Tag / the practice

by Nathan Coumbe

More bad ideas lead to more creativity

For most of us, if we want to be more original, to be more successful, to be more “renowned,” the key is to have more ideas. To create more things.

You need to focus on the quantity of work you create—the output—and less on the quality.

Why? You need bad ideas to come up with a few good ones. 

Seth Godin has a great rant about this around writer’s block. People don’t actually get writer’s block. They are afraid of writing down bad ideas and claim they have no good ideas.

Good ideas often come through sheer volume.

by Nathan Coumbe

Atomic writing

Atomic Habits by James Clear consistently tops every bestseller list.

And for good reason: if you follow the ideas, you’ll improve your habits. Improve your habits, and you improve your days. Improve your days, and you improve your life.

What’s the saying? “Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.”

Emerson definitely said it better than I. But it means the same thing: your daily habits lead to your lasting legacy.

Which brings me to an idea I presented to someone the other day.

A friend told me he wanted to write. And he’d considered going the “Stephen King” route, writing 2,000 words a day, but he seemed daunted by that prospect.

I agreed. That’s a lot to commit to at the beginning. So I suggested he go the Atomic Habits route instead.

What’s the smallest version of that habit he could reasonably commit to?

My idea: write one sentence every day. Then don’t break the streak.

I find it hard to believe that anyone reading this can’t come up with at least one original thought every day.

It doesn’t have to be brilliant. In fact, I guarantee that 50% of your ideas will be “below average.” But so what? Half my blog posts are below average—that’s the definition!

It doesn’t have to be brilliant—it just has to exist! Do that for 30 days, and the 31st sentence will be infinitely better than the 1st one.

A writer writes. So be a writer and start writing!

by Nathan Coumbe

Sometimes you miss a day

Even the best streaks get broken most of the time.

The only good response is to wipe the slate clean and start over.

The wrong, and much more common response, is to quit the whole thing because of one bad day.

Don’t do that.

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by Nathan Coumbe

We need the dreamers

A friend of mine wrote to me the other day telling me that my “realistic views” helped to balance out her “daydreaming” ideas. 

But we need the dreamers. 

Without them, nothing changes. Nothing improves. 

No new ideas means the world never gets safer, cleaner, healthier, or more just.

Without the imagination, suppositions, and oulandishness of some humans, we stagnate. 

Sure, we also (sometimes) need the realists and the doers to make the dreams come true. 

But without the people who are willing to say, “Is this anything?”, the rest of us have nothing to work with.

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by Nathan Coumbe

I don’t like the word “talent”

“Talent” is something you’re born with… It’s innate, unchanging, and implies that if you don’t already have it, you never will.

“Skill” is a more accurate term. Skills can be learned, and most everything we consider to be talents are actually skills.

  • Musical abilities
  • Public speaking
  • Leadership
  • Writing
  • Painting
  • Inventing
  • Salesmanship
  • Teaching

People aren’t born to do these things. They try them out and persevere through the poor quality and failed early efforts until they get better.

Calling a musician “talented” might actually be an insult. Why?

Because it dismisses all the hard work they put in to develop the skill of musicianship.

by Nathan Coumbe

“Being” requires “doing”

You become a writer by writing.

You become a leader by leading.

You become a doctor by doctoring.

You can learn the principles and the ideas behind these fields from books and courses. But the skill to do them is only developed through practice.

Zig Ziglar said: “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly.” That’s where you must start.

Anything worth being only comes about as a result of doing.

by Nathan Coumbe

Artists & fly fishing

Seth Godin has a short chapter in his book The Practice on his experience learning to fly fish. 

At the retreat, he specifically requested that he not have a hook attached to his rod so he could focus instead on the practice of casting perfectly. 

Without the hook (and therefore without any chance of catching anything), there was no way he could obsess over the outcome. He was focused on the process when everybody else was focused on catching a fish.

The result—he learned how to cast perfectly and mastered fly fishing. His friends obsessed over making a catch and failed to develop the necessary skills.

This is how artists must work. They must focus on the process, not the outcome. They must create and ship work on a regular basis without worrying about whether or not this project will be “the one.”

Process, not outcome. That’s where we need to redirect our focus.

If we don’t set out to create a masterpiece, it’s much more likely we’ll make one in the end.

(A personal aside: I realized after reading this passage that my dad was an artist in the same way. He loved fishing and genuinely did not care if he caught a fish or not in the process. He was totally at peace on a boat or pier casting and reeling, over and over. He had the mindset and demeanor of a true artist.)

by Nathan Coumbe

The inauthentic hero

The people we admire most are the ones who act the most inauthentic in the moment. 

Being authentic: the idea that you should do or say whatever it is you’re thinking or feeling in the moment. This is what we glorify. 

Vs.

Being inauthentic: doing things we’d rather not. Doing them because we promised we would. Doing things regardless of how we feel in the moment.

War heroes, the type of people we admire for their bravery and selfless acts, are those who act decidedly inauthentic in the moment. 

If they were being authentic—when the rounds cracked overhead or the grenade dropped in the middle of their buddies—they’d run as fast and far away as they could. 

But instead, they make a conscious decision to act despite how they feel in the moment. They run towards the sound of battle, or throw themselves on the grenade to save their friends. 

They do these things despite feeling terrified, exhausted, or pained. And we admire them for that. 

We admire the same traits in people from all walks of life: athletes, leaders, writers, musicians.

We want them to do what they signed up to do. Imagine going to a concert where the musician didn’t play because “they just didn’t feel like it” when they got on stage.

So, in fact, we don’t want authenticity. We want professionalism, decency, integrity—for people to keep the promises they make… To do the things that need doing regardless of how they’re feeling in the moment. 

In terms of behavior, authenticity leads to tantrums and inaction. 

Inauthenticity, on the other hand, leads to professionalism. 

(H/t to Seth Godin for inspiring this post.) 

by Nathan Coumbe

Judgement is the enemy of creativity

We kill most of our great, wonderful, creative ideas before they’re ever born.

We write them off, dismiss them out of hand, smother them…

But we can’t know if our ideas are good—if they’ll work or cause the change we seek to make in the world—until we publish them.

Only by letting our ideas engage with the market, the world, or our audience can we know if it’s good.

If you judge every idea before you try it out, you’ll never be creative.

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by Nathan Coumbe

What single superpower would you want?

As you can tell (because I keep quoting it), I’ve been reading and re-reading Seth Godin’s newest book.

Here’s the latest one that’s had my brain buzzing:

“The problem with the model of the well-rounded superhero [talking about Superman being able to solve any problem] is that there are very few well-rounded superheroes. It’s much more likely that we’ll succeed by overinvesting [emphasis added] in just one or two skills.

He continues by giving us a challenge:

“The challenge, then, is to have one superpower. All out of balance to the rest of your being. If, over time, you develop a few more, that’s fine… [But] begin with one.”

My first thought was: “I don’t know what superpower I want to invest all my time in.”

And then it came unbidden: writing.

So what about you? If you could only choose one, what superpower would you want to invest in?

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