Nick Pateras | The Dip
BOOK REVIEW
The Dip – Seth Godin
An agonizingly vapid effort on professional guidance, its triviality dulled only by its brevity
As much as I am generally an admirer of Godin as a thought leader, The Dip must be reprimanded as a sorry effort to proffer career-related instruction. This 70-page book resembles a lazy endeavor to capitalize on a well-earned reputation in business writing.
Godin begins by positing the value of ‘strategic quitting’, insisting that, contrary to the popular cliché, winners do quit but distinguish when it’s right to do so versus when it’s better to stay the course. He introduces The Dip as this paramount moment of decision: it represents the slog between starting and mastery, the tell-all phase between early fun and real accomplishment. Because it necessarily involves thankless work, it’s easy to succumb to the notion that mere survival signifies success, yet true achievement arrives for those who take the opposite approach and double their energies to conquer The Dip.
"Persistent people are able to visualize the idea of light at the end of the tunnel when others can't see it. At the same time, the smartest people are not imagining light when there isn't any."
For this, I applaud Godin. The attempt to resuscitate individuals from their hypnotized state of treading water is well-intentioned; however, the book is devoid of examples that illustrate what this might look like in practicality, and adopts a patronizing overtone not uncommon in self-help literature. Most offensively, the reader is left to question what new information was actually presented, given the omnipresence of platitudes such as Godin’s advice to not make a consequential decision hastily.
This work is symptomatic of the demise in quality demanded of an author once he has established himself as a commercial success. Publishers would do well to maintain a higher standard of quality throughout the manuscript review and approval process.
-NP, February 2017