Process, Practice & Magic

This week's inspo drop

Can you read this or have you melted into a person-shaped puddle?

I’m trying not to freak out about the climate catastrophe and simply accept that summer can be as brutal as winter, and sometimes means staying inside during the day, curling up with a cold blue screen, and messing with your circadian rhythms. It’s all fine and dandy until the next upper-Atlantic hurricane!

I just finished Seth Godin’s The Practice, which wasn’t totally revelatory (popular piece of advice for creatives: keep showing up and turn your craft into a habit), but full of clever little hooks into bigger insights (his trademark) that earworm their way into your process.

In this case, the term “on the hook” was Godin’s big hook, which is summed up here, if you’re in need of a good hooking.

Now I’m onto Cultish which is so far a perfect combo of pulpy cult stories shot through a highbrow lens of language theory. Little surprise I discovered it on a podcast about branding!

I wanted to share everything I highlighted in The Practice, but it was a library borrow so my highlights disappeared into the ether along with my 21-day Kindle access.

Best I can do is share highlights from a similar but way more woo-woo book on the same subject, Big Magic:

• We are all walking repositories of buried treasure.

• …the quiet glory of merely making things, then sharing those things with an open heart and no expectations…

• Just write anything and put it out there with reckless abandon.

• The older I get, the less impressed I become with originality. I’m far more moved by authenticity. If it’s authentic enough, believe me — it will feel original.

• I would so much rather that you wrote a book to entertain yourself than to ‘help’ me.

• Holding yourself together through all the phases of creation is where the real work lies.

• You must learn how to become a deeply disciplined half-ass. It starts by forgetting about perfect.

• A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.

Forever trying to hold it together and on the hook with violent execution,

Phoebe