Review: Business Book Club: The Practice

A small group of us gathered once again on Zoom to discuss Seth Godin's new book The Practice.

Seth is well known for his marketing books and that audience love him. And it felt to us like this book was again aimed more at these sorts of people again. We as a group found the writing style quite hard to get into. Although we often pass comment on books that only tell stories, we felt like this book needed more stories to illustrate the points made within it! 

The book was made up of 219 ideas to help people be more creative and while this felt like a slightly overwhelming list, we did still find some takeaways within the pages. It opened with the words ‘The magic of the creative process is that there is no magic’ . This book's premise was helping people get better at practising being creative as it's something we can all do. 

Key to this for us was the idea that creative blocks won't happen if we're not worried about failure. A lot has been written about being better at this over the last few years, so although it's not a new idea, it's interesting to think about the role of this in creating something. We need to trust ourselves, find the courage to be more creative and recognise that making mistakes is important. 

It also points out that the more you practise being creative, the better you will become at it and the better you will be at knowing how you work.

One of his other key focus areas was the concept of ‘shipping’, as he puts it ‘because it doesn’t count if you don’t share it’. Putting things out into the world is key to developing them further, in his eyes. While this makes sense in some spaces and it does link to being open to failure, there was some discussion about how sometimes we like to create for ourselves only, and how we thought that was ok! 

In short, although this book will not be going onto our top 10 list, as always, we had some good conversations. We'll take away from this that everyone can be creative in their own way, and whoever you are you will benefit from practicing creativity.