The Practice: Shipping Creative Work

by Seth Godin

It’s the choice to do something for long-term reasons, not because we’re having a tantrum.

Inauthentic means effective, reasoned, intentional. It means it’s not personal, it’s generous.

Determine who it’s for.

Learn what they believe, what they fear, and what they want.

Be prepared to describe the change you...

Care enough to commit to making that change.

Ship work that resonates with the people it’s for.

Once you know whom it’s for and w...

watch and learn to determine whether your interve...

Re...

Credentialing is a form of signaling, a stalling device,

This desire for external approval and authority directly undermines your ability to trust yourself, because you’ve handed this trust over to an institution instead.

When the Wizard gave the Scarecrow his diploma, he didn’t give him anything that he didn’t already have.

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

The fact that you have a degree doesn’t mean you have insight, experience, or concern.

take the opportunity that’s available to engage in the long process of earning genuine expertise, in service of making a change.

He only focused the company on what he thought Microsoft was good at.

and gave away the twenty-first century to people who were willing to fail.

precisely because the restaurant fits into an expected slot, they can challenge convention in other ways—their

Stories are real. And stories can change.

If your story isn’t working for you, you can find a better one to take its place.

To be creative is to work on the frontier, to invent the next thing, the thing for which there isn’t a playbook or a manual.

The uncertainty is the point.

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.

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

The practice is consistent, but only in intention, not in execution.

The practice reworks our narrative into something that helps us get to where we seek to go.

Our story is about how the world works, our role in it, and what might happen next.

Two questions about your narrative:

Is it closely aligned to what’s actually happening in the world?

Here’s a simple test. Ask: Do other successful people have this narrative?

Is it working? Is the narrative you use helping you achieve your goals? Because that’s what it’s for.

he begins at the beginning. But he begins.

It’s hard to get blocked when you’re moving. Even if you’re not moving in the direction that you had in mind that morning.

The infinite game is the game we play to play, not to win.

Play to keep playing.

trust ourselves enough to participate.

The marathon we don’t see is the year of lonely early-morning runs, the support groups, and the persistence of effort.

This is the practice. Get moving.

The act of creation involves touching something abundant and being eager to share it with other creators.

Everyone who is seriously engaged in the deep effort of inventing and shipping original work feels the fear.

The question is: where do you put the fear?

Forward motion is the only sort of motion that we’re interested in.

Take the situation you were handed, the lines that were uttered, the tension in the room, and then act as if “yes, and . . .”

Yes, this happened, AND I’m going to do som...

“No” is our attempt to regain control, but it means we’ve abandoned the process as we chase an outcome instead.

Improv keeps moving, so there’s no writer’s block.

When we let the ego subside and acknowledge the fear, then we’re able to say “yes, and . . .”

When we stop worrying about whether we’ve done it perfectly, we can focus on the process instead.

Take what you get and commit to a process to make it better.