The Practice

Our culture is like that village. Ideas shared are ideas that spread, and ideas that spread change the world.

See the pattern, find your practice, and you can begin to live the process of making magic. Your magic.

A good outcome happens or it doesn’t: it is a consequence of the odds, not the hidden answer. Just as a good process doesn’t guarantee the outcome you were hoping for, a good decision is separate from what happens next.

We don’t have to wait to be picked and we don’t have to stand by, hoping that we will feel our calling. And we certainly don’t have to believe in magic to create magic. Instead, we can model the process of the successful creatives who have come before us. We can go on a journey with our eyes wide open, trusting the process and ourselves to create o

Let’s call it art. The human act of doing something that might not work, something generous, something that will make a difference. The emotional act of doing personal, self-directed work to make a change that we can be proud of.

It’s so easy to decide to focus on ego—our urgencies, our agenda, our needs. But he made a different choice, the choice to focus externally and generously instead.

Getting paid for our work can confuse us, because it might seem that all we need to do is serve the person with a checkbook. But that’s the strategy of a hack—and it rarely leads to the contributions we set out to make in the first place. There’s a tension, the gap between what the work wants and what the person paying for it wants. Dancing in that

idiosyncratic approaches and differences in experience. If enough peculiar people get together, something new is going to happen. Author Scott Page has shown that as systems get more complex, diversity creates ever more benefits.

The alternative is to trust the process, to do our work with generosity and intent, and to accept every outcome, the good ones as well as the bad.

Money supports our commitment to the practice. Money permits us to turn professional, to focus our energy and our time on the work, creating more impact and more connection, not less. And more importantly, money is how our society signifies enrollment. The person who has paid for your scarce time and scarce output is more likely to value it, to sha