The Practice: Shipping Creative Work

by Seth Godin

Once you choose which subgroup to tell your story to, which subgroup needs to change, this group becomes your focus. What do they believe? What do they want? Who do they trust? What’s their narrative? What will they tell their friends? The more concise and focused you are at this stage, the more likely it is that you’re actually ready to make change happen. Empathy again. The practical empathy of creating work that resonates with the people you seek to serve.

Once we know who it’s for, it’s easier to accept that we have the ability and responsibility to bring positive change to that person. Not to all people, not to create something that is beyond criticism, but for this person, this set of beliefs, this tribe.

Once you can put yourself on the hook to commit to who you are serving, you can find the empathy to make something for them.

It turns out that the believers are tired of being ignored and they’re eager to cheer you on.

We’re hiding because we’re afraid, because we don’t see the world the way the person we’re working with does.

Maybe the fear of a new technology is sufficient for someone to hesitate and wait until the neighbors go first.

The process of shipping creative work demands that we truly hear and see the dreams and desires of those we seek to serve. After understanding what our people want, we have a choice. We can build with empathy and work with their dreams, or we can choose to move on, to determine the vision is not for them, and to make something else for someone else. To cause change to happen, we have to stop making things for ourselves and trust the process that enables us to make things for other people. We need the practical empathy of realizing that others don’t see what we see and don’t always want what we want.

But just because we can’t be sure doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

Intentional action demands a really good reason. Find a who, make an assertion, and execute your work to deliver on that promise. You can’t find a good reason until you know what you’re trying to accomplish.

Instinct is great. It’s even better when you work on it.

We do our best work with intention.

This is a practice. It has a purpose. I desire to create change. The change is for someone specific. How can I do it better? Can I persist long enough to do it again? Repeat.

There is nothing authentic about the next thing you’re going to say or do or write. It’s simply a calculated effort to engage with someone else, to contribute, or to cause a result.

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

Not sameness. Not repetition. Simply work that rhymes. That sounds like you. We make a promise and we keep it.

Determine who it’s for. Learn what they believe, what they fear, and what they want. Be prepared to describe the change you seek to make. At least to yourself. 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 what it’s for, watch and learn to determine whether your intervention succeeded. Repeat.

If you’re headed to graduate school to get a master’s, you might be better off spending those two years actually doing the work instead.

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.

By ignoring excuses, regardless of how valid they are, they’ve managed to get back on track and do their work. The truth: if a reason doesn’t stop everyone, it’s an excuse, not an actual roadblock.

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.

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

Every creator who has engaged in the practice has a long, nearly infinite string of failures. All the ways not to start a novel, not to invent the light bulb, not to transform a relationship. Again and again, creative leaders fail. It is the foundation of our work. We fail and then we edit and then we do it again.

All of us have a narrative—one about who to trust, or what’s likely to happen next, or how to do our work. The practice reworks our narrative into something that helps us get to where we seek to go.

Our narrative informs our choices, our commitments, and most of all, our ability to make a difference in the culture. It’s the frame we use to interpret the world around us.

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.

Play to keep playing. Each step is movement on a journey that we can only hope will continue. The infinite game has no winners or losers, no time clock or scoreboard. It is simply a chance to trust ourselves enough to participate.

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

Not because it’s perfect. But because it’s 11:30. We promised. The process, not the outcome. That’s the heart of our practice. Good process leads to good outcomes.

When you’re consistent in who it’s for and what it’s for, you can claim the high ground and clearly say, “It’s not for you.”

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

You are not your work. Your work is a series of choices made with generous intent to cause something to happen. We can always learn to make better choices.

We don’t write because we feel like it. We feel like it because we write.

Write more. Write about your audience, your craft, your challenges. Write about the trade-offs, the industry, and your genre. Write about your dreams and your fears. Write about what’s funny and what’s not. Write to clarify. Write to challenge yourself. Write on a regular schedule. Writing isn’t the same as talking, because writing is organized and permanent. Writing puts you on the hook. Don’t you want to be on the hook?

Determination of the will opens the door for us to trust ourselves enough to actually find the words.

External success only exists to fuel our ability to do the work again.

The internet brings uninvited energy, positive and negative, to the work we set out to do. It opens an infinite spigot of new ideas, new tools, and new people for the project.

If you want to create your work, it might pay to turn off your wi-fi for a day. To sit with your tools and your boundaries and your process and nothing else. There is time to engage with the world after we do our work, but right now, we fill the cup and we empty the cup. We sit and type and then we type some more.

Flow is the result of effort. The muse shows up when we do the work. Not the other way around. Set up your tools, turn off the internet, and go back to work.

Desirable difficulty is the hard work of doing hard work. Setting ourselves up for things that cause a struggle, because we know that after the struggle, we’ll be at a new level. Learning almost always involves incompetence. Shortly before we get to the next level, we realize that we’re not yet at that level and we feel insufficient. The difficulty is real, and it’s desirable if our goal is to move forward.

The commitment, then, is to sign up for days, weeks, or years of serial incompetence and occasional frustration. To seek out desirable difficulty on our way to a place where our flow is actually productive in service of the change we seek to make.

We continue to focus on process, not solely on outcomes. If the process is right, the outcome will inevitably follow. Chop wood, carry water. Anchor up. “Yes, and.” Ignore the parts you can’t control.

Instead of saying, “I’m stuck, I can’t come up with anything good,” it’s far more effective to say, “I’ve finished this, and now I need to make it better.” Or possibly, “I finished this, and it can’t be made better, but now I’m ready to do the new thing, because look at all I’ve learned.” This is the story of every human innovation. This is the story of every good idea, every new project, every pop song, every novel. There was a bad idea. And then there was a better one. If you want to complain that you don’t have any good ideas, please show me all your bad ideas first.

Instead of focusing on a masterpiece, ask yourself, What’s the smallest unit of available genius? What’s the bar of music, the typed phrase, the personal human interaction that makes a difference?

And thus the idea of morning pages, of typing up everything that comes to mind, or the “yes, and” of improv. Each of these tactics is a way of persuading the other half of our brain that we’re actually capable of doing this work on demand. We promise to ship, we don’t promise the result.

175. Genre, not Generic The world is too busy to consider your completely original conception. 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.

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.

Transformation begins with leverage. And you get leverage by beginning with genre.

Before we can begin to make it different, we have to begin with what’s the same. Humans and chimps share almost all the same DNA. More than 98 percent is identical. What makes us not a chimp is the last little bit. That’s all you need. The smallest viable breakthrough.

No, the real reason is this: Meetings are a great place to hide. Meetings are where we go to wait for someone else to take responsibility. Meetings are a safe haven, a refuge from what might happen.