“Half of my blog posts are below average, but I don’t know which half.”
This from author and speaker Seth Godin discussing on Faceboook today his latest book, The Practice: Shipping Creative Work.
Godin explains that shipping is the work of saying, “Here, I made this for you.” Lots of time, though, it doesn’t work.
But Godin, the publisher of over 7,000 blog posts is not sitting around polishing while waiting for perfect.
“I’m doing my best to learn, to pay attention and to get better for next time. Perfect is just a place to hide.”
Godin has been blogging at Seths Blog for eighteen years. His blog has made him a household name.
He’s not worried about the length of a blog post, its demonstration of intellect, the images on the post, its search engine performance, the distribution of the blog or stats.
We don’t ship because we’re creative, we’re creative because we ship, per Godin.
Legal bloggers are not creative in their intellect, they’re creative because they ship. They post regularly, not hiding in a place called perfect.
Godin’s right. We’ve been brain washed in law school and in the practice of law into thinking we need to be perfect.
We just need to be creative to feel good in our blogging. Feeling good will keep us keep blogging.
Creative need not be all the hard.
Per Godin, creative merely means what a human would do in their best moment of being generous, of doing something that might not work, of doing something for someone else with humanity. It doesn’t mean flash.