Seth Godin – The Practice

Encouragement for the creative mind.

Reassurance is futile. Attitude is a skill. Produce with intent. The work is too important to be left to how we feel. Instead, trust the process and do the work.

Change your actions first. We become what we do.

Peculiar means specific. The standard narrative pushes us to fit in, but through specificity and peculiarity, we stand out. Change comes from idiosyncratic voices. Be more specific and less generic.

Attachment to status, outcome, and opinions brings nothing. There is no such thing as a foundation. The process of engaging with the genre, the audience, the change ís the foundation. Become unattached.

The practice is about doing it, more than once, regularly, until it becomes… practice.
Ship on a schedule.

Credentials are just a piece of paper. Instead, create a body of work that shows you have insight, experience, and concern.

The work is an infinite game. No winners, no losers. (The reward for work is more work, said Tom Sachs.)

Determination counts (versus inspiration).

Chop wood, carry water.

Mise en place is preparation. The muse shows up when we do the work.

Seek desirable difficulty to seek improvement. Be uncomfortable.

Genre states your idiosyncratic work. Generic is a trap. Learning a skill is attitude and cohort.

Constraints feed creativity.

Be paranoid about mediocrity.

Many, many quotable sentences. A companion to The War of Art and Do The Work.

Austin Kleon and Johnny Rotten: a desire to constantly evolve

I hate self-promotion.

To start with the same introduction that Austin Kleon uses at the beginning of his book Show Your Work.

I just read Walden by Henry David Thoreau, a book that I had to let go of. I could not consume these elaborations on his simplified way of life any longer. However, I found his worldview interesting. I also liked the way he exchanges philosophical elaborations with down-to-earth statistics and lists of stuff he bought and sold for his house or from his gardening.

But Show Your Work reads very well. It is practical and motivational.

And the conclusion: Do The Work. This keeps coming back so often. Pressfield wrote a book about it. Get the fuck out of their chair. Start typing.

Kleon takes the myth out of most things. Everything is basically common sense. Don’t bullshit. Find an easy way of sharing work.

Do not do networking, but let the network do the work while you add value to your network.

The amateur is king: the amateur is not afraid to do things a new way, another way than the established professionals.

Naivety = openness to new things.

“Watching amateurs at work can also inspire us to attempt the work ourselves. “I saw the Sex Pistols,” said New Order frontman Bernard Sumner. ‘They were terrible. . . . I wanted to get up and be terrible with them.’ Raw enthusiasm is contagious.”

Interesting, as Johnny Rotten/Lydon has always referred to punk as a similar notion:

“Punk is a state of mind open to new ideas, with a desire to constantly evolve, to find the next step, not only in music but also in the world around us.”

Full article (and the french original article): Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten On The Real Meaning Of Punk

“I constantly try to deliver this message: “Admire someone’s work, but don’t imitate it, don’t lose your personality.”

Kleon is a Buddhist, I think. He writes:

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”

Some time go I read Buddhism for Dummies, Jonathan Landaw, Stephan Bodian, and Gudrun Bühnemann:

“Buddhism has always considered death to be one of the most powerful teachers, but this doesn’t make it a joyless or life-denying religion. Buddhism simply acknowledges that death has an unparalleled capacity to force you to look deeply into your own heart and mind and recognize what really matters.”

Kleon later on expresses:

“The experience of shaping the work is what matters”

Klein does bother about sharing his knowledge and experience with competitors. He knows his value. He even put it stronger as a competitive advantage:

“Teaching people doesn’t subtract value from what you do, it actually adds to it.”

The Monk and The Riddle and Rework and others

monk-and-riddle

The one is more imperative the other more loose.

Both are No BS.

I read The Monk and The Riddle and then Rework shortly after eachother.

The Monk etc is a great book about how startups really work. From the mouth of a top advisor of VCs in Silicon Valley. That sounds strong and confident and so is the book.
Illustrated with great real life example and stories around that – funeral.com, the Amazon of funeral goods, for heaven’s sake…
Talks about the business side, but also discusses the need for a vision the founders need on what they want the startup to achieve.

Rework

What are investors really look for. For them your business plan is one in very many.

Is there a big market? Can the product win and defend a large share? (Peter Thiel – look for a monopoly in Zero to One). Can the team do the job?

They are looking for passion. Money should not be the driver. Passion should.

Make plans, but don’t assume you can stick to them for very long. Be flexible. Also the investors should recognize this.

“In a Brave New World startup, there’s no existing market, no incumbent competitors, and no economic model, you’re literally investing the business as you go along.”

I take that opportunity to link to Fried and Heineman say in Rework – a plan is ok but it is all guesswork, they say, so do not worry too much if it needs changing; actually expect it to change (or you would be psychic).

Jason Fried and David Heineman Hansson are furthermore a lot less stern but and take a more relaxed standpoint. But they are from the other side of the table.

Their book has a number of nice bangs:
Learning from mistakes is overrated. I like that one against the “fail fast” silicon valley hype.
Do it for yourself – ignore the world (Ignore Everybody from Hugh Macleod).
Do not listen to your customer they do not know either (read Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma“).
Working too hard is stupid.
Small is fine – big not an objective.
Entrepreneur, a word that it sounds like a members-only club.

I like that.

Very practical no-nonsense advice.
In short: don’t bullshit around, do the work (Do The Work – Steven Pressfield).

Both very informative, funny. Read like a novel.