The Practice: Shipping Creative Work

A lazy poorly written excuse for a book.

Nutshell: Godin quotes heavily from Pressfield's [b:The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle 1319 The War of Art Winning the Inner Creative Battle Steven Pressfield https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1574272133l/1319.SY75.jpg 722104], and you might be better off (re)reading that book instead.If you're looking for the equivalent of a Tony Robbins motivational speech for artists and creatives, you'll dig this. I really don't mean that as a criticism—sometimes you just want a pep talk in which someone tells you things you already know using pithy phrases and accessible examples.A key piece of advice in here, presumably drawn from Godin's experience in marketing, is to define your audience as specifically as possible. Seems like a good idea! But Godin isn't following his own advice. (As a bestseller, one supposes he doesn't have to.)So, is this book for artists? Broadly, yes. Is it for “creatives”—those who might once have been called commercial artists? Sure, them too, definitely. Is it for entrepreneurs, chefs, basically anyone? Mhm! Like most crossover business/self-help books, this one casts as a wide a net as possible. In one breath, startup founders are given pro-tips and encouragement. With the next, Godin takes shots at the corporate world by way of telling the artists in the audience to keep it loose.The upshot is that the advice herein is necessarily generic. How else could the author speak to so many audiences at once? Still, most of the advice is totally reasonable, common sense stuff. Hearing such advice again probably won't revolutionize the way you do your thing, but it won't hurt.

As a huge Seth fan, I must sadly say this one was a disappointment. I felt it hard to read, thoughts scattered across many “chapters” (usually a page or two long). It seemed to me more like a bunch of blog posts combined into a book. Also in those little “chapters” there were so many repetitions of the very same thing over and over again I felt like a person with mental problems.

Genuinely different than most of his works, which I admire!