Good taste

Good taste, to me, is liking what you see and knowing why you like it.

Seth Godin writes in The Practice:

… the ability to know what your audience or clients are going to want before they do.
… watch what the market does and learn from that.

To me, that is too much of a market-oriented view of taste. The second statement also disagrees somewhat with the first.

I don’t think you learn about good taste by observing the market. You only learn what is out there and what the people with the most enormous mouths say about what they like.

Good taste is about appreciation for the specific. The market is about appreciation for the average.

Seth Godin – The Practice, Do the Work

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, and 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.

Failure narrative

From Seth Godin’s The Practice, this creator’s failure narrative:

  • There is more supply than demand; therefore, most of the feedback is rejection. From the market, from the gatekeepers.
  • The work is created with generally available tools. The group that believes they can do the same job or better is large.
  • The fan base is transient, and the churn is significant.
  • Negative criticism spreads easier than positive feedback.
  • We work in novelty. There is always more novelty for our customers to turn to.
  • We and our customers chase creative magic. By that standard, almost all of our efforts fail.

Then, successful creators have in their favor the benefit of the doubt and tribal cognitive dissonance.

More better than Google

About two weeks ago, I wrote that I haven’t used Google for quite some time now, and I am missing nothing. Incidentally, Seth Godin writes this week how he uses Perplexity as an alternative to Google. Perplexity was not on my list; I haven’t researched Perplexity thoroughly yet, but I trust Seth’s words.

Seth Godin – The Practice

Notes from The Practice by Seth Godin.

Change someone, ignore everyone. (Seth Godin / Hugh MacLeod)

You don’t create a hit trying to please everyone.

Create work that matters to someone. Develop a genre. Be peculiar.

Commit to the journey (not to the engagement).

Great work is work that’s worth doing.

Sales is turning “never heard of” into “yes” or “no”.

If it fails, would you still do it?

Reassurance is futile. Instead of worrying, get to work.

There is no guarantee that the world gives a shit about your mission. Nobody cares; it should be your starting point.

Balance your own point of view and pleasing the audience. How? Through work. Ship creative work on a schedule without attachment or reassurance.

Art for free creates deniability: what did you expect? It was free.

Being peculiar is natural. And beneficial.

Just because the outcome is uncertain doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

Consistency is the way forward. Work that thymes. Not repetition.

Flow is productive, but desirable difficulty brings us to a new level. The hard work.

Generic is a trap; genre is a lever.

Find your cohort.

A few or one superpowers. Commit to it. We must choose.

Do your homework. Read the essentials in your genre.

Constraints can be a creative source.

Hugh MacLeod

The Creativity Leap – Natalie Dixon

Via Seth Godin’s podcast. He called The Creativity Leap “even better” then his own, at that time not yet published book The Practice.

The Creativity Leap

The Creativity Leap is about activating the creative process in individuals and in organizations, and how creativity can transform people and organizations.

Invest in hobbies. Learn new things, cultivating a childlike, open outlook.

Seek out ideas from outside your normal world.

Creative ideas are formed during daydreaming, during doing nothing. On the other hand: practice makes perfect, without a lot of practice there is no mastery.

Learn to ask better questions. Start with “big picture” questions and then descend to specific questions.

Open-source collaboration and informal structures lead to cross-pollination and better solutions.

Research leads to better questions.

Practice improvisation and out-of-the-box thinking.

Have explicit attention to intuition; intuition is also a data point.

Work in communities.

Facilitate hybrid thinking; combine tech and artistic thinking, analog and digital.

Reuse, remix what is already there.

Make things within the constraints that are there. Creativity works best within constraints.

Get out of your brain. Look at yourself and things from a different angle. Get messy. Combine deep specialization with broad experience. Combine rationality with ambiguity. Combine a tight organization with a loose network organization.

Drift.

Seth Godin’s Graceful – beautiful advice

Record density wisdom/word ratio in Seth Godin’s free ebook Graceful.

Download from Seth’s site here.

Graceful - Seth Godin

Change This

Wonderful works on Change This, amongst which:

How to be creative:

https://changethis.com/manifesto/show/6.HowToBeCreative

The bootstrappers bible:

https://changethis.com/manifesto/show/8.BootstrappersBible/

A so much more…

Sharing

To steal from Seth Godin: all of us are smarter than any of us.
So we should share everything.

Anyway the stuff that you share has already been invented. It is already on paper.
It has become boring. It is old news.

We should be looking for the new news.

Design your future – Taylor Pearson on the end of jobs

Create your own job. the end of jobs

Taylor Pearson tells us in The End of Jobs. And explains how profitable this can be in today’s world.

Jobs as we know them will largely disappear. We are at the end of the Frederick Taylor work era.

Jobs are replaced by entrepreneurs. Everyone can be an entrepreneur, building a meaningful life doing what they want, now serving the long tail of markets has become profitable.