“You already know how to do it.”
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Notes
Analogy: working out an hour a day for 6-12 months will get you in shape, but that’s not the hard part. The hard part is becoming “the kind of person who goes to the gym every day.”
Similarly, it’s not difficult to do creative things. It’s difficult to trust yourself to be the kind of person who engages in the process of delivering creative work.
“You manage to find an hour every day to bathe, to eat, to commute, to watch Netflix, to check your email, to hang out, to swipe at your phone, to read the news, to clean the kitchen….
“Show us your hour spent on the practice and we’ll show you your creative path.”
You’ve been creative before, so you know how. The practice asks you do that more than once— “often enough that it becomes your practice.”
Thoughts
I’ve recently chopped out the majority of my time sinks, thanks to Elon’s destruction of Twitter. And, taking the advice of Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism, I’ve replaced most of that lost time with more meaningful activities, including embracing boredom (which is necessary for creativity).
“Show us your hour spent on the practice and we’ll show you your creative path,” Seth says. I wouldn’t say that I have yet replaced that nonsense with an hour (literal or figurative) of creative work. But I am doing better; I’ve been making some progress on the album most days.
This chapter makes me want to do more.
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.