I just picked up Seth Godin’s new book The Practice, Shipping Creative Work. I love how he writes—short, easily digestible essays, probably gleaned at least in part from his blog, collected into an anthology on a topic. I’m only about 20 pages in, but I a lot of what I am finding is gold. Of particular interest to this blog is a short piece called “To Be of Service.”
Godin writes:
To Be of Service.
Isn’t that what we’re here to do?
To do work we’re proud of.
To put ourselves on the hook. (Reference to an earlier chapter)
To find the contribution we’re capable of.
The only way to be on this journey is to begin.But there isn’t a guarantee. In fact, most of what we seek to do will not work. But our intent—the intent of being of service, of making things better, of building something that matters—is an essential part of the pattern.
Because most of us, most of the time, act without intent.
Seth Godin, The Practice: Shipping Creative Work
I loved this quote. So often we can get tangled up in motivations, but what if our primary intent in our creative work was to be of service, to improve the lives of others, to help and serve and share love. What if we let God deal with our success in the way He defines it and just set out to do the best work we possibly can. I think that could create a pretty awesome world and a pretty good life as well.
I highly recommend this book. It’s not a Christian book, but there are a lot of principles in here that will transfer nicely into what we are trying to do as Christ-following creatives. About the only downsize in reading a Seth Godin book, is the additional expense. Figure on using about $5 worth of highlighters. This is seriously great stuff.
AMOKArts 