Seth Godin

Who they are

Godin writes about marketing, work and organisations for a general business readership. His own site gives the broad picture: more than twenty bestselling books and a blog that he posts to daily, which the site says is read by a million people. His 2023 book The Song of Significance, published by Portfolio and Penguin Business under the subtitle A New Manifesto for Teams, is set out in an introduction and nine titled parts across 144 numbered micro-chapters. He calls it a manifesto in its own pages and says it is not a step-by-step manual. In the acknowledgements he writes that "much of the work in this book was foreshadowed in my online writing", which is a fair description of how his books and his blog relate.

In January 2010 he was promoting his book Linchpin. In an interview that month with Mixergy, titled around producing like a linchpin by understanding the lizard brain, he placed the lizard brain "near the top of your spinal cord, near the amygdala" and called it prehistoric. In a blog post of 28 January 2010, "Quieting the lizard brain", he called it "the pre-historic lump near the brain stem that is responsible for fear and rage and reproductive drive".

Key papers

Godin writes books and blog posts, not papers, and none of the writing cited here is a research study. The two pieces that matter for the lizard brain are these.

Godin, S. (2010, 28 January). "Quieting the lizard brain." Seth's Blog. The post links the lump near the brain stem to the resistance, an inner voice that urges caution, slowness and compromise. He writes that the resistance grows as a person nears finishing a project, gaining an insight or finding out what they want, and that "the lizard hates change and achievement and risk". He uses the lizard to explain why people act against their stated goals and why organisations hold excessive meetings and ship mediocre products, and he says the task is to learn to quiet it and ignore it.

Godin, S. (2010, 25 January). Interview with Mixergy, "How To Produce Like A Linchpin By Understanding Your Lizard Brain". The interview gives the same picture in speech and supplies the anatomical placement near the spinal cord and the amygdala.

Key ideas

The lizard brain as a name for resistance. In Godin's usage the lizard brain is the source of fear, anger and the pull toward the safe option. It works as a way of naming the internal obstacle to finishing and shipping work, and for a reader it can serve as a metaphor for that experience.

The anatomy behind the name. The description borrows the triune brain, Paul MacLean's model of a brain built in layers, with a reptilian complex beneath a limbic system and a neocortex. Joseph Cesario and colleagues reported in 2020 that researchers who study nervous-system evolution have long rejected the idea of newer structures added over older ones, and a 2022 study in Science comparing the brain of a bearded dragon with mouse data found no clean division of the brain into ancestral and novel areas. A 2019 review of vertebrate brain architecture found that the midbrain, hypothalamus, thalamus, basal ganglia and amygdala form shared systems that integrate emotion, cognition and motivation. The anatomy in the phrase does not hold, so the claim that a reptile layer is responsible for fear and rage is not supported.

What survives. The advice does not need the anatomy. A person can recognise that fear of shipping work is a common experience, and test whichever practices help, without a creature near the spinal cord. The marketing training that draws on the same picture, in which an old brain makes most decisions, has to be defended on tests of messages with customers.

The separate argument of The Song of Significance. The book distinguishes significance from productivity, a distinction Godin stipulates and does not test, and it should be read as an argument and not as a set of findings. See Significance Versus Productivity.

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