The Practice: Shipping Creative Work

by Seth Godin

We develop trust over time.

When Elizabeth King said, “Process saves us from the poverty of our intentions,” she was talking about the fish. You might seek a shortcut, a hustle, a way to somehow cajole that fish onto the hook. But if it distracts you from the process, your art will suffer.

In any given moment, the world isn’t perfect. Conditions aren’t right. The economy hits a bump. There’s a health emergency. Our confidence is shaken. A particularly nasty comment gets through our filter. We’re rejected. The list is long indeed. And in those moments, our intentions might not be pure. We might want to hide, or seek the muse. We might want to sell out or settle or simply give up. But the practice saves us. Because the practice can be trusted. And because in this moment it’s simply the best next step.

The career of every successful creative is part of a similar practice: a pattern of small bridges, each just scary enough to dissuade most people. The practice requires a commitment to a series of steps, not a miracle.

The world conspires to hold us back, but it can’t do that without our permission. The dominant industrial system misrepresents the practice, pretending that it’s about talent and magic. The system would prefer you to stand by, quietly.

Our world is long on noise and short on meaningful connections and positive leadership. Your contribution—the one that you want to make, the one you were born to make—that’s what we’re waiting for, that’s what we need.

Artists have a chance to make things better by making better things. Contributing work to those whom they serve. Turning on lights, opening doors, and helping us not only connect to our better nature, but to one another. Industrialists seek to make what’s requested, and to do it ever cheaper and faster. But people who have found their voice are able to help us see that life includes more than what’s requested.

You’re not a short-order cook. You’re here to lead us.

we shape the discourse by allowing those ideas to be shared. It might not work. But only you have your distinct voice, and hoarding it is toxic. Of course you’re allowed to sound like you. Everyone else is taken.

Hoarding your voice is based on the false assumption that you need to conserve your insight and generosity or else you’ll run out of these qualities.

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. Instead, we can adopt a mindset of abundance. We can choose to realize that creativity is contagious—if you and I are exchanging our best work, our best work gets better. Abundance multiplies. Scarcity subtracts. A vibrant culture creates more than it takes.

Art lives in culture and culture exists because we’re actively engaging with each other.

If you lived in a village where the water was riddled with disease, and you figured out how to purify the water, would you share the idea for free with the other villagers?

village with clean water is going to be a lot more productive. That productivity is going to raise the standard of living for everyone, producing more food, more well-being, and more joy for everyone. No matter the financial return, that joy will come back to you many times over.

Our culture is like that village. Ideas shared are ideas that spread, and ideas that spread change the world.

it turns out that the misfit, the fifth hammer, was the secret to the entire sound. It worked precisely because it wasn’t perfect, precisely because it added grit and resonance to a system that would have been flaccid without it. The harmonies of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young often worked best because of Neil Young—because his voice didn’t fit. Young was the fifth hammer.

The fifth hammer is the one that’s not proven, not obvious, or not always encouraged. The fifth hammer is you, when you choose the practice and trust yourself enough to create.

When Was the Last Time You Did Something for the First Time?

of all the usable directions, a sailboat goes slowest when it is going downwind. That’s because the sail acts as a parachute, meaning the boat can’t go any faster than the wind behind it. Dandelions spread their seeds at the whims of the wind, but they don’t make much of an impact. The sailboat doesn’t work that way. The sailboat is optimized to go across the wind. The fastest sailboat direction is beam or close reach, heading perpendicular or even toward the wind.

We can do this with our work. We can find a direction and a craft. We can trust a process to enable us to get better and better at the work we do. We make a difference in the world when we seek to make a difference. Not because it’s easy, but because it matters.

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. The same is true for learning. True learning (as opposed to education) is a voluntary experience that requires tension and discomfort (the persistent feeling of incompetence as we get better at a skill).

The practice, then, is to not only cause temporary discomfort for those whom you lead, serve, and teach, but to embrace your own discomfort as you venture into territories unknown. Artists actively work to create a sense of discomfort in their audience. Discomfort engages people, keeps them on their toes, makes them curious. Discomfort is the feeling we all get just before change happens. But this new form of hospitality—of helping people change by taking them somewhere new—can make us personally uncomfortable as well.

Problems have solutions. That’s what makes them problems. A problem without a solution isn’t a problem, it’s simply a situation.

Peculiar is a choice, an opportunity to bring our own experiences and our own point of view to the work. We’ve been trained for a long time to hide that unique voice or to pretend it’s not there, because the systems around us push us to conform. So much so that the word “peculiar” has taken on a shameful cast for some—when it simply means specific. But in a world that’s changing faster than ever, that distinct skill set and point of view are precisely what we need from you.

“Here, I Made This”

“Here,” because the idea is a gift, a connection transferred from person to person. These four words carry with them generosity, intent, risk, and intimacy. The more we say them, and mean them, and deliver on them, the more art and connection we create. And we create change for a living.

Change-Makers in Charge

You’re here to make change. We need to make things better, and we need someone to lead us.

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 problem is obvious—if you spend all day hitting the ball back, you’ll never end up serving. Responding or reacting to incoming asks becomes the narration of your days, instead of the generous work of making your own contribution.

It might be that the most generous thing to do is to disappoint someone in the short run. Inbox zero is a virtuous habit, though an exhausting one. Like all forms of responsiveness, it favors the short term over the long, the urgent over the important.

That inbox might be your email, or it might be the way you control your calendar, plan your next project, or deal with your sister-in-law. There’s always a list of things that others would like from you, and we spend far more time than we realize sorting and fulfilling this list.

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.

When you own your agenda, you own it.

We commit to making people uncomfortable in the short run so we can be hospitable later.

The right work to the right people for the right reason.

seeking reassurance isn’t helpful when we work to make change happen. Because doing something that might not work means exactly that . . . that it might not work.

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.

The practice is a choice. With discipline, it’s something we can always choose. The practice is there for us, whether or not we feel confident. Especially when we don’t feel confident.

Steven Pressfield’s masterful The War of Art taught us to see the force he calls resistance. Resistance is an elusive and wily force, an emotion that will conspire to block us, undermine us, or, at the very least, stall us in the pursuit of work that matters. Resistance focuses obsessively on bad outcomes because it wants to distract us from the work at hand. Resistance seeks reassurance for the same reason. Resistance relentlessly pushes us to seek confidence, then undermines that confidence as a way to stop us from moving forward. But if we don’t need confidence, if we can merely trust the practice and engage in the process of creation and shipping, then resistance loses much of its power.

Generosity subverts resistance by focusing the work on someone else. Generosity means that we don’t have to seek reassurance for the self, but can instead concentrate on serving others. It activates a different part of our brain and gives us a more meaningful way forward. People don’t want to be selfish, and giving in to resistance when you’re doing generous work feels selfish. Our work exists to change the recipient for the better. That’s at the core of the practice.

She brings a few pages of dialogue to a workshop and has the actors engage with it. It might work for some in the audience but not others. Does it land with the right people? Again, it’s not fraught, because the risks were understood when the process began. Now is not the time for reassurance: it’s the time for useful feedback. For art to be generous it must change the recipient. If it doesn’t, it’s not working (yet). But realizing it’s not working is an opportunity to make it better. The practice is agnostic about the outcome. The practice remains, regardless of the outcome.

The essence of your art isn’t that it comes from a rare place of genius. The magic is that you chose to share it.

There’s a practice. The practice is proven, and you’ve embraced it. Now, all that’s needed is more. 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.

If you ship generous work and it doesn’t connect with the desired audience, you may have had an outcome you didn’t hope for, but the practice itself isn’t a failure. 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.

Change someone. And, as Hugh MacLeod said, “Ignore everyone.” In This Is Marketing, I wrote about practical empathy. This is the posture of the successful creator. Having empathy might make you a good person, but it also makes you a better creative.

Part of the work involves leaving the safety of our own perfectly correct narrative and intentionally entering someone else’s. And so, there’s the challenge of embracing the gulf between what you see or want or believe and what those you’re serving see, want, or believe. Because they’re never the same. And the only way to engage with this gap is to go where they are,

It took programmers and creators who were seeking someone, not everyone, to give us TV we could be proud of. TV we now take for granted. Yes, the most popular shows on Netflix are shows that evolved into crowd-pleasers like The Office. But you don’t create a hit by trying to please everyone.

Shun the Nonbelievers A key component of practical empathy is a commitment to not be empathic to everyone. A contemporary painter must ignore the criticism or disdain that comes from someone who’s hoping for a classical still life.

“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.