#108 The Practice: Shipping Creative Work Seth Godin

What it means to do any sort of creative work, whether you're Jackson Pollock or Spike Lee or anyone in between, is persistently and consistently discovering how it's not done before you stumble onto something that other people didn't expect that works.

I've written 7,950 blog posts, and half of them are below average, some of them are terrible, and a few are really, really good. But if I had said 'I'm only going to publish the really good ones,' I'd never have a blog and I would never know which one was going to be a really good one. Now, blogging doesn't make me nervous because I've done it too many times.

I'm super proud of my failures. I've had more failures than most people, and that's the key. I wouldn't trade in any of them because if you don't have the failures, it means that you're not leaning toward the edges that allow you to do creative work.

If you want to raise $5 million or $50 million to build some fancy tech startup, well, why don't you start by being a jobber and importing some stuff from Ali Baba and figuring out if you can sell it. Because if you can't do that with a $500 investment, why on Earth would anyone give you $50 million?

When it comes to shipping creative work, people are saying to themselves, 'What will I tell the others, and what will I tell myself? Because if I'm on the hook, then I have to accept responsibility. I can't blame my boss; I don't have one. I can't blame my co-workers; I don't have them. I did this, and it didn't work. What will I tell myself? What will I tell the others?' And if we don't know what to tell them... then we're dead ... On the other hand, if we can train ourselves to say 'I learned something today, and I get to play again tomorrow,' well, that's a good thing to be able to tell yourself.

Authenticity is useless because no one really wants you to be authentic; they want you to be consistent.

Resistance is the work, and if you want to make any change happen, then you have to dance with the resistance; you cannot let it beat you.

Failure is what creativity is based on.

Generosity doesn't mean free. Generosity doesn't even mean giving it away. Generosity means expending emotional labor and energy to take a risk on behalf of the people you're trying to help, and charging for that is just fine.