# The Dip - Seth Godin Created: [[2023_12_24]] 09:47 Tags: #Book #Advice #Career The Dip is a short book that is all about knowing how/when to quit. It reframes quitting from being a bad thing your coach told you to never do into something smart people know when it is the right thing to do. If you aren't willing to go through the Dip of something, then it was never worth pursuing in the first place, you never could be the best in the world at it. ![[The Dip.excalidraw.svg]] ## The Dip When you first start something, it is fun and easy to do. You rapidly learn a lot of things and feel more and more confident (see [[Dunning-Kruger]]). Then you hit a wall, that's the Dip. It is the uncanny valley to mastery. Leaning into the Dip is what leads to success, though, you have to push through it to attain true mastery. ### The cul-de-sac This is where your progress in something _flat lines_, it is a _dead-end job_, where you can _no longer grow_, you've _hit your ceiling_. ### The Cliff The Cliff is something like smoking, easier to start and easy to be hooked onto. But eventually, it cliffs off, and you lose all of your results (like lung cancer). ## The Lie of Diversification To cope with the Dip, some may try to diversify to hedge their bets. But spreading yourself thin necessarily means not going deep on the one thing that you ought to be the best at. ## Highlights [[The Dip A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (And When to Stick) - Seth Godin]] ## References - [[80 - 20 Rule]] - "The Best" receive outsized gains for their efforts in making it through the dip. - [[You have to love the work, not the end goal]] - The Dip graph is essentially the same thing I was trying to communicate with this article, where you have to actually love the day to day of the thing you are doing because if you do not, you will hit a dip and not be able to get through it because your heart was never really in it. - [[The Second Mountain - David Brooks|The Second Mountain]] - The Dip is how to get through to the second mountain of your life. They even share the same metaphor of a valley that you must cross to get to your true goal atop the next mountain. The Second Mountain is about life in general, whereas The Dip is about any skill you attempt to master. - [[The Slow Hunch]] - Progress is not made "at once" it is pushed through over time.