An editor gave me a great piece of advice once: “The older I get, the more I realize I have no advice to offer and only stories to tell.” I am starting (slowly) to understand that.

When I am asked to speak (which is happening more these days), I am often confronted with an uncomfortable question.

“Can you keep it practical?” the event planner asks, sometimes with what I detect is a hint of anxiety. Maybe they’ve read my work and are aware of my penchant for the philosophical and esoteric. Or maybe they’re just doing their job. Either way, I don’t ever fully understand the question.

What does it mean to be practical? Can I share something practical when it is not I who has to practice it? I imagine anything a person says, in a way, is both practical and impractical.

I could tell the most obscure story with a mysterious meaning buried deep in the narrative, and it could change a person’s life immediately upon hearing it. Or I could give you the most vanilla advice, telling you step by step what to do, and you could leave, as many people do when I deliver such talks, and do absolutely nothing.

So what does it mean to be practical?

I imagine what the person is often really saying is, “Can you make it easy to put into practice?” Which is a little more clear than “keep it practical,” but no more helpful. And really, if I am being honest, what I hear when someone asks that question is, “Can you make it easy?”

And the answer is no, I cannot. Only you can do that. You get to decide if this thing you tackle—building a brand, starting a podcast, finishing a book, whatever—is easy. And most people don’t want it to be easy. They don’t even want to do it. They want someone to tell them a thing that they think will help them, and maybe it will. At least for a while.

But what we call “practical” doesn’t typically lead to great work. No one gave Monet a paint-by-number set and said, “Here are some water lilies. Do it just like this.” Nor did a producer sit Adele down and tell her, “Lock yourself in a room, alone with your sadness and a bottle of wine, and write, ‘Rolling in the Deep.’” It doesn’t work like that.

The mystery and excitement of the creative journey

But great creative work also is not an accident. We all have our mentors and guides, giving us little clues along our own hero’s journey. We get to choose whom we trust and listen to. Because, of course as is the case in any journey, there may be those who want to thwart our cause. And the best guides don’t tell you exactly what to do; they just give a nod in the right direction.

When I first understood that the word “guru” means the opposite of what we understand it to be in the West, I fell in love with the term and immediately wanted one. The word “guru” means no darkness. A guru is a teacher of sorts, but rarely in the way we think of the term. Their purpose is not to tell you what the way is, but rather what the way is not. And if you keep trying enough doors, eventually you find one that is open.

Practicality doesn't really solve the problem

Being practical is like giving you a key to a door you didn’t even know existed. It might work if you knew where to look, but you may not even be sure you want to walk through that door. Maybe that’s just what someone else did to unlock their own success.

Furthermore, there is nothing particularly inspiring about “practicality.” I understand the need for easy answers and abstract advice, but how could we, as individual entities, ever have anything to offer another human being when it comes to concrete concepts and ideas? These are, at best, guesses, and ones we should hold loosely.

Because your life is not my life. And my experience is not yours. Certainly, when your lived experience compares to mine, we may find areas of intersection, and in that space, we can learn something about what it means to be human, perhaps. Or at least, what it means to be two people living on this planet.

But when we sacrifice our creative abilities on the altar of practicality, we lose a lot of our humanity and reduce our experience to a handful of tips and tricks, some techniques that we likely heard from someone else and then projected onto our own life, confirming our own biases.

Perhaps it would be better to tell a story, to share what we are learning in our own lives, and to let the audience decide exactly what to put into practice.

Good luck,

Jeff

• Some thoughts on art and work​
• ​Did the creative class break America? (The Atlantic)
• ​Hemingway wannabes...but it’s not what you think

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—Created by Kelly Belmonte, from a poem by Sophia Stid

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On the HC podcast this week, you’ll notice we switched things up a little bit. That’s because, for creators, consistency is boring.

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Jeff, who used to take a new way home from work every day to avoid unnecessary consistency.

Chantel, who ran the same route at the same time every day for years to avoid getting lost.

Matt, who adds directions and local landmarks to guide your journey. It's the same, but a little different.