The following excerpt was taken from Seth Godin’s blog several months ago. I stumbled upon it adding notes to Evernote. I keep a Notebook called #worthsaving that I paste things in for, well, times like these I guess.

The Initiator

For each person who cares enough to make something, who is bold enough to ship it, who is generous enough to say, “here, I made this,”…

There are ten people who say, “I could have done it better.”

A hundred people who say, “Who are you to do this?”

A thousand people who say, “I was just about to do that,”

and ten thousand people who don’t care at all.

And all of that is okay, because the person we need, the one we cherish, the one we would miss, is the first person, the initiator, the one who cares.
 

Thanks for shipping your work. 

The biggest take away, for me, from this excerpt, was that each of us has to make a decision at some point. Are you a consumer or a creator? Consuming is much easier and safer. Creating is hard and risky. Most people consume. I consume more than I create. 

I am actively working to do more creating and it is a lot harder than I thought. To take an idea and spend the time necessary to turn it into something that someone else can consume, even if that means a post on a website, takes effort and guts. What I have learned is to be true to your intended audience; myself and those interested, and let the rest go. An example of this is a t-shirt site that I created called TheBlackTeesCo. I always wanted to start a t-shirt site, so I did. It isn’t changing the world or anything but it is mine and I made it and shipped it.

If you are working on putting yourself out there, shipping your work, creating art and sharing it… It is a tough road but it is appreciated; we appreciate it. We need more like you. 

#create 

-Nate