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.

You haven’t reached your goals (so far). You’re not as good at your skill as you want to be (not yet). You are struggling to find the courage to create (so far).

Persistent and consistent effort over time can yield results.

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.

We believe that we need a guarantee, and that the only way to get that guarantee is with external feedback and results. It draws our eye to the mirror instead of the work. Gratitude isn’t a problem. But believing we’re owed gratitude is a trap. The feeling of being owed (whether it’s true or not) is toxic. Our practice demands we reject it.

The thing is, shipping your art is for the audience. You’ve already seen it, understood it, and experienced it. But that’s insufficient because without sharing the work, you can’t make change happen. It’s not enough to please yourself. 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.

Results are a by-product.

Ship the work. Learn from what you ship.

Be paranoid about mediocrity.

The magic is that there is no magic. Start where you are. Don’t stop.