The Practice

The trick isn’t a trick at all. It’s a practice that begins with trusting yourself to show up and do the work.

avoid the path of becoming a hack. Sure, work can be better than no work, but the posture of giving up your standards to get that work can quickly become toxic. Once you see that you don’t need a lucky break and that the practice is available to anyone who is willing to commit, you may choose the life of a professional. Or you can embrace the path

The practice of choosing creativity persists. It’s a commitment to a process, not simply the next outcome on the list. We do this work for a reason, but if we triangulate the work we do and focus only on the immediate outcome, our practice will fall apart.

The career of every successful creative is part of a similar practice: a pattern of small bridges, each just scary enough to dissuade most people. The practice requires a commitment to a series of steps, not a miracle.

One question comes up in my podcast (at akimbo.link) the most often: where do I find my passion? And the corollary: if I’m not passionate about my work, what should I do? Once you decide to trust your self, you will have found your passion. You’re not born with it, and you don’t have just one passion. It’s not domain-specific: it’s a choice. Our pa

you can’t command people to feel what you want them to feel. All we can do is choose the right people, bring them the right work in the right way with the right intent, and then leave it to them to shift their emotional states. We have to trust ourselves and then we have to trust the people we serve. The trust will be repaid many times over.

It’s difficult to find what author Rosalyn Dischiavo calls “the deep yes.” This sort of selective prioritization requires responsibility and vulnerability. And it requires process. The people-pleasing power of an indiscriminate yes is a form of resisting the yes of shipping our real work. It cuts us off from the connection that we desperately seek.

Annie Duke, former world champion of poker, teaches us that there’s a huge gap between a good decision and a good outcome. A good decision is based on what we know of the options and the odds. A good outcome happens or it doesn’t: it is a consequence of the odds, not the hidden answer.

Decisions are good even if the outcomes aren’t. The same is true for the process of generous creativity. The process is a smart one even if the particular work doesn’t resonate, even if the art doesn’t sell, even if you are aren’t happy with the reaction from the critics. That’s because what we seek and how we create aren’t the same thing. Reassura