The Practice: Shipping Creative Work

by Seth Godin

The practice is not the means to the output, the practice is the output, because the practice is all we can control.

The practice will take you where you seek to go better than any other path you can follow.

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.

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. By putting yourself on the hook, you’re performing a generous act. You are sharing insight and love and magic. And the more it spreads, the more it’s worth to all of those who are lucky enough to experience your contribution. Art is something we get to do for other people.

Perfectionism has nothing to do with being perfect.

Attitudes are skills.

Professionals produce with intent.

Creativity is an act of leadership.

Good taste is a skill.

Passion is a choice.

Our work is about throwing. The catching can take care of itself.

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.

If you want to change your story, change your actions first. When we choose to act a certain way, our mind can’t help but rework our narrative to make those actions become coherent. We become what we do.

If we condition ourselves to work without flow, it’s more likely to arrive. It all comes back to trusting our self to create the change we seek. We don’t agree to do that after flow arrives. We do the work, whether we feel like it or not, and then, without warning, flow can arise.

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

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.

“Do what you love” is for amateurs. “Love what you do” is the mantra for professionals.

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 than lazy processes do.

The practice of choosing creativity persists. It’s a commitment to a process, not simply the next outcome on the list. We do this work for a reason, but if we triangulate the work we do and focus only on the immediate outcome, our practice will fall apart.

Decisions are good even if the outcomes aren’t. The same is true for the process of generous creativity. The process is a smart one even if the particular work doesn’t resonate, even if the art doesn’t sell, even if you are aren’t happy with the reaction from the critics. That’s because what we seek and how we create aren’t the same thing.

It’s not important that the kids developed their musical skills when they were eleven. It’s important that they developed the habit of identity. When they looked in the mirror, they saw themselves as musicians, as artists, as people who had committed to a journey. There’s nothing magic about being eleven years old. Except that it’s easier to develop an identity when you don’t have to walk away from one you’ve already developed.

There are people and organizations in our lives that we trust. How did that happen? We develop trust over time. Our interactions lead to expectations, and those expectations, repeated and supported, turn into trust. These organizations and people earn trust by coming through in the difficult moments. They’re not perfect; in fact, the way they deal with imperfection is precisely why we trust them.

The world expects that its requests will be accepted. That assignments, lunch dates, new projects, and even favors will get a yes. It’s just a small ask, the person thinks. The problem is obvious—if you spend all day hitting the ball back, you’ll never end up serving.

It’s easy for a self-focus to turn selfish. Saying no too often is a recipe for solipsism, a form of egomania that is just as selfish as the one we were trying to walk away from. Out of balance, a self-trusting no at all costs becomes yet another way to hide. If your no becomes a habit, a way to hide out, you may end up cutting ties with the very people you set out to serve. And if your no becomes too seductive, you can get comfortable there instead, never actually shipping your work, because shipping your work means that you’ll need to reenter the world with a yes.

Of my 7,500 blog posts, half of them are below average compared to the others, on any metric you’d care to measure. Popularity, impact, virality, longevity. That’s simple arithmetic. The practice embraces that simple truth. It’s all a way of understanding that if you have a practice, failure (in quotes if you wish) is part of it.

Choose to make work that matters a great deal to someone. Develop an understanding of genre, work to see your audience’s dreams and hopes, and go as far out on the edge as they’re willing to follow. Choose to be peculiar. Choose to commit to the journey, not to any particular engagement. Because you’re dancing on a frontier, it’s impossible that all of your work will resonate. That’s okay. Great work isn’t popular work; it’s simply work that was worth doing.

If there are only non-believers, the reason is simple: you’re not seeing genre the way others do. In other words, it’s not as good as you think it is—if you define “good” as work that is resonating with the people you seek to serve. That’s part of the practice. To embrace the fact that the audience isn’t wrong, you’re just not right (yet).

for you. And the second thing is making something for those you seek to connect and change. Pursuing either is fine. Pursuing both is a recipe for unhappiness, because what you’re actually doing is insisting that other people want what you want and see what you see.

Most of all, sales is about intentionally creating tension: the tension of “maybe,” the tension of “this might not work,” the tension of “what will I tell my boss . . .” Why would anyone sign up to create tension? But that’s precisely the tension that we dance with as creators. This is how we get sold on the thing we’re creating before we share it. We must sell ourselves on it first, before we can sell it to anyone else. 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.

We can spend a lot of psychic energy willing the weather to be perfect. We can spend just as much time living out the bad weather in advance, suffering ahead of time, knowing that the outcome we seek isn’t going to happen the way we want it to. We want it to work out so badly, we now need it to.

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.

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.

The rest of our process is about understanding how to become more generous. How to make more art, better art, art that’s courageous. We do this by understanding how our systems function, how our audience thinks, and how we got here. We do this by improving our craft and committing even further to our process.

The specific outcome is not the primary driver of our practice. If we obsess about the outcome, we’re back to looking for an industrial recipe, not a way to create art.

You can do it and so you must do it.

Any idea withheld is an idea taken away. It’s selfish to hold back when there’s a chance you have something to offer.

Worrying is the quest for a guarantee,

The traditional way to encourage people to contribute is to let them off the hook. Look for signs of genius. Point to the mysterious muse. Encourage people to sit quietly and let that other voice take over.

In the many conversations I’ve had with successful creatives, it sometimes gets a bit uncomfortable. Sometimes they wonder if looking directly at their source of inspiration will make it disappear. The source is simple: It’s the self. It’s us when we get out of our way. It’s us when we put our self on the hook.

Talent is something we’re born with: it’s in our DNA, a magical alignment of gifts. But skill? Skill is earned. It’s learned and practiced and hard-won.

Spend an hour a day running or at the gym. Do that for six months or a year. Done. That’s not the difficult part. The difficult part is becoming the kind of person who goes to the gym every day. And so it is with finding your voice. The tactics, the writing prompts, the kind of pencil—none of them matter compared to one simple thing: trusting yourself enough to be the kind of person who engages in the process of delivering creative work.

It’s possible (and admirable, and even heroic) to be an amateur. The amateur serves only herself. If there are bystanders, that’s fine, but as an amateur your work is only for you. A privilege, a chance to find joy in creation. And you may choose to make the leap to be a professional, to have a practice. To show up when the muse isn’t there, to show up if you don’t feel like it. This manifesto is for you.

You don’t do that by doing better work for lousy clients. That’s because lousy clients don’t want you to do better work. They are lousy clients for a reason. They don’t want better work.

You earn better clients by becoming the sort of professional that better clients want.

First, find ten. Ten people who care enough about your work to enroll in the journey and then to bring others along.

If you’re using any sort of self-control (there’s that “self” word again), then you’re not being authentic. Only a tantrum is authentic. Everything else we do with intention.

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

What we seek out is someone who sees us and consistently keeps their promises to bring us the magic we were hoping for. Someone who has committed to rhyming with what they did yesterday. When you trust yourself enough to turn pro, you’re entering into a covenant with those you seek to serve. You promise to design with intention, and they agree to engage with the work you promised to bring them.

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.