The Dip

Godin argues that quitting is usually the correct decision and that the failure is quitting the wrong things at the wrong time. His central distinction is between a dip and a cul-de-sac. A dip is a period of difficulty that separates people who will reach mastery from those who will not, and the difficulty is what makes the reward on the other side worth having. A cul-de-sac is a situation that does not get better regardless of effort.

His argument is that the reward for getting through a dip is disproportionate, because being the best in a defined market captures most of the value while being merely good captures very little, and the dip is what keeps most competitors out.

His prescription is to quit cul-de-sacs immediately and to quit them early, freeing resources for a dip worth entering, and to decide in advance what conditions would cause you to quit a dip, before you are inside it and reasoning under pressure. He argues that most people do the opposite: they quit dips because the difficulty is uncomfortable, and they persist in cul-de-sacs because quitting feels like failure and because the situation is not painful enough to force a decision.

The book is very short, roughly eighty pages, and states its argument without evidence. The distinction between a dip and a cul-de-sac is difficult to apply in practice, since the two look identical from inside, and Godin offers no test. The instruction to decide quitting conditions in advance is the practical content and it does not require the rest of the framework.

American marketing writer, founder of Yoyodyne and Squidoo, who has published a daily marketing blog for two decades.

Permission Marketing argued for earning attention through opt-in years before that became the default of email and content marketing, and Purple Cow made remarkability the product's job rather than the advertising budget's. The Dip supplies a decision rule for when to quit a market and when the difficulty itself is the barrier worth pushing through.

Yoyodyne, Squidoo