After reading Seth Godin’s The Practice: Shipping Creative Work (and summarizing what it meant for me here), I committed to accomplishing my first step: defining an audience and the impact I could have on this group through my art. My initial goal was to “define an audience and identify the change I can bring to them.” I thought about groups I could most likely influence, but none really excited me.

Maybe it’s cheating, but I already have an idea for my “art”, and the audience, at least initially, is me. It’s an app that I want for myself. This goes against the approach in The Practice, where the audience is ideally not the creator or even people like them. The idea is to tap into something unique within oneself that can bring change to an audience that is different.

The app feels meaningful and useful to me so I’ll continue “cheating”. It may be naive to assume that enough people in the world would find value in a product designed primarily for myself, but I think some will. Even if they don’t, I can still frame this approach as art in Godin’s view. I’m creating something I’ll ship, even if just to myself. I know it will change at least me by building my skills, providing meaningful work, and eventually helping me connect with like-minded people that maybe I can even help.

As an exercise in defining an audience, here are some traits I think my audience could have. Although most describe me, not all do entirely. My audience consists of people who:

• Want to improve, document, and share their cooking skills
• Want to start, maintain, or carry on cooking traditions
• Feel connected to their heritage, either from childhood memories or ancestral roots
• Want to expand their cooking skills by learning traditions outside their own heritage
• Resist a dull, monotonous life
• Appreciate meaningful reasons to cook
• Believe that spending time and effort on cooking good meals is worthwhile
• Have time to cook, even if only occasionally
• Value cooking at home over eating out or ordering takeout, including as a way to save money
• Would appreciate a community of like-minded people

To keep moving forward with this process, I’ll reframe each action item as it relates to my idea. Here are the action items I previously committed to:

1. Define an audience and the change I can bring to them
2. State the assertion
3. Pick a genre
4. Schedule the work
5. Develop an accountability system
6. Brainstorm ways to find a supportive group of peers
7. Engage with the audience and ship the smallest piece of work I can
8. Measure the impact
9. Repeat