V IS FOR VULNERABLE

This full-color "adult alphabet book" feels just like the picture books you grew up with. But it's not for kids; it's for you and anyone who works as hard as you do. It makes a perfect companion to The Icarus Deception, highlighting a key riff in that book and featuring illustrations by the web's favorite cartoonist, Hugh MacLeod. It captures 26 of Seth Godin's principles about treating your work as a form of art. For instance...

A is for Anxiety, which is experiencing failure in advance. Tell yourself enough vivid stories about the worst possible outcome of your work and you'll soon come to believe them. Worry is not preparation, and anxiety doesn't make you better.
C is for Commitment, which takes you from "That's a fine idea" to "It's done." Commitment is risky, because if you fail, it's on you. On the other hand, without commitment, you will fail, because art unshipped isn't art.
F is for Feedback, which can be either a crutch or a weapon. Use feedback to make your work smaller, safer and more likely to please everyone (and fail in the long run). Or use it as a lever, to further push you to embrace what you fear (and what you're capable of).
V is for Vulnerable, the only way we can feel when we truly share the art we've made. When we connect, we shift all the power and make ourselves naked in front of the person we've given the gift of our art to. We have no excuses, no manual to point to, no standard operating procedures to protect us. This is unlike any previous Godin book and makes a great gift, both for loyal fans and those who have never read him before. It will take you just a few minutes to read, but it will get under your skin. And you might find yourself handing copies to colleagues and friends. Seth Godin is the author of more than a dozen international bestsellers that have changed the way people think about marketing, leadership and change: Permission Marketing, Unleashing the Ideavirus, The Big Red Fez, Survival is Not Enough, Purple Cow, Free Prize Inside!, All Marketers are Liars, Small is the New Big, The Dip, Meatball Sundae, Tribes, Linchpin, Poke the Box, and We Are All Weird. He is also the founder and CEO of Squidoo.com and a very popular lecturer. He writes one of the most influential business blogs in the world, which is also consistently one of the 50 most popular blogs on any subject.