PDF Summary:The Practice, by Seth Godin

Can anyone be creative? Seth Godin’s The Practice dismantles the long-standing myth that creativity requires a special kind of “magic.” Godin argues that making creative work doesn’t require genius, lightning bolts of inspiration, or even confidence. Instead, creativity is a skill that can be learned. To be successful in creative endeavors, you simply need to maintain a consistent practice of creating and sharing your work with others. In this New York Times best seller, Godin tells you just how to do that.

Our guide contrasts Godin’s advice with other popular approaches to creativity, such as those found in Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic and Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist. In addition, we take a look at some creative habits of working artists to determine how they line up with the practices advocated by Godin.

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Using your specific voice and contributions also helps create diversity. Diversity of thoughts, experiences, cultures, and so on, increases the likelihood of solving difficult problems. If enough different people get together, they’ll probably create something new. A more homogenous group, on the other hand, might not come up with as many unique, creative ideas.

It’s important to note that sharing your unique voice doesn’t always mean sharing your “authentic” voice. There’s a common misconception that successful artists should strive for authenticity by sharing their innermost thoughts and feelings. But Godin points out that very few things are truly authentic—almost everything we do is the result of a series of intentional choices. Art itself is inauthentic in the sense that you are inventing something that appears real. Godin advises that you create art in such a way that the audience has an authentic experience—which doesn’t necessarily involve using your authentic voice.

For example, if you wanted to write an effective personal essay, you wouldn’t just tear a page out of your journal containing your unfiltered, authentic thoughts. You would need to make choices about the structure of your essay and what dialogue and characters to include. You’d need to decide which of your inner thoughts the reader needs to know and which don’t serve the story. Your writing voice itself takes practice to discover. While it certainly isn’t “fake,” neither is it the voice you use in everyday life.

(Shortform note: At first glance, Godin’s advice appears inconsistent: He seems to be saying that you should speak in your own, true, voice but also that your voice doesn’t need to be authentic to be successful. Upon closer examination, however, Godin seems to be using the word “voice” in two different ways here—in the first instance, to mean what you have to say (your ideas, life experiences, desires, and opinions), and in the second, to mean how you say it. Indeed, artists often use “voice” in a variety of ways to mean different things. For example, Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story, a book on writing, distinguishes between your authorial voice on the page and your everyday voice (such as the voice you use to speak to your spouse or neighbors).)

Principle 2: Establish Your Intent

In addition to learning to trust yourself, creative work requires that you establish your intent. If art seeks to make change, then to make art you need to be clear on what change you’re trying to make. Godin argues that to be creative, you need to establish your intent by asking yourself what and who your work is for.

What Is Your Work For?

The first question you need to ask yourself is what your work is for. What purpose do you want it to serve? What change are you trying to make? For example, perhaps you’re trying to challenge a popular misconception, inspire people to be more compassionate, or bring a needed service to an underserved community. Setting an intent helps you focus on what the work needs in order to serve its purpose, rather than on what you need to assuage your ego (for example, personal gratification or success). It also prevents you from hiding. If you’ve identified where you want to go, it’s easier to ask for directions and listen to people when they tell you how to get there.

Godin advises that you ask the intent question not only about the whole project but also about each element of the project. Ask yourself, “What is this part for?” Everything has to have a function.

(Shortform note: Elizabeth Gilbert disagrees with Godin’s assertion that the purpose of art is to effect change for the better. She says in Big Magic that there’s no requirement that you “save the world” with your art, and in fact, trying to do so can result in you creating art that is pedantic and insufferable. It’s perfectly acceptable to do creative work for whatever reason you want, says Gilbert, including for the simple reason that you enjoy it. (Plus, if you love what you do, you may end up creating something that makes a difference after all.) When it comes to motive for your creative pursuits, Gilbert advises that you do whatever sets your heart on fire, not whatever you think will effect the greatest change in the world.)

Who Is Your Work For?

Godin argues that you need to establish your intent not just about what you’re trying to do but also about who you’re doing it for. In other words, you need to consider your audience. Of course, you can choose to create for yourself alone, but Godin claims that's not professional work because it's not serving anyone but yourself. Knowing who your work is for creates a responsibility to bring positive change to those people.

In asking yourself who your work is for, there are a couple of considerations. First, don’t try to appeal to everyone. People who like horror films might not like your romantic comedy, but you’re not making it for them. In fact, one measure of whether work is “good” is simply whether it resonates with the specific audience to whom you're directing it.

Second, if you’re making something for someone else, you have to truly understand and empathize with what they want and need. For example, if you’re a teacher designing an arts curriculum for a group of underserved kids, you can’t assume that they’ll have the resources to buy lots of expensive art supplies. You’ll need to have an understanding of what materials they do have on hand in their daily lives that could be used to create art projects.

To understand your audience, Godin recommends that you start with a small group of people who care about your work and think about what they want. Be specific. What do they believe? What do they love? What do they need?

This doesn’t mean tailoring your work exclusively to please other people. It means considering the needs of the people who are interested in the work you do because without them, you’d have no audience.

You can’t create art that’s exclusively for others or exclusively for yourself, Godin says. If you try to create something that's exactly what you want, what you’re really doing is trying to force other people to want what you want or see things through your eyes. You need to empathize with the audience you're trying to reach.

The Personal as Universal

Just as Gilbert takes issue with Godin’s thoughts about the purpose of art, she also disagrees to some extent with his emphasis on understanding and empathizing with your audience. She uses her own best-selling memoir, Eat Pray Love, as an example. She says she wrote the book to understand herself better. It ended up helping a lot of readers understand themselves better, too—but if her sole intent had been to help others, she might have written a book that was far less popular with her audience.

Many successful artists subscribe to this view that the more personal a work is, the more universal it is. Memoirists, in particular, often say that in writing about their own lives, they are moved by a desire to express what it means to be human. By examining their own inner struggles and personal experiences, writers such as Cheryl Strayed, Anne Lamott, and Meghan Daum say that they hope to give readers permission to feel their own messy emotions and gain new insight into their own lives.

Principle 3: Work Consistently Despite Obstacles

While trusting yourself and establishing your intent are important to creative work, perhaps the most critical aspect of being a creative professional is working consistently despite the challenges that come your way. Godin advises that you spend at least an hour every day on your creative work. He takes the position that many of the apparent obstacles to producing good work—lack of inspiration, failure, and creative “blocks,” to name a few—are actually integral to your practice (or at the very least, they’re not the threat they’re often made out to be).

Inspiration Follows Work

Creatives often speak of being “touched by the muse” or working in a state of flow. Indeed, there are times when it feels like magic infiltrates your work and genius flows through you. When you aren’t inspired in this way, it can be hard to make progress, and everything you create feels flat and boring. It might seem like you only have two choices: Produce low-quality work, or give up for the day until inspiration returns.

But Godin says that letting yourself feel this way is a form of giving up your own agency. The truth is that inspiration shows up when you put in the work. You don’t create because you’re inspired; you’re inspired because you create. Rather than waiting for inspiration to arise or for conditions to be perfect, simply do the work to allow inspiration the opportunity to arise.

Plus, while working when you’re not inspired can be challenging, Godin points to research showing that you’re more likely to improve if a task is difficult for you. When you’re trying to get better at something, you’re necessarily going to feel incompetent before you get there. So while you’re often going to feel incompetent while you’re creating, if you don’t challenge yourself, you can't improve.

Creativity and the Muse

Godin claims that there is no magic to the creative process. However, artists throughout history who have relied on the muses for inspiration would disagree.

The idea of muses originates in Greek mythology. Muses were the goddesses of inspiration in literature, science, and the arts. They were the nine daughters of Zeus (king of Olympian gods) and Mnemosyne, the Titan goddess of memory. (It was appropriate that the mother of the muses was Memory because, in a largely illiterate society, memory was necessary to remember the words of great artists.) Each of the muses excelled in her unique talent. For example, Calliope was the muse of epic poetry, and Thalia was the muse of comedy. The words “museum” and “music” both come from the word muse.

The muses have provided creative inspiration to poets and artists throughout history, from the ancient Greeks to Shakespeare, Milton, and beyond. Homer invokes the muse in the opening lines of some of the earliest works in Western literature, The Iliad and The Odyssey.

Contemporary artists continue to believe in the power of the muse—or a similar type of “magic.” Elizabeth Gilbert, a friend of Godin’s, strongly disagrees with his position that creativity is not magic. In her book, aptly titled Big Magic, she details her belief that creative ideas are actually a type of energetic life form moving through the air around us at all times and searching for someone who they can “speak through.” If you say “yes” to these ideas when they visit you, then much like muses, they will bless you with inspiration. Gilbert recognizes, however, that magic is not enough. Like Godin, she is a huge proponent of practice, persistence, and hard work.

Failure Is Necessary to Success

Every time you do creative work, you’re making something for the first time: You may have written songs before, but you’ve never written this particular song; you’ve never painted this painting or written this story. And the only way to do something new, Godin says, is to be willing to fail.

Anyone who creates regularly has failed many times. Even successful directors make unsuccessful movies, and famous bands make bad songs.

Failure is the foundation of creative work. You fail, then you make changes and try again. As long as you don’t stop, failure always leads to improvement.

(Shortform note: Science supports Godin’s assertion that failure is necessary to success. But success isn’t just about perseverance in the face of failure; it’s also about how you fail. A 2019 Northwestern study found that people who succeed and people who fail try approximately the same number of times, but two factors separate the winners from the losers. One is that people who succeed not only learn from their failures, but, more specifically, they only make necessary improvements and don’t try to reinvent the wheel every time they try again. The second is that people who succeed fail faster: The time between their consecutive failed attempts decreases until they achieve success.)

Creative “Blocks”

Godin maintains that “writer’s block,” or any kind of creative block, isn’t real. Rather, it’s a story we tell ourselves. For example, we might think, “I’m not Toni Morrison (or Mick Jagger, Renoir, Beyonce, or any other iconic artist). I don’t have the time, the talent, or the luxury to sit around and create art. I can’t keep staring at this blank page, I have to do the laundry.”

We all have a story about who we are and what we are (or aren’t) capable of. However, rather than accept the story you tell yourself at face value, you have to ask yourself two questions, says Godin. First, does the story accurately reflect reality? (Is there reason to expect that you would be as good as a Pulitzer prize-winning author when you’re first starting out?)

Second, is your story helping you achieve your goals? (What matters more to you in the long run, the laundry or your long-neglected creative endeavor?) Godin claims that if the story you tell yourself isn’t working for you, then you can change it. This is much easier than trying to change reality to fit your narrative. For example, you might tell yourself, “I’m still relatively new to this, and, like any other skill, I’ll need to practice more before I learn how to do it well. If I invest a small amount of time every day, I’ll learn to trust myself and I’ll create something I’m proud of.”

One benefit of a consistent practice is that you’re working every day and constantly moving forward, so it’s harder to get “blocked.” You create regardless of whether you want to or not, and regardless of whether you're inspired. It’s better to create something that’s not great and work to improve it than it is to say you’re stuck and not create anything at all.

Very few people create brilliant work from the start, according to Godin. All work is bad at first.

In fact, sharing “bad” work or ideas is essential to creating good work. Sharing work that’s not good shows you that you can survive it and learn from it. (“Good” is very hard to define in any event, says Godin. Many best-selling books and movies were rejected repeatedly before they found success.)

(Shortform note: While creative blocks might not technically be “real,” they’re psychologically real, a point Godin is getting at in his discussion of how to rewrite your narrative. They may have their roots in perfectionism, fear, or even bitterness and greed. Because they’re unique to each individual, methods for dealing with them also vary from one person to the next. Some ideas that do the trick for working creatives include: 1) Come up with a list of 20 possible next moves, so your brain isn’t so laser-focused on making the one perfect move; 2) Draw or write messily or blindly for a bit to give yourself permission to make mistakes; or 3) Take notes when you have creative blocks to see if there’s a trend—maybe it’s as simple as not getting enough sleep the night before.)

Sunk Costs

While you shouldn’t give up on creative work just because of a temporary “block,” there are times when giving up is appropriate. If you’ve invested a lot of time and effort into something that’s not working, you don’t have to stick with it. According to Godin, feeling regret about sunk costs is better than sticking with something that isn’t going anywhere. For example, if you’ve revised a short story many times and you can’t get it to where you want it, it’s OK to abandon it and move on to something new. Maybe the story would make more sense as a novel (in which case, it wasn’t a waste of time to consider some of the characters and plot points in a shorter draft).

(Shortform note: The pull to stick with something just because you’ve invested time, effort, and money into it is well-documented in a variety of fields. For example, one 2018 study found that, given a chance to win money using either a solution they’d developed or a solution with a higher probability of winning, the majority of participants chose the sunk-costs solution. This was likely due to a psychological need to feel that their work hadn’t been in vain, as well as a need to feel competent in their decision-making.)

Principle 4: Share Your Work and Make Improvements

Godin believes it’s important to share your creative work regularly, on a schedule. Promising to deliver your work can help you be creative, and sharing your work allows you to receive feedback from your audience. Engaging with your audience is important because it will either give them something they want, or it will teach you what's not working with what you created.

(Shortform note: Austin Kleon espouses a different view in Steal Like an Artist. He cautions against sharing your work when you’re just starting out. He says anonymity is an asset for a beginning artist because it gives you the freedom to experiment as much as you want. Once you become well-known, your audience will expect a certain type of art from you, which can have the effect of backing you into a creative corner.)

Feedback

When you share your work, some of it might work for some people, but not others; some of it might not work at all. The goal is not to get reassurance from your audience; it’s to incorporate useful feedback to make your work better.

Godin points out that a lot of criticism isn’t worth paying attention to. This includes criticism from internet trolls or people who aren’t your intended audience. For example, people who like meandering, lyrical ballads aren’t going to like your rap music, so it doesn’t matter what they have to say.

The only criticism worth paying attention to is criticism from people who tell you what’s not working for them without indicting you personally.

How to Stop Worrying What Other People Think and Use Feedback Effectively

It’s one thing to say, “Share your work (even if it’s bad!),” it’s quite another thing to actually do it. Many of us are afraid of what others will think of our work—not only do we want to avoid criticism, but we’re also overly attached to praise. So what can we do to handle feedback effectively and use it to our advantage?

Godin addresses this to some extent when he talks about reassurance and how seeking praise won’t help your work. He also discusses the difference between useful and useless criticism. Other books on creativity overlap with this advice, while also presenting additional ideas about evaluating, filtering, and incorporating feedback. In Playing Big, for example, Tara Mohr shares the following tips for detaching ourselves from caring too much about praise and criticism:

1. It’s not about you. Feedback doesn’t tell you about your own worth, it only tells you about the person giving the feedback and their preferences and opinions. Mohr also says that the purpose of feedback is not to inflate or deflate your ego, or to tell you whether your work is “bad” or “good”; it’s to give you information about whether you’re reaching your intended audience.

2. Don’t worry about what family, friends, or “experts” think. Family and friends may try to be supportive—or alternatively, they may project their fears onto you—but usually they don’t have the information you need to properly evaluate your creative project. And if you’re working on something brand new, experts in your field may not understand what you’re trying to do either, or they may feel threatened by it. The most important people to get feedback from are your intended audience and the decision makers you need to influence or reach. Then, take the feedback that’s strategically useful to you and leave the rest.

3. Criticism doesn’t mean you’ve done something wrong. Criticism doesn’t mean you've made a mistake. On the contrary, criticism is inevitable whenever you put important work into the world. Need proof? Mohr suggests reading the top positive and negative book reviews for any best seller to bring home the point that any significant work draws a wide range of reactions.

Selling Your Work

Selling is often seen as crass and undesirable, but Godin believes that if you create things that serve others, selling those things can change the world for the better. In addition, if people have to pay for your work, they’re more invested in it—they’re more likely to value it and share it with others. And of course, money also allows you to support yourself so you can continue creating.

Better clients expect more from you and lead to better work, so part of selling your work is making the effort to get better clients.

(Shortform note: There is no shortage of options for selling your creative work online. In addition to dozens of online marketplaces, such as Etsy for makers of all kinds and Redbubble or Society6 for artists, you can also use social media and your own website to promote and sell your work. For example, you could include samples of your copywriting or editing work on your website. You could attract new customers using Instagram. You could also use videos on sites like YouTube or TikTok to perform your music, display your creative work, or otherwise engage your potential paying audience.)