The Dip

So I went to Queens Bay’s Borders book store yesterday because bored.. nothing to do.. plus.. i was planning to find some books to read for free :-p (yeah..yeah.. so sue me..). This book that caught my attention, it is called The Dip by the marketing guru, :- Seth Godin. Following is the description of the book “ a small book that teaches when to quit(and when to stick)”. Following is the summary of the book.
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OK.. so the books starts off with a correction of an old saying which says
“Winners Never Quit and Quitters never Wins”
Well Seth says the saying is wrong because winners do quit, and quitters do win. The only thing different that any winners do is that they: -

“Quit the wrong stuff and Stick with the right stuff and have the guts to do one or the other”

1.0 Being the best in the world
Seth continues with saying that it pays to be the best in the world, and being an average joe or well rounded people is for losers.



Example: There is a typical pareto for any successful ideas or person where the being first is typically minimum double compared to others. This pareto could be describing the sales of flavours of ice cream, where vanilla will be typical #1 followed by the rest of other flavours. The book also recalls the "Zipf's Law".The essence of this concept is that people or companies who occupy the first position are in general much ahead of those behind them. Its like the progression - 1, 1/2, 1/3, ... 1/n. The difference between the first and second is quite high compared to that between the rest of them


2.0 The Three Curves
There are typical three types of results vs effort curves in initiating a business or penetrating a market.

2.1 The Dip

Almost everything in life worth doing is controlled by the dip.




2.2 Cul-de-Sac (Dead –End )
That’s as though it has hit a dead-end and cannot move upward. People who stick around with this curve generally fail to make any progress and remain where they are. Get off it fast! As the cost of investing your life to something that is not going to get any better is too high.


2.3 The Clift
This is rare, but very dangerous. This curve looks more like the Cul-De-Sac - the only difference being that, after a certain stage, the curve falls down all of a suddenly. You can’t quit until you fall.




3.0 The Dip

So what is the "Dip"? The author defines Dip as "the long slog between starting something and mastering it". The Dip curve looks somewhat like the graph below. The initial part of the curve shoots up pretty quick; but after that comes a downtrend which lasts for a longer duration compared to the initial upward movement. Once the Dip is over, the curve resumes its uptrend.

“The dip creates scarcity; scarcity creates value”

3.1 The brave thing to do is to tough it out and end up to the other side – getting the benefits of the scarcity

3.2 The mature thing to do is not even border starting, because you’re probably not even going to get through the dip

3.3 The stupid thing to do is to start, give it your best shot, waste a lot of time and money and quit at the middle of the dip

3.4 The next time you catch yourself being average, when you feel like quitting, realize that you have only two good options

Quit or Be Exceptional

4.0 Summary
All our successes are the same, and so too our failures

• We Succeed when we do something remarkable

• We Fail because we give up too soon

• We Succeed when we are the best in the world at what we do

• We Fail because we get distracted by the task we don’t have the guts to quit