The Practice: Shipping Creative Work

by Seth Godin

Our world is long on noise and short on meaningful connections and positive leadership.

Here’s 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?

A scarcity mindset simply creates more scarcity, because you’re isolating yourself from the circle of people who can cheer you on and challenge you to produce more.

Kennedy grew up surrounded by insufficiency. It’s a feeling many of us have been taught to feel.

Ideas shared are ideas that spread, and ideas that spread change the world.

Nostalgia for a future that hasn’t happened yet is a modern affliction.

The easiest way to go through life is to let life go through you.

My colleague Marie Schacht differentiates between hospitality (welcoming people, seeing them, understanding what they need) and comfort (which involves reassurance, soft edges, and an elimination of tension).

But art doesn’t seek to create comfort. It creates change. And change requires tension.

Time is fleeting and you only get today once.

First, you can embrace the fact that you can, in fact, trust the process and repeat the practice often enough to get unstuck. Second, you can focus on the few, not everyone. And third, you can bring intention to your work, making every step along the way count.

Stand-up comedy is the most naked of the mass entertainments.

Writer Justine Musk reminds us that 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. The world

Generous doesn’t always mean saying yes to the urgent or failing to prioritize. Generous means choosing to focus on the change we seek to make.

And so it might be easier to stay warm in the narcissism of always saying yes.

While it’s calming to be reassured, it never lasts.

We’ve amplified a feeling of scarcity to encourage people to comply. To get them to buy more stuff (before it’s all gone), to work ever harder (because someone is going to overtake you), and to live in fear.

If you are using outcomes that are out of your control as fuel for your work, it’s inevitable that you will burn out. Because it’s not fuel you can replenish, and it’s not fuel that burns without a residue.

We don’t have to be victim to our feelings. They don’t have to arrive or leave of their own accord. We can choose to take actions that will generate the feelings we need.

For art to be generous it must change the recipient. If it doesn’t, it’s not working (yet).

More time, more cycles, more bravery, more process. More of you. Much more of you. More idiosyncrasy, more genre, more seeing, more generosity. More learning. It’s not working. (Yet.)

Positive people are more likely to enjoy the practice. They’re not wasting any time experiencing failure in advance.

You don’t need to be a toddler to design toys, or a cancer survivor to be an oncologist. Part of the work involves leaving the safety of our own perfectly correct narrative and intentionally entering someone else’s.

“It’s not for you” is the unspoken possible companion to “Here, I made this.”

There’s nothing wrong with the non-believers. They don’t have a personality disorder and they’re not stupid. They’re simply not interested in going where you’re going, not educated in the genre in which you work, or perhaps not aware of what your core audience sees. If we can’t embrace this, and if our focus is on external validation, then the journey will always be fraught.

solipsism.

That’s part of the practice. To embrace the fact that the audience isn’t wrong, you’re just not right (yet).

It’s honorable for your art to be just for you. For you to choose to create for an audience of one. But that’s not professional work, because you’re not on the hook. There’s no one to serve but you and the idea in your head.

The other route is to become a working professional, a leader, someone who chooses to ship creative work. And shipping means that it’s for someone. To commit to that path is a brave and generous act. And it puts you on the hook to see the audience clearly enough, and to...

Being accepted and admired by your specific audience is another sort of good—and for most of us, this is actually enough. I believe this is the goal of a working creative. This is the secure spot in the circle of those who matter to you. This is the ability to continue to do your work for people who care. This is where we can produce without feeding the beast of “more.”

And the last type of good, the one that distracts so many who engage in the process, is the feeling that comes from creating a monster hit. A piece of work that crosses over from the core audience to a much larger one. This is the bestseller list or the line out the door. This is the TED talk with forty million views. Chasing this elusive sort of perfection is a challenging task, because the numbers are stacked against you (many entries, few winners). It also puts a lot of focus on outcomes, instead of on the practice.

That means that because most of the time you won’t go viral, it’s worth producing work you’re proud of, even if you don’t have a hit in the end.

taking something from the prospect—their time, their attention, and ultimately, their money. That, after all, is what car dealers taught us to experience. Even if you get paid for it, sales can feel like harrowing work. Small-scale theft, all day every day.

Selling is simply a dance with possibility and empathy. It requires you to see the audience you’ve chosen to serve, then to bring them what they need.

This is why so many people have trouble with the idea of trusting themselves. Because they’re bad at selling themselves on the commitment to the process.

Our desire to please the masses interferes with our need to make something that matters.

The masses want mass entertainment, normal experiences, and the pleasure of easy group dynamics.

The masses want what the m...

We already have plenty of stuff that plea...

We’re not born to be selfish. And the economics of living in community make it clear that short-term hustle rarely benefits anyone. But when you’re flailing and looking for something (anything) to stand on, there’s pressure to choose the selfish path. To a drowning man, everyone else is a stepping-stone to safety.

It’s easy to see the absurdity of attachment when we’re talking about the weather. The thoughtful alternative is resilience. To be okay no matter how the weather turns out, because the weather happens without regard for what we need.

Our job is to be generous, as generous as we know how to be, with our work.

How often do you recommend a competitor? Authors blurb books for one another because they don’t seek to corner the market and they understand that a mindset of abundance fuels their work. Authors and other working creatives embrace the idea that not everything they offer is for everyone. The ability to eagerly suggest an alternative to your work is a sign that your posture is one of generosity, not grasping.

The first obligation, as the blogger Rohan Rajiv helps us understand, is the obligation we have to the community. Once we trust ourselves to be more than invisible cogs (and perhaps even before we do that), we incur a debt. We owe the people who fed us, taught us, connected us, believed in us. We owe the people who expect something from us.

No one owes us anything.

If we choose to do work for generous reasons, and not for reciprocity or a long con but simply because we can, we stop believing that we are owed by others.

The feeling of being owed will destroy our ability to do generous work.

That’s because working in anticipation of what we’ll get in return takes us out of the world of self-trust and back into the never-ending search for reassurance and the perfect outcome.

Art is the human act of doing something that might not work and causing change to happen. Work that matters. For people who care. Not for applause, not for money. But because we can.

Asking why teaches you to see how things got to be the way they are. Asking why also puts us on the hook—it means that we’re also open to being asked why, and it means that at some level, we’re now responsible for doing something about the status quo.