The words in this cartoon come from my friend, Seth Godin, and his crowd-funded book, “What To Do When It’s Your Turn”.
Basically, the book is a meditation on doing stuff that matters, and as the drawing implies, it comes with a heavy burden. Nobody ever said it would be easy (But that’s what gives it its edge, right?).
Seth has a great little video on why he wrote the book, just click on the link above to see it. What interests me about Seth book is not what’s inside per se- you can already get that kinda stuff for free every day on his blog, after all.
What I like is how he designed the book not only to be read, but to be passed around to other people afterwards. Easy on the eye and fun to read, designed to be digested in bite-size pieces, the pages are graphically more like a magazine than like a dense marketing tome.
I would call this work a “Change Object”: an object you give to people in order to affect change.
i.e. It’s not the thing that’s valuable, it’s the change it causes that’s valuable, the fact that it’s being shared is valuable.
Other things can be change objects, not just books: Pamphlets, posters, t-shirts, swag…
And yes, of course, gapingvoid art has always been about that, from Day One.
I think the point Seth is really good at getting across, is that success does not start from being smarter or better or more talented than other people.
Success starts out as an emotion, something deep and dark and mysterious and personal and very, very existential.
And from that, everything furthers.
