Creativity is a choice. If you aspire to find a new truth, solve an old problem, or make the world a better place, you can. To achieve this, establish a "Practice" of consistently generating, sharing, and shipping what you make.
The five key principles in doing this that are:
<ul>
<li>Trust yourself to make great art.</li>
<li>Be generous with your art.</li>
<li>Be professional.</li>
<li>Aspire to make change with your art.</li>
<li>Generate your art consistently.</li>
</ul>

The Conceptual Foundation

The real breakthrough is doing work that is worth doing, even though you know it's not going to work.
The Western mindset is "tell me if it's going to work and then I'll do it." This mentality of only doing what's needed if it gets me an A on the test holds back creators.

Not The Straight A Grade Stuff

When you ship or share what you create — whether you get paid for it or not — you establish a "Practice" which will help your creative skills to grow and expand even more in the future. 
This kind of practice is self-driven, and is not outcome-based. The more you ship, the faster your creative skills will grow and expand, and the better your art will become, whatever form it may take.

Self-Driven Practice

The colloquial understanding of magic is someone who does a coin trick. The coin disappears from one hand and is gone for just a moment. At that moment we feel the tension. How is that possible? 
Once we know how the trick is done the magic evaporates. This magic can be found in the things we create. Creators can make magic happen for the people they seek to help.

Creating Magic

Creativity is not an innate gift or a talent you're born with. Rather, creativity is a skill and a choice — it can be learned and expanded. 
The key to becoming more creative is to get into the habit of shipping or sharing your creative output all the time.

Creativity Can Be Learned

You were born ready to make art. Art is the generous act of making things better by doing something that might not work.
But you've been told that you can't trust yourself enough to do so. You've been told you don't have enough talent (but that's okay, because you can learn the skill instead). And you've been told that if you can't win, you shouldn't even try (but now you see the journey is the entire point).

It's Not About The Results

<ul><li>Establish a "Practice" to ship whatever you create to a schedule. The discipline of doing that will cause you to be even more creative in the future.</li><li>Write every day. Blog, and record your thoughts. It will establish your identity, and help you arrange your thoughts. That's the foundation for your creative output of the future.</li></ul>

Important Activities

The magic of the creative process is that there is no magic.

The key to building a creative practice for yourself is to be consistent in generating and shipping your art — whatever form it may take. Certainly, good processes help you generate professional-quality outputs, but consistency really is the key to moving forward. Generating art is something that you do, not merely something that you speak about.The second set of five key principles which underpin this idea are:<ul><li>Make bold assertions.</li><li>Earn your skills by consistently producing.</li><li>Welcome and harness your constraints.</li><li>Watch for creative ideas.</li><li>Be unquenchable.</li></ul>

Making It Happen

The way we act determines how we feel way more often than the way we feel determines how we act. The way you behave will inform your identity. 
If your practice is to go running every day, the more this practice is done consistently you will have a runners identity. We are what we do.

The Practice Becomes Your Identity

From the bestselling author of Linchpin, Tribes, and The Dip comes an elegant little book that will inspire artists, writers, and entrepreneurs to stretch and commit to putting their best work out into the world. Creative work doesn't come with a guarantee. But there is a pattern to who succeeds and who doesn't. And engaging in the consistent practice of its pursuit is the best way forward. Based on the breakthrough Akimbo workshop pioneered by legendary author Seth Godin, The Practice will help you get unstuck and find the courage to make and share creative work. Godin insists that writer's block is a myth, that consistency is far more important than authenticity, and that experiencing the imposter syndrome is a sign that you're a well-adjusted human. Most of all, he shows you what it takes to turn your passion from a private distraction to a productive contribution, the one you've been seeking to share all along. With this book as your guide, you'll learn to dance with your fear. To take the risks worth taking. And to embrace the empathy required to make work that contributes with authenticity and joy.

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From the bestselling author of Linchpin, Tribes, and The Dip comes an elegant little book that will inspire artists, writers, and entrepreneurs to stretch and commit to putting their best work out into the world. Creative work doesn't come with a guarantee. But there is a pattern to who succeeds and who doesn't. And engaging in the consistent practice of its pursuit is the best way forward. Based on the breakthrough Akimbo workshop pioneered by legendary author Seth Godin, The Practice will help you get unstuck and find the courage to make and share creative work. Godin insists that writer's block is a myth, that consistency is far more important than authenticity, and that experiencing the imposter syndrome is a sign that you're a well-adjusted human. Most of all, he shows you what it takes to turn your passion from a private distraction to a productive contribution, the one you've been seeking to share all along. With this book as your guide, you'll learn to dance with your fear. To take the risks worth taking. And to embrace the empathy required to make work that contributes with authenticity and joy.

Seth Godin is a bestselling author, entrepreneur and agent of change.Godin is author of ten books that have been bestsellers around the world, and he is also a renowned speaker. He was recently chosen as one of 21 Speakers for the Next Century by Successful Meetings and is consistently rated among the very best speakers by the audiences he addresses.Seth was founder and CEO of Yoyodyne, the industry's leading interactive direct marketing company, which Yahoo! acquired in late 1998.He holds an MBA from Stanford, and was called "the Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age" by Business Week.

The Practice Becomes Your Identity

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