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by
Seth Godin
Read between
October 16 - October 18, 2020
The job is what you do when you are told what to do. The job is showing up at the factory, following instructions, meeting spec, and being managed. Someone can always do your job a little better or faster or cheaper than you can. The job might be difficult, it might require skill, but it’s a job.
Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people. I call the process of doing your art “the work.” It’s possible to have a job and do the work, too. In fact, that’s how you become a linchpin. The job is not the work.
Can the time you spend at work be the place you give gifts, create connections, invent, and find joy?
The job is not your work; what you do with your heart and soul is the work.
Until they make the choice to be artists, they sadly float along.
Organizations under pressure are stuck because their pain makes it hard for them to believe in the future.
Passion is caring enough about your art that you will do almost anything to give it away, to make it a gift, to change people. Part of the passion is having the persistence and resilience to change both your art and the way you deliver it. Passion for your art also means having a passion for spreading your art. This means being willing to surrender elements that you are in love with in order to help the other parts thrive and spread. And at the same time, passion means having enough connection to your art that you’re not willing to surrender the parts that truly matter.
Deciding what to leave out and what to insist on is part of your art.
Art, at least art as I define it, is the intentional act of using your humanity to create a change in another person.
Why aren’t all waiters amazingly great at being waiters? I think it’s fear, and I think we’re even afraid to talk about this sort of fear. Fear of art. Of being laughed at. Of standing out and of standing for something. Now, though, the economy is forcing us to confront this fear. The economy is ruthlessly punishing the fearful, and increasing the benefits to the few who are brave enough to create art and generous enough to give it away.
“Creativity is an instinct to produce.”
You can’t ship if you’re far outside the box.
Artists think along the edges of the box, because that’s where things get done. That’s
As we’ll see, the greatest shortage in our society is an instinct to produce. To create solutions and hustle them out the door. To touch the humanity inside and connect to the humans in the marketplace.
Saturday Night Live goes on each week, ready or not. The show is live, and it’s on Saturday. No screwing around about shipping. There are no do-overs, no stalls, no delays. Sometimes the show suffers, of course, but on balance, it’s the shipping (built right into the name) that actually makes the show work.
What It Means to Ship The only purpose of starting is to finish, and while the projects we do are never really finished, they must ship. Shipping means hitting the publish button on your blog, showing a presentation to the sales team, answering the phone, selling the muffins, sending out your references. Shipping is the collision between your work and the outside world.
Why is shipping so difficult? I think there are two challenges and one reason: The challenges: 1. Thrashing 2. Coordination And the reason: The resistance.
ship. Thrash late and you introduce bugs. Professional creators thrash early.
The reason that start-ups almost always defeat large companies in the rush to market is simple: start-ups have fewer people to coordinate, less thrashing, and more linchpins per square foot.
The Resistance: Your Lizard Brain The lizard brain is hungry, scared, angry, and horny. The lizard brain only wants to eat and be safe. The lizard brain will fight (to the death) if it has to, but would rather run away. It likes a vendetta and has no trouble getting angry.
Daemon is a Greek term (the Romans called it a “genius”).
The whole thing is called the basal ganglia, and there are two almond-shaped bits in everyone’s brain. Scientists call these the amygdala, and this mini-brain apparently takes over whenever you are angry, afraid, aroused, hungry, or in search of revenge.
This is part metaphor, part biology. The lizard brain is here to keep you alive; the rest of your brain merely makes you a happy, successful, connected member of society.
Quick oversimplified biology lesson: Here are four of the major systems in your brain.
As you go down the list, each system becomes more civilized but less powerful: 1. Brain Stem—breathing and other unconscious survival functions 2. Limbic System—the lizard brain. Anger and revenge and sex and fear. 3. Cerebellum—coordination and motor control 4. Cerebrum—the newest and most sophisticated part of our brain, and also the one that is always overruled by the other three parts. There are four lobes to the cerebrum, and their functions are the stuff to be proud of:
Of course, the resistance loves school. If school is about obedience, then you can be soothed by thinking that more obedience is better work, and the resistance is fine with that. If school is about fitting in, the resistance happily agrees. If school is about postponing the day you have to stand up in front of the world and put yourself at risk, the resistance would like to stay there forever.
Successful people are successful for one simple reason: they think about failure differently.
You’ve probably guessed what happens when you have a great backup plan: You end up settling for the backup.
A well-defined backup plan is sabotage waiting to happen. Why push through the dip, why take the risk, why blow it all when there’s the comfortable alternative instead? The people who break through usually have nothing to lose, and they almost never have a backup plan.
When someone says to me, “I don’t have any good ideas . . . I’m just not good at that,” I ask them, “Do you have any bad ideas?”
One way to become creative is to discipline yourself to generate bad ideas.
If you’re a genius, after all, then you need to deliver genius-quality results.
The freedom of the new kind of work (which most of us do, most of the time) is that the tasks are vague and difficult to measure.
the guys who don’t fit in, who don’t follow the score, who know the rules but break them. They are artists. Many others have been indoctrinated by the system and frightened by the resistance into following instructions.
Making the resistance happy is not the same as succeeding.
When you were a kid, beautiful art—questions, curiosity, and spontaneity—poured out of you.
It turns out that the three biological factors that drive job performance and innovation are social intelligence, fear response, and perception.
Public speaking brings all three together.
Where Is the Fear?
Don’t listen to the cynics. They’re cynics for a reason.
Here are some signs that the lizard brain is at work:
Don’t ship on time. Late is the first step to never. Procrastinate, claiming that you need to be perfect. Ship early, sending out defective ideas, hoping they will be rejected. Suffer anxiety about what to wear to an event. Make excuses involving lack of money. Do excessive networking with the goal of having everyone like you and support you. Engage in deliberately provocative behavior designed to ostracize you so you’ll have no standing in the community. Demonstrate a lack of desire to obtain new skills. Spend hours on obsessive data collection. (Jeffrey Eisenberg reports that “79 percent of
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“I’m doing this because of the resistance.” “My lizard brain is making me anxious.” “I’m angry right now because being angry is keeping me from doing my work.”
the closer you get to achieving the breakthrough your genius has in mind, the stronger the wind will blow and the harder the resistance will fight to stop you.
Eating ice cream is easy. Making something that matters is hard.
Anxiety, on the other hand, is dangerous paralysis. Anxiety is the exaggeration of the worst possible what-if, accompanied by self-talk that leads to the relentless minimization of the actual odds of success.
Reality is the best reassurance of all.
If you can’t teach the world a lesson, accept it, don’t get attached to a different outcome.
When you haven’t set up a judge and jury for your work, you get to do art that doesn’t alert the resistance.
Permission Marketing.
