advice and practice
on knowing, doing, and the space between
In recent weeks, I’ve found myself in a strange position. After months of building systems, writing essays, and thinking deeply about creative structure, I began offering creative advising sessions—working one-on-one with other artists, writers, producers, and creative professionals to help them navigate their own processes.
Moving in this direction has been energizing and clarifying. Also, a little destabilizing.
Because, even as I’ve been offering strategies and insights to others, I’ve found myself re-evaluating everything in my own routine. Advice, it turns out, hits differently when you try to inhabit it. The systems that seemed stable on paper suddenly feel precarious when applied to your own messy, embodied, contingent life. You begin to realize that knowing something and acting on it are not the same. They live in different registers entirely.
This is the tension I’ve been thinking about this week—the space between what we say and what we do, between what we understand intellectually and what we’ve integrated into the daily rhythms of our work
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The Promise of Advice
Advice is everywhere. We consume it almost without noticing: podcasts, interviews, posts, threads, voice notes between friends. It comes in the form of frameworks, mantras, metaphors—ways of seeing that feel revelatory in the moment. And often, they are. A good piece of advice can reorient a stuck perspective. It can relieve pressure, restore momentum, or help us reframe the terms of the work itself.
But advice is also seductive precisely because it feels so clean. It bypasses the uncertainty of doing. It distills hard-won experience into simple language, and in that simplification, something gets lost. Advice offers coherence, but not necessarily traction. It tells you what you could do, but it doesn’t make you do it.
In my own life, I’ve reached a point where I can reliably bring a musical idea into the world. I have the materials I need, a perspective that welcomes uncertainty, and a system that guides me through the early, middle, and final stages of a project. My loose SOP for making a track is familiar enough that I can show up, work through resistance, and finish something—even when the process gets murky.
What I cannot seem to reliably do is market my music in a way that brings it to a large audience. . I have consumed approximately one gazillion pieces of advice on DIY music marketing: I’ve watched the tutorials, studied shortform editing, learned campaign strategy, audience engagement, visual branding, the whole ecosystem. But when it comes to my own work, I struggle to generate the momentum to apply them. Without a sense of traction, the path forward doesn’t reveal itself clearly. And that’s when advice begins to feel abstract again—true, maybe, but not yet alive in the room with me.
(Strangely, when other artists ask me for help with this exact challenge, I often overflow with ideas—angles, platforms, narrative frames, practical moves. Perhaps this particular blockage is something to explore in more detail in the future…)
When you are actually in the work—in the room with your own doubts, distractions, and imperfect materials—the advice you once admired starts to feel insufficient. Or too general. Or too optimistic. You start to sense that the real work of creativity isn’t in acquiring better ideas. It’s in returning to the same ideas repeatedly, under new conditions, until they become part of how you move.
Back to bell hooks because I’ve been on a kick lately. She says in Art on my Mind, “I’m not sure any theory or even writing on creativity can fully evoke the process, the being that goes into making art.” That being—the temperament, the capacity to persist, the ability to structure your own attention—matters just as much as any technique. They are, in fact, the pillars of an embodied auto-didacticism that, I think, will become increasingly necessary as technology and culture move forward.
The Reality of Practice
Practice is where advice gets tested.
When I work with others on, I try to offer clear language, conceptual orientation, and a set of tools or routines that might support their work. But in doing so, I’m also forced to hold up a mirror. Am I using these same tools? Are my own creative rhythms intact? What does it mean to recommend a strategy if I’ve abandoned it myself?
In that way, practice has a way of humbling you. It forces you out of abstraction. It reveals how partial and contingent your systems really are. It also teaches you what endures—what advice continues to function across time, mood, and project type.
There’s a reason I advocate for structure—not because it guarantees output, but because it offers a form within which uncertainty can unfold. Structure gives you something to return to when motivation disappears. It turns ephemeral insight into durable rhythm.
For me, the most reliable structure for music making has been a weekly rhythm of focused sessions—sound selection, composition, arrangement, and rough mix. Not because these are universally correct stages of creativity, but because they map to the kinds of decisions I have to make in a given week. They help me orient myself, even when things feel scattered.
That’s what most creative advice is really about: helping someone orient themselves when they’re lost. Giving them a foothold. And then getting out of the way.
The Space Between
There is always a space between intention and embodiment.
It’s not a failure. It’s the condition of creative life. You understand something conceptually, but it hasn’t yet made its way into your nervous system, into your calendar, into the tactile rituals that comprise your days. You can’t skip this space. But you can be accompanied through it.
That’s what I’ve come to see as the heart of advising. It isn’t about delivering perfect answers. It’s about helping someone stay in the space long enough for the work to start moving again. Sometimes, that means helping them remember what they already know. Sometimes, it means naming something they couldn’t quite articulate on their own. Other times, it’s simply about asking the right question at the right time.
To me, this isn’t coaching. It isn’t productivity consulting. It’s a form of creative witnessing—a structured conversation that helps clarify direction and restore trust in your own instincts. It’s also the kind of support I wish I’d had in my earlier life.
If this resonates—if you’re someone navigating the space between clarity and action, vision and execution—I’d love to work with you. I’ve opened a handful of spots for one-on-one creative advising sessions this month. These aren’t formulaic or pre-scripted. Each session is tailored to your context, your goals, and your particular blockages.
You can book a session here. Or, if you’re not ready for that, feel free to reply to this email with a question or reflection. I may address it in a future letter.
Thank you, as always, for being part of this project. Writing this newsletter is, itself, a form of practice—one that keeps me accountable to the ideas I care about most. I hope it does something similar for you.