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Review: "The Dip" by Seth Godin


If you think you've seen this book before, you're probably not mistaken. It's not a new book at all. It came out in 2007, and the first time I read this book was actually back in 2011. For personal reasons, I chose to pick it back up, and I'll talk about that in a separate post.

Having been five years since my last read, I'm glad I dug this back up. It's a pretty teeny book, as you can see in the image below. A person can definitely breeze through the entire book in an hour or two.

Anyway, this is a book review! How does this book hold up in the nine years since it's initial release? Let's get into it.


Comparing the size of the book to a pop can. It's pretty small!

EASY ACCESSIBILITY

Before jumping into the precise content of the book, I can't go without remarking about Godin's writing style. This book is very well structured and accessible for readers of almost any educational range. I appreciate this because I'll be the first to raise my hand and say that I'm a dumb reader. It takes me forever to read books, and this one took me no time at all. If you need to set it down to do something else, Godin provides plenty of opportunities for you to easily jump back in.

A LESSON IN OPPORTUNITY COST AND SUNK COST

Even though those two terms never come up at all within the book, this is really what's at the heart of The Dip. One of my favorite quips in the world comes from Dr. Drew Pinsky:

Reality on reality's terms.

Godin embraces that idea here. We all have a finite capability about ourselves, so we have to choose what we can and cannot do. And the reality also is that we now live in a world where the best of the best are chosen above the rest. (Hey... That rhymed!)

Without sharing all the excellent pieces of advice found in the book, one that stood out to me was the nature of our public school system. Our schools teach that we need to be well rounded in everything, but that's not how reality works. We can't be well rounded in everything, so we need to focus on being the best at one or two things.

This is where Godin's idea of "The Dip" comes in. At some point in all our journeys, we will venture down a path that will inevitably get difficult at a point. Godin challenges readers to either lean into "the dip" and become the best you can be or quit. Immediately. If it's not working out, it's time to move on, which is basically the concept behind opportunity cost. The longer we try sticking with something we just know isn't going to work out, the more time and resources we wast, which is basically the concept behind sunk cost.

(Quick side note: I've written a post about those concepts before, so if you're interested in learning more about sunk cost and opportunity cost, check out that post here.)

A CAUTIOUS RECOMMENDATION

This is an excellent little book, but I very cautiously recommend it to folks. Not because Godin's content is bad at all, but I fear people misconstruing his words. Godin makes note many times through the book to not make "the Dip" the reason you're getting out of something. When times get tough, your first thought shouldn't be, "I gotta get out of here", especially when the alternative is nothing. (I'll talk about this more in my next post.)

That note aside, I totally forgot how much gold can be found in this little book. In my book rating system, I note that I purposefully try to reserve that top recommendation (Summit It) for only the best books. I attempted to rationalize why you shouldn't read it right away, but given it's brevity and value it provides in its mere 80 pages, it would be wrong to give The Dip nothing less than the best recommendation. Go check it out. Now.


Disclaimer: I read this book from cover-to-cover prior to writing this review. For more information on how LYEATT reviews its books, check out the post behind this link.
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