The Practice: Shipping Creative Work Book Review

Details of The Practice: Shipping Creative Work

• Book Name: The Practice: Shipping Creative Work
• Authors: Seth Godin
• Pages: 279
• Publish Date: 2020
• Language: English
  
• Genre: self-Help Book

Summary:

The Practice - Shipping Creative Work by Seth Godin. This book is for you if you are a current or an aspiring content creator or artist. I am one so I definitely resonated with it. 

As content creators, we go through a lot of self-doubt, fear, uncertainty, confusion, frustration and failures. it can be a lonely journey. 

so if you want an experienced and well-balanced content creator like Seth Godin, who has probably experienced all these things in his own creative career, to hold your hand and mentor you through your "practice" of creating content, then this book is for you.

I absolutely loved this book! my only tiny, tiny gripe is that it could have been organized a bit better. I found that some ideas in the book appeared in multiple places, stated in a slightly different way. 

I would have grouped them together in one place. now I'm going to share with you my biggest takeaways from this book. 

Number one: choose to be peculiar. true fans require you to show your idiosyncrasies. 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. generic work is replaceable. 

Ultimately the goal is to become the best in the world at being you. to bring useful idiosyncrasy to the people you seek to change and to earn a reputation for what you do and how you do it. 

Being hated by many and loved by a few is a sign that the work is idiosyncratic, worth seeking out and worth talking about. 

Takeaway number two: flow requires effort. the flow state when we are completely absorbed in our art and we feel that the muse is with us feels great! but it doesn't happen automatically. 

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.

Takeaway number three is around the concept of desirable difficulty. Seth says that as much as flow is satisfying, it probably doesn't help us move our practice forward as much as we'd like. the desirable difficulty is actually required for us to upskill and move to the next level. 

The 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. 

My next favourite takeaway is that learning almost always involves incompetence. true learning as opposed to education is a voluntary experience that requires tension and discomfort and the persistent feeling of incompetence as we get better at a skill. 

The next takeaway is to embrace failure. every creator who has engaged in the practice has a long, nearly infinite string of failures. the only way to find something new is to be prepared and even eager to be wrong on our way to being right. 

The infinite game is the game we play to play, not to win. Seth says that of my 7500 blog posts, half of them are below average compared to the others on any metric that you'd care to measure, like 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 is a part of it. 

The next thing I loved in the book is what Seth has to say about writer's block. he says writer's block is simply a side effect of our narrative. it's not an actual physical or organic ailment. 

It's simply a story we tell ourselves - one that leads to bad work habits and persistent fear. you don't need more good ideas. you need more bad ideas. instead of saying "I'm stuck. I can't come up with anything good", it's far more effective to say "I 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 everything that I have learned" 

Seth says that reassurance is helpful for people who seek out certainty, but successful artists realize that certainty isn't required. in fact, the quest for certainty undermines everything we set out to create. when we require outcomes as proof of our worth, we become brittle, 

Unable to persist in the face of inevitable failure on our way to making a contribution. 

The next takeaway is something I need to practice, which is to find your cohort. when you're surrounded by respected peers, it's more likely that you'll do the work you set out to do. 

Find this cohort with intent. do not wait for it to happen to you. you don't need to be picked. you can simply organize a cohort of fellow artists who will encourage themselves. 

I love what Seth had to say about constraints in the book. constraints and your dance with them are part of the practice. constraints like time, money, format, team members, technology and so on. 

You probably have no choice but to ease maybe 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. 

Seth says when you find the edge of the box, you're in the place that has scared away those that came before you. it's from this edge that you can turn the constraint into an advantage instead of an excuse. 

Seth says generosity is the most direct way to find the practice. 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. on the topic of money, Seth says that money supports our commitment to the practice. 

Money permits us to turn professional, to focus our energy and our time on the work, creating more impact and more connection, not less. and generosity doesn't require us to reduce friction by making things free and more importantly, 

Money is how our society signifies enrollment. the person who has paid for your scarce time and scarce output is more likely to value it, share it and take it seriously. 

Often the act of charging for the work creates a generous outcome because our work is to affect change, not to make ourselves invisible and free. 

The next beautiful piece of advice from Seth is to not please the masses. the practice demands that we seek to make an impact on someone, not on everyone. our desire to please the masses interferes with our need to make something that matters. 

The masses want mass entertainment, normal experiences and the pleasure of easy group dynamics. we already have plenty of stuff that pleases the masses. 

On the topic of creating change, Seth says that art is the human act of doing something that might not work and causing change to happen. work that matters. for people who care. not for applause, not for money but because we can. 

The change we seek to make can feel small indeed but it all ripples. one record, one interaction, one person - it might be enough. 

If you're a content creator, you may have experienced a kind of friction where on one hand you have a vision for a possible future, but on the other hand, the person that you're seeking to serve and lead brings a set of their own expectations and desires for your work. 

Seth says that these two will never be perfectly aligned and this friction is the place where your work can thrive. 

Also read: A radical awakening book review

Also read: Can't Hurt Me David Goggins Book Review

Also read: I will teach you to be rich by ramit sethi pdf download

Also read: Inner engineering book summary PDF Download 

Also read: Rich dad poor dad book review

 THANK YOU SO MUCH