#476: Seth Godin on The Game of Life, The Value of Hacks, and Overcoming Anxiety

There's no such thing as writer's block. Writer's block is real, but it does not exist. What it really is is misnamed 'I have a fear of bad writing. I have a fear of what the world will say when it encounters my bad writing.' And the way through is to do your bad writing. You don't have to ship it to the world, but you have to do the bad writing. And bad writing, over time, if you do enough of it, can't persist. Good writing will slip through.

Anxiety is experiencing failure in advance, at least it is for me ... After it's over, we don't call it anxiety anymore. We're in grief or we're rebuilding. But when it might go wrong, worrying (anxiety) is what we feel when we're imagining it did, and that's not helping anything.

What would you do if you knew you would fail? What would be worth doing even though it's not going to work? And if you've got things on that list that you haven't been doing, ironically, those are the things that are most likely to work because other people aren't doing them either.

If you want to learn how to juggle, you have to drop an enormous number of balls. If you want to learn how to swim, you have to sort of drown. And if you want to learn to be creative, you have to show me an enormous number of bad ideas.

Tomorrow morning, when you wake up, you probably won't feel like engaging in the practice, and if you do, you probably won't feel that way the next day. What we do is... decide that we're a runner, and runners go running every day. We decide we're a blogger, and bloggers blog every day. And that decision lightens the cognitive load so much because there's no time, no reason, to negotiate with ourselves because we already had the meeting—we already decided.

The way we act determines how we feel way more often than the way we feel determines how we act.

'Just do it' implies 'What the hell. It doesn't matter.' That's not a good way forward because it pushes you to be a hack who's not responsible for your own work. The alternative is to replace the word 'just' with the word 'merely.' Merely do the work. The time you are spending narrating yourself doing the work, the time you're spending catastrophizing the work, is not helping anything.

Where we need patience is in confronting the things we're going to get better at and in strapping in for a useful journey ... Where we need impatience is with our fear and with our selfishness.

The subtitle [of 'The Practice'] is 'Ship Creative Work,' and either you do that for a living or you don't. If you don't do that for a living, good luck to you because you're a cog in a system that wants to replace you. On the other hand, if you ship creative work, ship means 'if it doesn't ship, it doesn't count;' work means you do it even when you don't feel like it; and creative is where the joy is because creative is 'no one's ever done it this way before.'

I think authenticity is a crock, and I think authenticity is overrated and talked about far too much. The problem with authenticity is it's selfish. Authenticity enables us to say whatever we want, and if people don't like it, 'Well, I was just being authentic.' It is a ticket to self-absorbed inconsistency.

Anxiety and worry is almost never in service of someone else; it's in service of our need for the status quo and reassurance, and I think reassurance is futile because you never have enough of it.

Lots of the people that you and I know who go to work and just dig it out day after day don't do it because they need more money; they are seeking some sort of status, some sort of emotional engagement, some sort of energy. But they forget along the way... that there is the game one can play of 'Wow, that really was cool what I just made. That fills me with joy. I just did something generous. I just connected with someone at an elemental level.' They're too busy playing somebody else's game to play that game.

Creativity is a generous act. Get out of your own way. Don't ask for a guarantee. Simply merely ship the work without drama and without dialogue.

I believe that now that we've got AI and robots and offshoring and the rest, the work that's left for us is the work to create magic.

The smallest viable audience is more attainable than ever before.

Generosity doesn't mean free. People pay for a surgeon who's going to save their life. Generosity means that you're spending emotional energy, emotional labor, to help somebody else.

I don't believe in the muse at all. I don't think there's any outside force. I don't think talent really matters. I think what matters is choosing to find your smallest viable audience, understand your genre, and explore what it means to make magic in the small so you can do it again.

You've touched on one of the most important elements of human nature, which is our inability to ignore sunk costs. Sunk costs are the unspoken minefield of mistake in which we rationalize why we have to justify the thing we already have, we invent new meanings for the word 'momentum' well beyond Isaac Newton, and we imagine that we have to stick with what we did. So, much of the time, learning to ignore sunk costs is the single most useful thing I can point out to people.