Awesome post by Seth Godin below. Taste matters and so does seeing things before other people. It was obvious to me that Ben's Friends was working magic about a month into the project. That gave me the confidence to invest tons of energy and some cash into it.
The important thing though, is to trust yourself when you see it. I can't emphasize this enough. Maybe you'll be wrong, but I doubt it. If something inside of you is telling you it will work, it probably will. The hard part is starting.
The important thing though, is to trust yourself when you see it. I can't emphasize this enough. Maybe you'll be wrong, but I doubt it. If something inside of you is telling you it will work, it probably will. The hard part is starting.
"This is endemic in the book business, which resolutely refuses to understand the actual P&L of most of the books it publishes. As a result, there are plenty of editors who continue to overpay for the wrong books, because their wow isn't the market's wow.
In his book Money Ball, Michael Lewis wrote about how virtually every single scout and manager in baseball was wrong about what makes a great baseball player. They had the wrong radar, the wrong wow. When statistics taught a few teams what the real wow was, the balance of power shifted.
By definition, just about every great idea resonates early with those that have better radar than those that don't. The skill, then, is to expose yourself often enough, learn enough and fail enough that you get to say wow before the competition does."
