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As we engage in the practice, we begin to trust the practice. Not that it will produce the desired outcome each time, but simply that it’s our best available option.
Relieved of this easily measured outcome, I could focus on the practice alone.
At some point, the professional has to bring home the fish.
But the catch is the side effect of the practice itself.
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.
Our world is long on noise and short on meaningful connections and positive leadership.
an easy test for manipulation:
if the people you’re interacting with discover what you already know, will they be glad that they did what you asked them to?
Artists have a chance to make things better by maki...
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Industrialists seek to make what’s requested, and to do it ever cheaper and faster.
Art lives in culture and culture exists because we’re actively engaging with each other.
Ideas shared are ideas that spread, and ideas that spread change the world.
The fifth hammer is you, when you choose the practice and trust yourself enough to create.
Nostalgia for a future that hasn’t happened yet is a modern affliction.
There’s nothing that we can do to ensure that tomorrow turns out exactly as we hope it will.
choose to take our chance, to speak up, and to contribute.
The fastest sailboat direction is beam or close reach, heading perpendicular or even toward the wind.
We make a difference in the world when we seek to make a difference.
True learning (as opposed to education) is a voluntary experience that requires tension and discomfort (the persistent feeling of incompetence as we get better at a skill).
Discomfort engages people, keeps them on their toes, makes them curious.
Our practice is to bring a practical empathy to the work, to realize that in our journey to create change, we’re also creating discomfort.
But in a world that’s changing faster than ever, that distinct skill set and point of view are precisely what we need from you.
The same instinct to match whatever narrative is dominant pushes us to fit in instead of to stand out.
Fitting into someone else's narrative is fooling yourself, not trusting yourself
It amplifies our fear at the same time it diminishes our contribution.
“Here, I Made This”
It didn’t used to exist, and now it does. This is peculiar, not generic.
These four words carry with them generosity, intent, risk, and intimacy.
You’re here to make change. We need to make things better, and we need someone to lead us.
Time is fleeting and you only get today once.
embrace the fact that you can, in fact, trust the process and repeat the practice often enough to get unstuck.
focus on the few, not everyone.
Your audience
bring intention to your work, making every step along the way count.
The process compounds over time with amount of intention
if we trust ourselves and seek to make change happen, hiding can no longer be an option.
in order to say no with consistency and generosity, we need to have something to say “yes” to.
Our commitment to the practice is the source of that yes.
And it comes with a juicy deniability, a way
to spend an hour or two without having to own too much.
Generous means choosing to focus on the change we seek to make.
The people-pleasing power of an indiscriminate yes is a form of resisting the yes of shipping our real work.
When you own your agenda, you own it.
you’re responsible, without excuses about why you might be hiding or explanation...
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a self-trusting no at all costs becomes yet another way to hide.
the most generous (and frightening) thing you can do: trusting yourself enough to show up and ship the work. The right work to the right people for the right reason.
doing something that might not work means exactly that . . . that it might not work.
the quest for certainty undermines everything we set out to create.
If you are using outcomes that are out of your control as fuel for your work, it’s inevitable that you will burn out.
If she were measuring her practice based on a vote that is out of her control, she’d be basing her decisions on incorrect data.
it’s something we can always choose. The practice is there for us, whether or not we feel confident.
Resistance focuses obsessively on bad outcomes because it wants to distract us from the work at hand.
