20: The Practice
“If you spend all day hitting the ball back, you’ll never end up serving”
- taken from The Practice: Shipping Creative Work by Seth Godin, thanks to Journey Further Book Club for sending me a copy of the book.
Do check out Journey Further Book Club’s incredible community of bookish business-minded people, a great forum that hosts thoughtful discussions and events too!
Scroll down for @thecultured.life audio reading of this post, also available to download, if you prefer 🎧
Are you a creative looking to BOOST your daily practice?
No matter the industry you’re in, whether you’re a writer, maker, artist or entrepreneur, you might be looking for a manual on how best to better your craft.
Well then, this call-to-action book authored by serial creator and entrepreneur Seth Godin was written with you in mind.
Now I’m a Godin fan. And it shows. One of the very first books I raved about on this page is his orange number This is Marketing. And this cool blue number doesn’t disappoint either. The story of this book and I begins in my search for a new ‘practice’ to save me from creative complacency.
The book is written in very much the Godin-style I’ve come to love, he writes as he talks - resulting in a book that reads like a flow of consciousness, with littered anecdotes and life lessons told as short stories or ‘riffs’ as he calls them. The Practice contains 219 riffs. His riffs contain surprising truths and each riff leads into the next.
My favourite riffs from the book:
⚡️ 33: The poverty of our intentions
⚡️ 41: When was the last time you did something for the first time?
⚡️ 81: The Lifeguard who wasn’t sure
Although I was nodding furiously and snapping my fingers to a lot of the riffs contained in the book, there were a few that I am yet to change my mind about. One of them is his assertion of “Creativity as a choice [...] not a bolt of lightning from somewhere else.” In my worldview, there’s room for creativity to be both.
It would be interesting to follow up my reading of this book with Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, a book that argues for the mysterious nature of creativity and inspiration. I don’t think a belief in this should have to hinder your practice.
Nonetheless, The Practice is fantastic and palatable food for thought for all creatives. Would recommend.
“Committing to a practice that makes our best better is all we can do”
Thinking to add The Practice to your TBR?
Purchase The Practice by Seth Godin here
**This post includes affiliate links where I would be paid a small commission if you make a purchase, at no extra cost to you. This just helps keep the light on!
