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Seth Gobin’s booklet ‘The Dip’ is about the moment of frustration that precedes any creative effort. The concept may not be new but its explanation in intuitive terms is The Dip’s main merit.
The dip is only one of the possible lifecycles of a project. The booklet introduces 2 further curves, the ‘cul-de-sac’ (or dead-end) and the cliff. It’s sometimes not easy to distinguish between these 3. For example, e-mail marketing may be on a cliff curve, heading for disaster after the initial euphoria. Or it may be merely going through a dip.
Two further ideas make The Dip an interesting book. First the concept that giving up is not always bad. In fact, having the courage to strategically quit dead-end projects is necessary. Strategic quitting should not be confused with emotional quitting while going through the dip. In this sense, the book embodies an idea of focus, which is also a central message in other books such as ‘Good to Great’ and ‘Made to Stick’, and seems to be emerging as a mainstream concept in management literature.
The second concept is that deeper and longer dips make a project more worthwhile, since it becomes more difficult for copycats. Owning such project after the dip puts you in a very comfortable position.
With 80 pages – pocket size, the booklet reads in a few hours, and is designed to be viral – pass it on to colleagues.
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