I am not sure when I got to know about Seth Godin’s world. Seven years back I remember hearing his audiobooks while I used to drive from office to home and back. It was a good one-hour drive one way and that is when I had the chance to hear his three books Tribe, Dip, and Icarus Deception. I didn’t enjoy the slow narration of Seth in the audiobook while I was driving through those traffic snarls. But his ideas and content had a profound impact on me silently. Since then I have been collecting a lot of his books ( not yet read fully). I am on his latest book The Practice. I have been regularly watching his videos and podcasts. I am inspired by him in writing. He has written over 7000 blogs, 19 bestseller books and continues to write every day. He calls himself a ‘ professional noticer”. Someone came to Seth and told him ” I am not a good writer”. He replied, ” Good, show me your bad writing “. I like Seth for this kind of approach. One of the best lessons I got from him and which helped me in blogging has been this one.
The other day I was asked in a community meeting. ” Has your writing helped you in speaking?” I responded positively and shared some ideas about how it helped. Seth Godin talks about this very deeply in his book “The Practice.” I am consolidating a set of Seth’s rules which I found very fascinating. I want to implement them as part of my system to write every week. This is Seth’s Trifecta which made sense to me:
- Write every day – He quotes ” Art isn’t a result , it’s a journey”
I chose all the weekends to write instead of every day. I later realized that in my journal I was writing every day. The very art of writing was helping me to push the boundaries. My ritual used to be to write whatever ideas that come to my mind in my multi-color journal. To that extent to make it frictionless, I used to keep changing my pens so that my thoughts can flow consistently, effortlessly, and manifest as words. Seth has a point here. He says, ” Nobody is good at it until you do it several times”.
I used to wonder what I will write every weekend. Then I decided to observe things that go around me. That made me look at the world around us with stories as I covered in the last blog ” What do you blog about?” So when I started writing I initially used to wonder how will the ending be and what is the message I am sharing and was anxious about the entire process. Over time as Seth mentions in one of the video interviews, ” The dance between what is obvious and I never thought it that way used to fulfill me much more than the blog itself. Call it finding happiness in the wild pursuit-like path with disciplined practice.”
2. We should not underrate excuses, they are peaceful for the mind.
I am 5 blogs away from 200. Seven days left and I am already getting jitters. I decided what if I missed, what is the big deal? It was my wife who threw this challenge at me complete 200 blogs before April 24th. I was doing my best on the 17th morning to give myself excuses. One of the best things about excuses is that they are valid and they let you off the hook. Seth gave me some piece of his mind by saying that we should never underrate excuses as they are peaceful for the mind. I felt good hearing that from him. In the next instance, I decided to shift my internal story. I decided to be on the hook. One of the best lessons I learned through this blogging exercise from Seth was that through the blog How I am marketing it to myself? Earlier the story used to be about sufficiency ( Knowledge, grammar, Vocabulary), my ideals and assertions in life, my contributions to name a few. Seth talks about how Talent is overrated. He mentions that ” Don’t call someone skillful talented, they are skillful”. They have worked their way to build skills. I was allowing all the reasons not to blog because I am not good at it. But then I found solace in this one.
3. So far and Not yet
The other day when I was caught in this frenzy of hitting home with 200 I turned to my wife and asked her for ideas. She sat down and started looking at my blog posts drafts. There were 100 of them. She went into a couple of them and told me ” why don’t you check out these drafts and figure out from those 5 ones”. I took her point and decided to pick one from the 103 drafts because one thing I learned from that process was that to get to 197 blogs I had to write 104 drafts and I was stuck on the way. Seth asks the question, “How big is the discard Pile? ” I realized that there are countless ideas that I have recorded on my iPhone notes, blog journals that have not seen the light of the day. One thing that kept me posting blogs was this mantra of these words ” So Far” and ” Not Yet“. Seth mentioned in practice this way: You haven’t reached your goals ( So far), You’re not as good at your skill as you want to be ( Not yet )
“So far” and “Not yet” are the foundation of every successful journey, build a streak
Finally, I must mention that I have combined trifecta to write every week and post every week. But the best rule I have learned is this one, thanks to my wife who does the streak of edits of my blogs…
