The Practice: Shipping Creative Work

by Seth Godin

Creativity is a choice, it’s not a bolt of lightning from somewhere else. There’s a practice available to each of us—the practice of embracing the process of creation in service of better. The practice is not the means to the output, the practice is the output, because the practice is all we can control. The practice demands that we approach our process with commitment. It acknowledges that creativity is not an event, it’s simply what we do, whether or not we’re in the mood.

The important work, the work we really want to do, doesn’t come with a recipe. It follows a different pattern.

This practice is available to us—not as a quick substitute, a recipe that’s guaranteed to return results, but as a practice. It is a persistent, stepwise approach that we pursue for its own sake and not because we want anything guaranteed in return. The recipe for recipes is straightforward: good ingredients, mise en place, attention to detail, heat, finish. You do them in order. But when we create something for the first time, it’s not as linear, not easily written down.

At the heart of the creative’s practice is trust: the difficult journey to trust in your self, the often hidden self, the unique human each of us lives with.

When you choose to produce creative work, you’re solving a problem. Not just for you, but for those who will encounter what you’ve made.

Does It Take Courage to Be Creative? We care enough to stand as a leader, whether on the stage or behind the keyboard, and say, “Here, I made this.” For some, this moment of being judged—where we’re nothing but an imposter acting as if we belong—is overwhelming.

Creativity Is an Action, Not a Feeling Marie Schacht points out that we can’t always do much about how we feel, particularly when it’s about something important. But we can always control our actions. Your work is too important to be left to how you feel today. On the other hand, committing to an action can change how we feel. If we act as though we trust the process and do the work, then the feelings will follow. Waiting for a feeling is a luxury we don’t have time for.

Flow is a symptom of the work we’re doing, not the cause of it.

I’m not passionate about my work, what should I do? Once you decide to trust your self, you will have found your passion. You’re not born with it, and you don’t have just one passion. It’s not domain-specific: it’s a choice. Our passion is simply the work we’ve trusted ourselves to do.

This is worth deconstructing, because the strategy of “seeking your calling” gives you a marvelous place to hide. After all, who wants to do difficult work that doesn’t fulfill us? Who wants to commit to a journey before we know it’s what we were meant to do? The trap is this: only after we do the difficult work does it become our calling. Only after we trust the process does it become our passion. “Do what you love” is for amateurs. “Love what you do” is the mantra for professionals.

We live in an outcome-focused culture. A plumber doesn’t get credit for effort; he gets credit if the faucet stops leaking. A corporation is rarely judged on the long-term impact of how it treats its employees; it is judged on its earnings per share.

A short-term focus on outcomes means that we decide if a book is good by its bestseller rank, if a singer is good based on winning a TV talent show, and if a child athlete is good based on whether or not she won a trophy. Lost in this obsession with outcome is the truth that outcomes are the results of process.

Good processes, repeated over time, lead to good outcomes more often t...

message is that you haven’t been chosen, haven’t been given the right talents, and aren’t worthy of having a voice.

But you are already enough. You already have enough leverage. You already see enough. You already want to make things better. Start where you are. Start now. Find the pattern and care enough to do something about it.

Recent research estimates that 40 percent of the workforce has a job that requires innovation, human interaction, and decision making.

Imposter Syndrome Is Real It’s a sign that you’re healthy and that you’re doing important work. It means that you’re trusting the process and doing it with generosity.

Start Where You Are Identity fuels action, and action creates habits, and habits are part of a practice, and a practice is the single best way to get to where you seek to go. Before you are a “bestselling author,” you’re an author, and authors write. Before you are an “acclaimed entrepreneur,” you’re simply someone who is building something.

The practice doesn’t care when you decide to become an artist. What simply matters is that you decide. Whether or not your mom is involved in the decision.

Trust is not self-confidence. Trust is a commitment to the practice, a decision to lead and make change happen, regardless of the bumps in the road, because you know that engaging in the practice is better than hiding from it.

The career of every successful creative is part of a similar

practice: a pattern of small bridges, each just scary enough to dissuade most people. The practice requires a commitment to a series of steps, not a miracle.

Industrialists seek to make what’s requested, and to do it ever cheaper and faster. But people who have found their voice are able to help us see that life includes more than what’s requested. You’re not a short-order cook. You’re here to lead us.

One way to avoid criticism (and to distrust our own voices) is to sound like everyone else. When we mimic talking points or work hard to echo what the others have said, we’re hiding. We’re doing it with the support of the system, the one that would prefer we be a commodity, an easily replaceable cog in the factory.

We need the practical empathy of realizing that others don’t see what we see and don’t always want what we want.

You’re not offended if someone tells you that you’ve taken a wrong turn. It’s not personal and it’s not devastating. It’s simply helpful advice on how to get where you’re going.

Mindfulness is healthy, it’s professional, and it allows us to be our best self. It is also maddeningly difficult, particularly in a culture that prizes busyness over just about everything else. But mindful isn’t the opposite of busy. Mindfulness demands intention. Mindfulness is the practice of simply doing the work. Without commentary, without chatter, without fear. To simply do our work.

There is nothing authentic about the next thing you’re going to say or do or write. It’s simply a calculated effort to engage with someone else, to contribute, or to cause a result. The politician who offends everyone in the room and blows up his career may claim he was being authentic, but the choices that led to that moment were all intentional acts. This time, the actions didn’t lead to the outcome he was hoping for (or perhaps they did).

If we don’t ship the work, no change will happen. If we ship the wrong work to the wrong people, no change will happen.

Your audience doesn’t want your authentic voice. They want your consistent voice.

We can only deliver what our audience needs by being consistent, by creating our inauthentic, intentional, crafted art in a way that delivers an authentic experience to our audiences as they consume it.

Did the word “inauthentic” make you bristle? That’s how good a job the creators of the mythology of creativity have done in brainwashing us. We have lots of words for people who are proudly inauthentic. We call them professionals, champions, leaders, and heroes. It’s hard to authentically show up day after day, working hour after hour, when there’s probably something else you’d rather be doing.

to encounter a dangerous situation without blinking, to patiently persist in the face of criticism, or even to merely show up on a regular basis. But that difficult work is all inauthentic. It’s work we do precisely because we don’t feel like it in the short run. It’s the choice to do something for long-term reasons, not because we’re having a tantrum. I...

Intentional Action Has a Few Simple Elements

The truth: if a reason doesn’t stop everyone, it’s an excuse, not an actual roadblock.

I’m not provoking you to become a charlatan (or to follow one). Simply to take the opportunity that’s available to engage in the long process of earning genuine expertise, in service of making a change.

Writer’s block is a myth. Writer’s block is a choice. Writer’s block is real. And yet it’s all invented.

In an industrial world, the high-stakes marketplace requires us to be right. Every time.

Getting rid of your typos, your glitches, and your obvious errors is the cost of being in the game. But the last three layers of polish might be perfectionism, not service to your audience. Failure is the foundation of our work. The process demands that we live on the frontier. That we learn new skills, explore new audiences, and find new magic for our existing audiences. As soon as we’ve mastered an approach or technique we begin again, in search of a new and more powerful one.

But the only way to find something new is to be prepared (or even eager) to be wrong on our way to being right.

All of us have a narrative—one about who to trust, or what’s likely to happen next, or how to do our work. The practice reworks our narrative into something that helps us get to where we seek to

go.

writer’s block is simply a side effect of our narrative. It’s not an actual physical or organic

ailment, simply a story we tell ourselves, one that leads to bad work habits and persistent fear.

The most important parts of our lives are games that we can’t imagine winning.

Saturday Night Live doesn’t go on at 11:30 p.m. because it’s ready. It goes on because it’s 11:30.

We don’t ship because we’re creative. We’re creative because we ship.

You don’t need to hear from anonymous trolls, nor do you need to worry at all about the criticism from people who don’t want the sort of thing you make. All they’ve done is announce that they’re not the ones you seek to serve.

But a generous critic? Priceless. The generous critic has taken the time to regard your work, understand your intent, and then speak up. The generous critic is ready to be enrolled in your journey, is eager to go where you’d like to take them. That means you can learn something. And learning something is part of the process.

If the practice you’ve developed isn’t getting you what