The Practice

by Seth Godin

When we intentionally avoid desirable difficulty, our practice suffers, because we’re only coasting. 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.

Writing every day is a practice. Learning to see is a practice. You’re never done, and you’re never sure. We have unlimited reasons to hide our work and only one reason to share it: to be of service.

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. Befriending your bad ideas is a useful way forward. They’re not your enemy. They are essential steps on the path to better.

168. The Smallest Viable Breakthrough Could you rewrite one paragraph of Fahrenheit 451 and make it better than Bradbury’s version? Could you write one new page for the screenplay of The Matrix? Can you play just one note on the clarinet that’s worth listening to? 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?

Don’t worry about changing the world. First, focus on making something worth sharing. How small can you make it and still do something you’re proud of?

Welcome to the practice. 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.

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...

172. What Does “Good” Mean? No one wants to make lousy work. We seek out good or even great. But how, exactly, do we judge our work? It might be a trap to ask someone else (or yourself) if your work is any good. It’s a trap because you might be tempted to judge “good” by commercial success. Or feedback from gatekeepers. Was Harry Potter not good when it was rejected by twelve publishers? Did it suddenly become good after it became a worldwide phenomenon? How can the same book be good and not good at the same time?

Good needs to be defined before you begin. What’s it for and who’s it for? If it achieves its mission, then it’s good. If it doesn’t, then either you were unlucky, incorrect, or perhaps, what you created didn’t match what you set out to do.

You won’t run out. This isn’t your one and only shot. There’s no perfect idea, just the next thing you haven’t shipped yet. No one is keeping you from posting your video. No one is keeping you from blogging every day.

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. 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.

What’s the format? What should it cost? What does it remind me of? Ski resorts are a genre. So are monster movies. Without genre, we’re unable to process the change you seek to make. It’s too difficult to figure out what you are doing and for whom, so we walk away.

If you tell us that this is a reggae record, we’re going to compare you to Bob Marley. If you assert that you’re painting fine art, you’ve got a thousand years of artists to stand next to. It’s so much easier to say, “It’s just me.” It’s simply what I felt like creating. Because then we’ll ignore you. And then you’re off the hook.

It’s not that Gil’s songs are better than yours, or that Hemingway’s writing is better than yours. It’s that they shipped their work, and you hesitated.

Of course, at first, all work is lousy. At first, the work can’t be any good—not for you and not for Hemingway. But if you’re the steam shovel that keeps working at it, bit by bit, you make progress, the work gets done, and more people are touched.

There’s plenty of time to make it better later. Right now, you...

Build streaks. Do the work every single day. Blog daily. Write daily. Ship daily. Show up daily. Find your streak and maintain it.

Seek the smallest viable audience. Make it for someone, not everyone.

Find and embrace genre. Seek out desirable difficulty.

Then one day, I looked up and James Flexner was standing over me. The expression on his face was friendly, but after he had asked what I was writing about, the next question was the question I had come to dread: “How long have you been working on it?” This time, however, when I replied, “Five years,” the response was not an incredulous stare. “Oh,” James Flexner said, “that’s not so long. I’ve been working on my Washington for nine years.” I could have jumped up and kissed him, whiskers and all—as, the next day, I could have jumped up and kissed Joe Lash, big beard and all, when he asked me the same question, and, after hearing my answer, said in his quiet way, “Eleanor and Franklin took me seven years.” In a couple of sentences, these two men—idols of mine—had wiped away five years of doubt. Find your cohort. The generous ones.

In order to deliver speed at a low price, FedEx had to commit. They made a significant number of choices all focused on that one metric. If you try to ship a very large (but very light) box via FedEx, you’ll discover that instead of costing $30, it costs $450. That’s because it breaks their system, and their system is their superpower. When we think of an artist we admire, we’re naming someone who stands for something. And to stand for something is to commit.

And so the network TV writer wishes she were on cable. And the cable TV showrunner believes it might be better if it were a movie. And the movie producer wants a development deal. But … some of the most important work goes on in live theater, a room with no retakes, no special effects, and a tiny budget. That’s because it’s constraints that enable us to create art. Art solves problems in a novel way, and problems always have constraints.

Finding the constraints and embracing them is a common thread in successful creative work.

211. Some Favorite Constraints Time Money Format Team members User trust Materials Technology Regulation Physics The status quo You probably have no choice but to ease one or two of them. But the rest? They will persist and you can befriend them as you rely on them to amplify your creativity. Constraints and your dance with them are part of the practice.

The world is filled with overconfident people. Overconfidence leads to malpractice, to fraud, and to broken promises. Overconfidence is arrogance. You don’t want an overconfident surgeon or even an overconfident bus driver. By definition, overconfidence leads to risky behavior and inadequate preparation.

216. Elements of the Practice Creative is a choice. Avoid certainty. Pick yourself. Results are a by-product. Postpone gratification. Seek joy. Understand genre. Embrace generosity. Ship the work. Learn from what you ship. Avoid reassurance. Dance with fear. Be paranoid about mediocrity. Learn new skills. Create change. See the world as it is. Get better clients. Be the boss of the process. Trust your self. Repeat.

As the artist George Ferrandi said, “If you have to ask ‘should I keep going?’ the answer is ‘yes.’”

Life is on the wire, the rest is just waiting PAPA WALLENDAfn1 Are you on the wire? (Or are you just waiting?)

Where Do Ideas Come from? Ideas rarely come from watching television. Ideas sometimes come from listening to a lecture. Ideas often come while reading a book. Good ideas come from bad ideas, but only if there are enough of them.

Anger gets you only so far, and then it destroys you. Jealousy might get you started, but it will fade. Greed seems like a good idea until you discover that it eliminates all of your joy. The path forward is about curiosity, generosity, and connection. These are the three foundations of art.

Art is a tool that gives us the ability to make things better and to create something new on behalf of those who will use it to create the next thing. Human connection is exponential: it scales as we create it, weaving together culture and possibility where none used to exist.

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

My five conversations on The Moment with Brian Koppelman (along with my close listening to his one hundred best interviews) had a huge impact on how I think about the ideas in this book. He cares about where the magic comes from.