This one is a challenge.
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Chapter 14: It’s Time to Find Your Voice
Notes
The process, or practice, is not guaranteed, but it’s the best way forward. It is:
- a method with no fixed steps
- a strategy in which tactics don’t matter
- a pattern with “counterintuitive twists and turns” that can be learned by looking at the experiences of “the creative heroes”
Start where you are. “You can do the work that you were born to do.”
Better is better than more.
Thoughts
Hmmm… I’m not sure what’s going on here.
There’s nothing explicit about “your voice” within the chapter; only the single clause, “and you can be heard,” has anything to do with speaking, literally or metaphorically.
But Seth isn’t random; I can’t imagine him mistitling the chapter. So he must be up to something.
If I look at this as an extension of the previous few chapters—about how feeling comes from action, or stories can be changed through action, or flow arises from the work—then perhaps the argument starts to take shape. Perhaps he is saying that your voice comes out of the work.
That is to say, perhaps he is implying (or, certainly, I can infer) that people may hold back from doing whatever creative work they would like to do in part because they feel they don’t have a voice.
But we shouldn’t seek our voice so that we can work. We find our voice (as the title says) by starting the work (as the chapter says). We can, he says, start where we are, see and be seen, listen and be heard. We’ll find our voice on the path, on the “way forward.”
Aside from the “work you were born to do”—that’s a “story” that I don’t buy and doesn’t make sense to me—I think I get what’s going on here. To find your voice, get started on the work.
I’m not going to say that I’ve made the whole chapter hold together, but it’s much clearer (or, at least, I’ve made meaning) than my first read.
This series is meant to capture my thoughts as I work through Seth Godin’s The Practice. It’s a book with over 200 (very short) chapters, which I hope to work through and, I further hope, to implement over time.
If you’re interested in more of Godin’s ideas, or my thoughts about them, you can check out this collection of posts. Note that if you’re more interested in the former, you should probably get Godin’s book and read it yourself; my notes will be both incomplete and idiosyncratic, and my thoughts will relate to my own experience.
But if my thoughts resonate with you, or if you think I’m just silly, I welcome your comments.