My work is to listen, then support. Clients will talk me through an opportunity or challenge, taking me through many angles and details before then asking me for my thoughts and insights. Quite often, my response begins by saying that the issue is:
“Simple, but not easy”
Simple? Any opportunity or challenge will feel simple when we get to the heart of the issue, to what needs solved for the issue to be resolved. However, it is often not easy to do what needs to be done.
This week I was listening to one of my all-time favourite thinkers on a favourite podcast, Seth Godin being interviewed by Tim Ferris, in advance of the release of his new book, “The Practice – Shipping Creative Work“.
The podcast began by delving into a favourite topic for Seth, the topic of “shipping”, one I talked about last week in “The Art of Finishing“. Seth then mentioned the famous Nike slogan “Just Do It”, then said that “just” implied an excuse to merely go through the motions, so he prefers “merely do it”.
My iteration on that is that I feel “merely” also minimises the importance of doing the work, so I prefer the powerful word that I almost always encourage people to use in place of “just”, and that is “simply”.
So, as I do each day in writing a daily blog (inspired, of course, by Seth’s practice of doing so), I don’t “just” write, I simply write. When people ask me how I manage to write every day, to come up with ideas, I say “I’m a writer, I simple write”.
Oh, and a last thought. Yoga is something that, no matter how long you have been doing it, how many classes, courses you have completed, how expert you are, Yoga is something that you practice. So, to practice shipping your creative work, the answer is:
Simply do the work