The Practice: Shipping Creative Work

by Seth Godin

136. Writer’s Block Writer’s block is a myth. Writer’s block is a choice. Writer’s block is real. And yet it’s all invented. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Gravity isn’t invented. Everyone experiences it the same way. Chocolate isn’t invented. That’s either a chocolate bar or it isn’t. But writer’s block is invented. So is a fear of spiders, a belief in astrology, or the confidence we feel before giving a speech. We know this because it changes. It changes from person to person and from day to day. It’s a story. 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.

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.

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

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

After your family and circle of friends (who have little choice in the matter), there’s a wide gap before you reach the actual fans. That’s because the pressure to conform and to avoid the boos pushes us away from being fan-worthy. True fans require idiosyncrasy. True fans are looking for something peculiar, because if all they wanted was the Top 40 or the regular kind, they could find it far more easily from someone who isn’t you.

If the practice you’ve developed isn’t getting you what you are after, you can politely walk away from it. If the audience you’ve worked so hard to build trust with is making it clear that your vision doesn’t match theirs, you can move on. It’s fine to experience regret when we abandon a sunk cost. It’s a mistake to stick with one simply because we can’t bear the regret.

Sunk costs are real, but sunk costs must be ignored.

Flow is the result of effort. The muse shows up when we do the work. Not the other way around.

We promise to ship, we don’t promise the result. It doesn’t matter if the work is good at first. How can it be? Was Richard Pryor hysterically funny the first time he went to an open mic night? Unlikely. Did Gödel revolutionize mathematics the first time he went to the chalkboard? Of course not. What these first rounds of public work do is establish to the creator that it’s survivable. Show up. Do your best. Learn from it.

The people you bring your work to want to know what it rhymes with, what category it fits in, what they’re supposed to compare it to. Please put it in a container for us, they say. We call that container “genre.” That’s not a cheap shortcut; it’s a service to the person you’re seeking to change. Generic work is replaceable. A generic can of beans can come from any company, because they’re all the same. But genre permits us to be original. It gives us a framework to push against. Shawn Coyne has written brilliantly about genre. Not generic, which is boring, but genre, which gives your audience a clue as to what this work is about. What’s the format? What should it cost? What does it remind me of?

Genre is a box, a set of boundaries, something the creative person can leverage against. The limits of the genre are the place where you can do your idiosyncratic work. To make change happen, the artist must bend one of those boundaries, one of those edges. Generic is a trap, but genre is a lever.

we realize that if we choose a genre, we’ve just made a series of promises.

181. A Roundup of Tips and Tricks for Creators Build streaks. Do the work every single day. Blog daily. Write daily. Ship daily. Show up daily. Find your streak and maintain it. Talk about your streaks to keep honest. Seek the smallest viable audience. Make it for someone, not everyone. Avoid shortcuts. Seek the most direct path instead. Find and embrace genre. Seek out desirable difficulty. Don’t talk about your dreams with people who want to protect you from heartache.

Choose the skill we’re going to assert to the outside world. Even if it comes at the cost of neglecting some of the work you used to do that, in the end, was simply a distraction.

The point is not to copy, but in fact to avoid copying. Our best commercial work reminds people of what they’ve seen before. Creativity doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.