.
Meeting and overcoming obstacles is what strengthens our abilities and makes the learning process rewarding. Iron sharpens iron.
Surviving the dip and pushing through will keep you from settling for mediocrity. The dip will help you to push towards and eventually reach your potential.
