Words of Wisdom from Seth Godin

Pick Yourself 

Authority?You want the authority to create, to be noticed, and to make a difference? You're waiting for permission to stand up and speak up and ship?
Sorry. There's no authority left.

...Our cultural instinct is to wait to get picked. To seek out permission, authority, and safety that come from a publisher or a talk-show host or even a blogger who says, "I pick you."
Once you reject that impulse and realize that no one is going to select you - that Prince Charming has chosen another house in his search for Cinderella - then you can actually get to work.  

...Once you realize that there are problems waiting to be solved, once you realize that you have all the tools and all the permission you need, then opportunites to contribute abound. The opportunity is not to have your resume picked from the pile but to lead. 

... No one is going to pick you. Pick yourself. 

How much responsibility are you willing to take before it's given to you?

The Math of Self-Selection 

We've all seen the music industry fall apart. Even if you're not a musician, it's worth considering the implications when the connection revolution permits a musician to bypass the label and pick herself.
According to Jeff Prince at TuneCore, the math of before and after the revolution in the music business looks like this: 

Before the revolution:Virtually all musicians aren't picked by a label and are invisible nonentities.
Of those picked, 98 percent fail in the marketplace.
Of the remaining 2 percent, less than half a percent ever receive a single royalty check as a result of their recorded music. Ever.
So we have a world where the odds of being signed are close to zero and the odds of getting a check as a result of your sales, even if you are signed, is even closer to zero. 

After the revolution:A musician who sells two (two!) copies of a song on iTunes makes more money than she would have earned from a record label for selling an entire CD for seventeen dollars.
There are more musicians making more music being heard by more people and earning more money than ever before.
Now, multiply what happened to music by a million. Multiply it by consulting, coaching, and design. Multiply it by manufacturing, speaking, and nonprofits. Multiply it by whatever it is you care enough to do.
That's what after looks like.

 (The Icarus Deception by Seth Godin, pp. 48-50)