Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon
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Intro
- You don't just have to be good, you need to be findable.
- Build sharing into your routine.
You don't have to be a genius
- Don't buy into the "lone genius" myth.
- "Scenius" - great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals.
- Start asking how you can contribute to a scenius.
- Be an amateur.
- Contributing something is better than contributing nothing.
- Think about what you want to learn, and make a commitment to learning it in front of others.
- Find a scenius and start taking not of what they're not sharing. Fill the voids.
- The only way to find your voice is to use it.
- If you want people to know about what you do, and the things you care about, you have to share.
- Just remember that you're goint to die, and therefore have nothing to lose.
Think process, not product
- People want to see how the sausage gets made.
- Become a documentarian of what you do.
- Sharing process is most valuable if products of your work aren't easily shared.
- Shape the scraps and residue of your process into something.
- Documenting and recording your process will help you see your work more clearly.
Share something small everyday
- Focus on days.
- A daily dispatch show what you're working on right now.
- Frame it as "what are you working on?"
- Only put things out there that may be helpful. Always ask "so what?"
- Stock and flow. Flow is the stuff that reminds people you exist. Stock is the durable stuff.
- Maintain flow while working on stock in the background.
- Stock is best made by collecting, organizing, and expanding your flow.
- Think of your website as a self-invention machine. Fill it with your work, ideas, and stuff you care about.
Open up your cabinet of curiousities
- Wunderkammern - wonder chamber of your curiousities. Have one of those.
- Collecting and creating are on opposite ends of the same spectrum.
- Your influences are worth sharing. They clue people in to who you are and what you do.
- Love your garbage. If you like something, like it.
- If you don't properly attribute the work of others, you not only rob the creator, you rob all the people you've shared it with. They can't dig deeper.
Tell good stories
- Work doesn't speak for itself.
- The value of things to others is deeply affected by what you tell them about it.
- The stories you tell about your work have a huge effect on how people feel and understand it.
- A story must have structure.
- The key is to edit the messiness of life and your work into something with structure.
- Pitches are stories without endings.
They are a great structure for open-ended stories.
- First act is past. Why do the work? What have you done?
- Second act is present. What are you doing now?
- Third is future. Where you're going. How can someone help you get there.
- Keep bios short and sweet.
Teach what you know
- Emulate chefs by out-teaching the competition.
- The minute you learn something, turn around and teach it to others.
- Make people better at something they want to be better at.
- When you teach someone how to do your work, you're generating more interest in your work. You're letting them in on it.
Don't turn into human spam
- Shut up and listen. If you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader.
- Be interested in something and someone other than yourself.
- If you want fans, you have to be a fan first. If you want to be accepted by a community, you have to be a good citizen.
- Be a connector.
- If you want to be interesting, you have to be interested.
- Make stuff you love and talk about stuff you love and you'll attract people who love that kind of stuff.
- "Whatever excites you, go do it. Whatever drains you, stop doing it" - Derek Sivers