Show Your Work! – Austin Kleon
Put yourself, and your work, out there every day, and you’ll start meeting some amazing people.
Document your Work
Become a documentarian of what you do. Start a work journal. Write your thoughts down in a notebook or speak them into an audio recorder. Keep a scrapbook. Take a lot of photographs of your work at different stages in your process. Shoot video of you working.
A lot of people are so used to just seeing the outcome of work. They never see the side of the work you go through to produce the outcome
Ask a question before sharing
Is it something I’d be comfortable with my boss or my mother seeing?”
Think of Social Media platforms as Notebooks
Your stock is best made by collecting, organizing, and expanding upon your flow. Social media sites function a lot like public notebooks—they’re places where we think aloud and let other people think back at us.
You can revisit and flip back through old ideas to see what you’ve been thinking.
For example, a lot of the ideas in this book started out as tweets, which then became blog posts, which then became book chapters. Small things, over time, can get big.
You’re only as good as your record collection
You’re only as good as your record collection
Where do you get your inspiration?
What sorts of things do you fill your head with?
What do you read?
Do you subscribe to anything?
What sites do you visit on the Internet?
What music do you listen to?
What movies do you see?
Do you look at art?
What do you collect?
What’s inside your scrapbook?
What do you pin to the corkboard above your desk? What do you stick on your refrigerator?
Who’s done work that you admire?
Who do you steal ideas from?
Do you have any heroes?
Who do you follow online?
Who are the practitioners you look up to in your field?
Share what you are learning
The best way to get started on the path to sharing your work is to think about what you want to learn and make a commitment to learning it in front of others. Find a scenius, pay attention to what others are sharing, and then start taking note of what they’re not sharing.
Love your Choices, it makes you unique
We all love things that other people think are garbage. You have to have the courage to keep loving your garbage, because what makes us unique is the diversity and breadth of our influences, the unique ways in which we mix up the parts of culture others have deemed “high” and “low.”
When you find things you genuinely enjoy, don’t let anyone else make you feel bad about them. Don’t feel guilty about the pleasure you take in the things you enjoy. Celebrate them.
Share what you love
Share what you love, and people who love the same things will find you.
Obituaries aren’t really about death; they’re about life.
“The sum of every obituary is how heroic and noble people are,” writes artist Maira Kalman. Reading about people who are dead now but did things with their lives makes me want to get up and do something decent.
Try to share something everyday
Your daily dispatch can be anything you want—a blog post, an email, a tweet, a YouTube video, or some other little bit of media. There’s no one-size-fits-all plan for everybody
Be open, share imperfect and unfinished work that you want feedback on, but don’t share absolutely everything. There’s a big, big difference between sharing and oversharing.
Become a storyteller
We have to be storyteller while sharing our work,
In this chapter author shares the story of some people who picks up the things from flea market at $128 and sells on ebay at around $3200. how? They hire some writers and make stories around products, how and where they found them.
When sharing a picture, try to tell a story that can connect people with the picture. Humans are good at remembering stories.
Whether share it or save it for later
Documenting and recording your process as you go along has its own rewards: You’ll start to see the work you’re doing more clearly and feel like you’re making progress. And when you’re ready to share, you’ll have a surplus of material to choose from.
Carving out a space for yourself online, somewhere where you can express yourself and share your work, is still one of the best possible investments you can make with your time.