The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly?

by Seth Godin

Don’t think! Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.

—Ray Bradbury

Buddhists call it prajna—accepting reality as it occurs instead of interpreting it as part of our ongoing narrative.

When you’re wrong, the instinct is to blame the universe, not your worldview. We rarely want to surrender our framework for how things work or question our assumptions. Instead, we rail against fate or chalk it up to random noise. Instead, every misjudgment is a chance to revisit and hone our ability to notice the underlying needs in the market, the forces at work in success and failure.

You can’t accurately see until you abandon your worldview.

At some point, we stop seeing patterns and start looking for shortcuts. We profile, believing our own shortcuts to be correct, and so everything gets a name.

We profile because it speeds things up, but mostly we profile because it’s safer. We don’t have to risk experiencing things if we can merely remind ourselves of previous experiences. Not only that, but if we preprocess our reactions to things already labeled, we don’t have to reconsider our plans.

Rarely do we see the world as it is. Most of the time we are so busy compartmentalizing, judging, and ignoring what we can’t abide that we see almost nothing. We don’t see opportunities. We fail to see pain. And most of all, we refuse to see the danger in doing nothing.

If a piece of art in the marketplace is working to change things and you don’t know why, ask a colleague to explain it to you. If people are listening to or watching or buying something

and you don’t get it, inquire as to why. If a blog post or a novel or a strategy makes no sense to you, ask someone who knows.

Learn to see through their eyes. Why does this br...

The goal isn’t to adopt a few new pattern rules or to memorize some new labels. The goal is to have so many pattern rules and so many labels and be aware of so many worldviews that they swirl together and allow you to become naive all over again.

To be naive is to abandon your hard-earned worldview. It means seeing the world without prejudice and accepting it as it is, as opposed to the way you’re expecting it to be.

Learning how to make things turns you from a spectator into a participant, from someone at the mercy of the system to someone who is helping to run the system.

The artist soon sees that the only voice worth embracing is the muse. Learn your field, of course. Excel in domain knowledge. Have empathy for your customers, and care deeply about how your work will affect them. Yes, yes, and yes. But . . . But make what you will make. Not in anticipation of or dependence on the applause of others, and not because you are totally entangled in the results. No, make it because you are committed to making it. The commitment works because you can be sure of your intent, sure of your skills, and sure of your compassion for those who will encounter what you make.

To the industrialist, the product is the product, the transaction is the transaction. Caveat emptor. It’s yours; deal with it. To the artist, to the human who values outcomes and connections, caring enough to call is part of the art.

It’s possible that you have an engineering problem. If you do, go solve it. If you have an artistic challenge, though, quit looking for the right answer.

The people with more leverage than you don’t work any harder than you do. They’ve hired people to do that. No, the people with more leverage than you do are making better art.

way, “It’s best to get as many people as possible into one room. And then go somewhere else.”

The meeting is a temporary collection of people waiting for someone to take responsibility so everyone else can go back to work.

The power is shifting, fast, from those who provide things that are no longer scarce to those who invent art that leads to connection.

The industrial economy won’t disappear, but the agenda will increasingly be set by those who make connection, not widgets.

commitment to the path of making a difference. Your opinion about a particular employee’s new idea is not nearly as important as how you act in the face of the things he does that don’t work or might not work.

This is a group loosely based on the classic Mastermind idea created by Napoleon Hill. Find exactly three other artists—who work in different fields, who

come from different backgrounds, who pursue different goals—and connect with one another about the process of your art. The object of this group isn’t to help you see better or make better art. The object is to remind you of your commitment and to push you to make your art more original, personal, and successful. When you know that you need to meet every two weeks and look a respected artist in the eye and tell her what you did (or didn’t) make, it will raise your game.

It’s so much easier to live a life in the shadows, where you never have to deal with either impostor syndrome or rejection. You never have to confront the fraudulent feeling of being called talented or the horror of being recognized as a fraud. So much easier to hide.

Success can be just as fraught with danger as failure, because it opens more doors and carries more responsibility.

Complaining is stupid. Either act or forget. —Stefan Sagmeister

But there is always an alternative. In the idea-driven connection economy, the cost of experiments is lower than ever, the ability to coordinate is high, and the impact of being right is huge.

The magic of Steve Jobs wasn’t in being right. It was in being sure.

The marketer spams a mailing list again and again because it’s easier than treasuring the attention of the audience for the long haul.

For the marketer, the freelancer, and the entrepreneur, the challenge is to reset your comfort level, to be okay with the undone, with the cycle of never ending. We were trained to finish our homework, our peas, and our chores. Today we’re never finished, and that’s okay. It’s a dance, not a grind.

“I don’t have enough experience to have an opinion.”

Really? You came to the meeting, to the class, to the concert and you refuse to think? Or to share what you’re thinking?

Box 5 was the question “What am I afraid of?”

A talented executive coach can change your life. A coach can certainly pay for herself in no time. And yet few of the people who would benefit end up hiring one. Why? Because it involves asking about box 5. We don’t want to put ourselves at risk of being seen as arrogant or acting with hubris, because the shame of being seen as a fraud lurks right around the corner.

When There Is No Right Answer . . . then anything you do is open to criticism.

A problem is a chance for you to do your best. —Duke Ellington

One of the lizard’s most pernicious tactics is to push you to fall in love with the impossible project, with the impossible dream, with the worthy but ultimately doomed mission.

The gadfly, on the other hand, is in love with his role as an underdog who is not responsible for much and in fact shies away from the compromises that would ultimately lead to real impact.

David Puttnam,

“It is more acceptable to fail in conventional ways than in unconventional ways. And its corollary: The reward for succeeding in unconventional ways is less than the risk of failing in unconventional ways. In short, you can screw up with impunity so long as you screw up like everybody else.”

Infinite games, on the other hand, are played for the privilege of playing. The purpose of an infinite game is to allow the other players to play better. The goal of your next move is to encourage your fellow game players to make their next moves even better.

Artists need significant reassurance that they have chosen a worthy path and that you have their back. But reassurance about the work itself must come from within.

The best question you can ask an artist is “How is this going to work?”

The resistance wants to be reassured. It wants a testable plan. It wants to know that before it endures the pain, it is guaranteed the prize at the end.

Angela understood that her best asset wasn’t the secrets of what she’d learned; it was the guts to do the next thing. So she paid her secrets forward, put them into the infinite game of learning, and learned more in exchange.