The premise
Show Your Work’s premise is that sharing what you’re working on is one of the best things you can do to fast-track both your learning and your career. Showing others your work is a more accurate and honest representation of your capabilities than a CV is.
Show Your Work!
Author:: Austin Kleon
Highlights
Comedian Steve Martin famously dodges these questions with the advice, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” If you just focus on getting really good, Martin says, people will come to you. I happen to agree: You don’t really find an audience for your work; they find you. But it’s not enough to be good. In order to be found, you have to be findable. (Location 22)
Almost all of the people I look up to and try to steal from today, regardless of their profession, have built sharing into their routine. (Location 26)
If Steal Like an Artist was a book about stealing influence from other people, this book is about how to influence others by letting them steal from you. (Location 35)
Scenius doesn’t take away from the achievements of those great individuals; it just acknowledges that good work isn’t created in a vacuum, and that creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds. (Location 56)
We’re all terrified of being revealed as amateurs, but in fact, today it is the amateur—the enthusiast who pursues her work in the spirit of love (in French, the word means “lover”), regardless of the potential for fame, money, or career—who often has the advantage over the professional. Because they have little to lose, amateurs are willing to try anything and share the results. (Location 72)
Amateurs are not afraid to make mistakes or look ridiculous in public. They’re in love, so they don’t hesitate to do work that others think of as silly or just plain stupid. (Location 77)
Amateurs fit the same bill: They’re just regular people who get obsessed by something and spend a ton of time thinking out loud about it. (Location 85)
The world is changing at such a rapid rate that it’s turning us all into amateurs. (Location 91)
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. Be on the lookout for voids that you can fill with your own efforts, no matter how bad they are at first. (Location 97)
It sounds a little extreme, but in this day and age, if your work isn’t online, it doesn’t exist. (Location 119)
“People really do want to see how the sausage gets made.” That’s how designers Dan Provost and Tom Gerhardt put it in their book on entrepreneurship, It Will Be Exhilarating. “By putting things out there, consistently, you can form a relationship with your customers. It allows them to see the person behind the products.” (Location 172)
sharing your process might actually be most valuable if the products of your work aren’t easily shared, if you’re still in the apprentice stage of your work, if you can’t just slap up a portfolio and call it a day, or if your process doesn’t necessarily lead to tangible finished products. (Location 191)
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. This isn’t about making art, it’s about simply keeping track of what’s going on around you. Take advantage of all the cheap, easy tools at your disposal—these days, most of us carry a fully functional multimedia studio around in our smartphones. (Location 197)
Once a day, after you’ve done your day’s work, go back to your documentation and find one little piece of your process that you can share. Where you are in your process will determine what that piece is. (Location 211)
A daily dispatch is even better than a résumé or a portfolio, because it shows what we’re working on right now. (Location 217)
“When I ask them to show me work, they show me things from school, or from another job, but I’m more interested in what they did last weekend.” (Location 218)
The form of what you share doesn’t matter. 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. (Location 221)
I like the tagline at dribbble.com: “What are you working on?” Stick to that question and you’ll be good. Don’t show your lunch or your latte; show your work. (Location 233)
Of course, don’t let sharing your work take precedence over actually doing your work. If you’re having a hard time balancing the two, just set a timer for 30 minutes. (Location 243)
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 over-sharing. The act of sharing is one of generosity—you’re putting something out there because you think it might be helpful or entertaining to someone on the other side of the screen. (Location 254)
“Stock and flow” is an economic concept that writer Robin Sloan has adapted into a metaphor for media: “Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.” (Location 267)
Sloan says the magic formula is to maintain your flow while working on your stock in the background. (Location 270)
your stock is best made by collecting, organizing, and expanding upon your flow. (Location 272)
When you detect these patterns, you can start gathering these bits and pieces and turn them into something bigger and more substantial. You can turn your flow into stock. (Location 276)
Don’t think of your website as a self-promotion machine, think of it as a self-invention machine. Online, you can become the person you really want to be. Fill your website with your work and your ideas and the stuff you care about. (Location 295)
“Dumpster diving” is one of the jobs of the artist—finding the treasure in other people’s trash, sifting through the debris of our culture, paying attention to the stuff that everyone else is ignoring, and taking inspiration from the stuff that people have tossed aside for whatever reasons. (Location 342)
So, what makes for great attribution? Attribution is all about providing context for what you’re sharing: what the work is, who made it, how they made it, when and where it was made, why you’re sharing it, why people should care about it, and where people can see some more work like it. Attribution is about putting little museum labels next to the stuff you share. (Location 363)
where we found the work that we’re sharing. It’s always good practice to give a shout-out to the people who’ve helped you stumble onto good work and also leave a bread-crumb trail that people you’re sharing with can follow back to the sources of your inspiration. (Location 366)
Words matter. Artists love to trot out the tired line, “My work speaks for itself,” but the truth is, our work doesn’t speak for itself. Human beings want to know where things came from, how they were made, and who made them. (Location 398)
Whether you’re telling a finished or unfinished story, always keep your audience in mind. Speak to them directly in plain language. Value their time. Be brief. Learn to speak. Learn to write. Use spell-check. (Location 436)
Teaching people doesn’t subtract value from what you do, it actually adds to it. When you teach someone how to do your work, you are, in effect, generating more interest in your work. People feel closer to your work because you’re letting them in on what you know. (Location 500)
As every writer knows, if you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader first. (Location 511)
Meeting people online is awesome, but turning them into IRL friends is even better. (Location 600)
When you put your work out into the world, you have to be ready for the good, the bad, and the ugly. The more people come across your work, the more criticism you’ll face. (Location 608)
The way to be able to take a punch is to practice getting hit a lot. Put out a lot of work. (Location 613)
If you spend your life avoiding vulnerability, you and your work will never truly connect with other people. (Location 620)
My wife is fond of saying, “If someone took a dump in your living room, you wouldn’t let it sit there, would you?” Nasty comments are the same—they should be scooped up and thrown in the trash. (Location 640)
We all have to get over our “starving artist” romanticism and the idea that touching money inherently corrupts creativity. Some of our most meaningful and most cherished cultural artifacts were made for money. (Location 652)
Everybody says they want artists to make money, and then when they do, everybody hates them for it. (Location 657)
Whether you ask for donations, crowdfund, or sell your products or services, asking for money in return for your work is a leap you want to take only when you feel confident that you’re putting work out into the world that you think is truly worth something. Don’t be afraid to charge for your work, but put a price on it that you think is fair. (Location 681)
Even if you don’t have anything to sell right now, you should always be collecting email addresses from people who come across your work and want to stay in touch. (Location 685)
Email is decades and decades old, but it’s nowhere close to being dead. (Location 687)
Don’t betray their trust and don’t push your luck. Build your list and treat it with respect. (Location 697)
As a human being, you have a finite amount of time and attention. At some point, you have to switch from saying “yes” a lot to saying “no” a lot. (Location 718)
The way I get over my guilt about not answering email is to hold office hours. Once a month, I make myself available so that anybody can ask me anything on my website, and I try to give thoughtful answers that I then post so anyone can see. (Location 722)
You can’t plan on anything; you can only go about your work, as Isak Dinesen wrote, “every day, without hope or despair.” You can’t count on success; you can only leave open the possibility for it, and be ready to jump on and take the ride when it comes for you. (Location 742)
If you look to artists who’ve managed to achieve lifelong careers, you detect the same pattern: They all have been able to persevere, regardless of success or failure. (Location 754)
Instead of taking a break in between projects, waiting for feedback, and worrying about what’s next, use the end of one project to light up the next one. Just do the work that’s in front of you, and when it’s finished, ask yourself what you missed, what you could’ve done better, or what you couldn’t get to, and jump right into the next project. (Location 761)
“Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough,” writes author Alain de Botton. (Location 795)
Think of it as beginning again. Go back to chapter one—literally!—and become an amateur. Look for something new to learn, and when you find it, dedicate yourself to learning it out in the open. Document your progress and share as you go so that others can learn along with you. Show your work, and when the right people show up, pay close attention to them, because they’ll have a lot to show you. (Location 806)
Go online and post what you’re working on right now with the tag showyourwork. Plan a “Show Your Work!” night with colleagues or friends. Use this book as a guide — share works-in-progress and your curiosities, tell stories, and teach one another. (Location 811)
Title: Show Your Work!
Author: Austin Kleon
Tags: readwise, books
date: 2024-01-30
Show Your Work!
Author:: Austin Kleon
AI-Generated Summary
None
Highlights
Comedian Steve Martin famously dodges these questions with the advice, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” If you just focus on getting really good, Martin says, people will come to you. I happen to agree: You don’t really find an audience for your work; they find you. But it’s not enough to be good. In order to be found, you have to be findable. (Location 22)
Almost all of the people I look up to and try to steal from today, regardless of their profession, have built sharing into their routine. (Location 26)
If Steal Like an Artist was a book about stealing influence from other people, this book is about how to influence others by letting them steal from you. (Location 35)
Scenius doesn’t take away from the achievements of those great individuals; it just acknowledges that good work isn’t created in a vacuum, and that creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds. (Location 56)
We’re all terrified of being revealed as amateurs, but in fact, today it is the amateur—the enthusiast who pursues her work in the spirit of love (in French, the word means “lover”), regardless of the potential for fame, money, or career—who often has the advantage over the professional. Because they have little to lose, amateurs are willing to try anything and share the results. (Location 72)
Amateurs are not afraid to make mistakes or look ridiculous in public. They’re in love, so they don’t hesitate to do work that others think of as silly or just plain stupid. (Location 77)
Amateurs fit the same bill: They’re just regular people who get obsessed by something and spend a ton of time thinking out loud about it. (Location 85)
The world is changing at such a rapid rate that it’s turning us all into amateurs. (Location 91)
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. Be on the lookout for voids that you can fill with your own efforts, no matter how bad they are at first. (Location 97)
It sounds a little extreme, but in this day and age, if your work isn’t online, it doesn’t exist. (Location 119)
“People really do want to see how the sausage gets made.” That’s how designers Dan Provost and Tom Gerhardt put it in their book on entrepreneurship, It Will Be Exhilarating. “By putting things out there, consistently, you can form a relationship with your customers. It allows them to see the person behind the products.” (Location 172)
sharing your process might actually be most valuable if the products of your work aren’t easily shared, if you’re still in the apprentice stage of your work, if you can’t just slap up a portfolio and call it a day, or if your process doesn’t necessarily lead to tangible finished products. (Location 191)
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. This isn’t about making art, it’s about simply keeping track of what’s going on around you. Take advantage of all the cheap, easy tools at your disposal—these days, most of us carry a fully functional multimedia studio around in our smartphones. (Location 197)
Once a day, after you’ve done your day’s work, go back to your documentation and find one little piece of your process that you can share. Where you are in your process will determine what that piece is. (Location 211)
A daily dispatch is even better than a résumé or a portfolio, because it shows what we’re working on right now. (Location 217)
“When I ask them to show me work, they show me things from school, or from another job, but I’m more interested in what they did last weekend.” (Location 218)
The form of what you share doesn’t matter. 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. (Location 221)
I like the tagline at dribbble.com: “What are you working on?” Stick to that question and you’ll be good. Don’t show your lunch or your latte; show your work. (Location 233)
Of course, don’t let sharing your work take precedence over actually doing your work. If you’re having a hard time balancing the two, just set a timer for 30 minutes. (Location 243)
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 over-sharing. The act of sharing is one of generosity—you’re putting something out there because you think it might be helpful or entertaining to someone on the other side of the screen. (Location 254)
“Stock and flow” is an economic concept that writer Robin Sloan has adapted into a metaphor for media: “Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.” (Location 267)
Sloan says the magic formula is to maintain your flow while working on your stock in the background. (Location 270)
your stock is best made by collecting, organizing, and expanding upon your flow. (Location 272)
When you detect these patterns, you can start gathering these bits and pieces and turn them into something bigger and more substantial. You can turn your flow into stock. (Location 276)
Don’t think of your website as a self-promotion machine, think of it as a self-invention machine. Online, you can become the person you really want to be. Fill your website with your work and your ideas and the stuff you care about. (Location 295)
“Dumpster diving” is one of the jobs of the artist—finding the treasure in other people’s trash, sifting through the debris of our culture, paying attention to the stuff that everyone else is ignoring, and taking inspiration from the stuff that people have tossed aside for whatever reasons. (Location 342)
So, what makes for great attribution? Attribution is all about providing context for what you’re sharing: what the work is, who made it, how they made it, when and where it was made, why you’re sharing it, why people should care about it, and where people can see some more work like it. Attribution is about putting little museum labels next to the stuff you share. (Location 363)
where we found the work that we’re sharing. It’s always good practice to give a shout-out to the people who’ve helped you stumble onto good work and also leave a bread-crumb trail that people you’re sharing with can follow back to the sources of your inspiration. (Location 366)
Words matter. Artists love to trot out the tired line, “My work speaks for itself,” but the truth is, our work doesn’t speak for itself. Human beings want to know where things came from, how they were made, and who made them. (Location 398)
Whether you’re telling a finished or unfinished story, always keep your audience in mind. Speak to them directly in plain language. Value their time. Be brief. Learn to speak. Learn to write. Use spell-check. (Location 436)
Teaching people doesn’t subtract value from what you do, it actually adds to it. When you teach someone how to do your work, you are, in effect, generating more interest in your work. People feel closer to your work because you’re letting them in on what you know. (Location 500)
As every writer knows, if you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader first. (Location 511)
Meeting people online is awesome, but turning them into IRL friends is even better. (Location 600)
When you put your work out into the world, you have to be ready for the good, the bad, and the ugly. The more people come across your work, the more criticism you’ll face. (Location 608)
The way to be able to take a punch is to practice getting hit a lot. Put out a lot of work. (Location 613)
If you spend your life avoiding vulnerability, you and your work will never truly connect with other people. (Location 620)
My wife is fond of saying, “If someone took a dump in your living room, you wouldn’t let it sit there, would you?” Nasty comments are the same—they should be scooped up and thrown in the trash. (Location 640)
We all have to get over our “starving artist” romanticism and the idea that touching money inherently corrupts creativity. Some of our most meaningful and most cherished cultural artifacts were made for money. (Location 652)
Everybody says they want artists to make money, and then when they do, everybody hates them for it. (Location 657)
Whether you ask for donations, crowdfund, or sell your products or services, asking for money in return for your work is a leap you want to take only when you feel confident that you’re putting work out into the world that you think is truly worth something. Don’t be afraid to charge for your work, but put a price on it that you think is fair. (Location 681)
Even if you don’t have anything to sell right now, you should always be collecting email addresses from people who come across your work and want to stay in touch. (Location 685)
Email is decades and decades old, but it’s nowhere close to being dead. (Location 687)
Don’t betray their trust and don’t push your luck. Build your list and treat it with respect. (Location 697)
As a human being, you have a finite amount of time and attention. At some point, you have to switch from saying “yes” a lot to saying “no” a lot. (Location 718)
The way I get over my guilt about not answering email is to hold office hours. Once a month, I make myself available so that anybody can ask me anything on my website, and I try to give thoughtful answers that I then post so anyone can see. (Location 722)
You can’t plan on anything; you can only go about your work, as Isak Dinesen wrote, “every day, without hope or despair.” You can’t count on success; you can only leave open the possibility for it, and be ready to jump on and take the ride when it comes for you. (Location 742)
If you look to artists who’ve managed to achieve lifelong careers, you detect the same pattern: They all have been able to persevere, regardless of success or failure. (Location 754)
Instead of taking a break in between projects, waiting for feedback, and worrying about what’s next, use the end of one project to light up the next one. Just do the work that’s in front of you, and when it’s finished, ask yourself what you missed, what you could’ve done better, or what you couldn’t get to, and jump right into the next project. (Location 761)
“Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough,” writes author Alain de Botton. (Location 795)
Think of it as beginning again. Go back to chapter one—literally!—and become an amateur. Look for something new to learn, and when you find it, dedicate yourself to learning it out in the open. Document your progress and share as you go so that others can learn along with you. Show your work, and when the right people show up, pay close attention to them, because they’ll have a lot to show you. (Location 806)
Go online and post what you’re working on right now with the tag showyourwork. Plan a “Show Your Work!” night with colleagues or friends. Use this book as a guide — share works-in-progress and your curiosities, tell stories, and teach one another. (Location 811)
Main points
Scenius instead of genius
Kleon points out that the problem with genius is that it implies brilliance in isolation, when the reality is that good work builds off of the existing body of work. Brilliance doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it is a product of intentional interaction with others in the field. He calls this situation of sharing and learning scenius.
Steal like an artist from your scenius
All good artists “steal”; that is, they build upon the ideas of others. This process requires content consumption and collaboration by its very nature. Picking the very best parts of someone’s work and expanding upon it is a worthy enough and valuable enough goal in itself.
Collaboration is necessary for creativity.
Why share
“If your work isn’t online, it doesn’t exist.”
Work that isn’t shared is limited in usefulness if it can’t be proven. Sharing work online improves the chances of finding scenius, of getting better jobs in the future, and of learning itself.
Sharing is not self-promotion
Sharing is not self-promotion; it is an end in itself because Writing does not help us learn - it IS how we learn. Similarly, expressing what we have learned solidifies our knowledge and our own identities. We ourselves learn what kind of person we are through the Learning Exhaust we’ve created.
In fact, Kleon says that when the more we share, the more shame we may feel about where we were previously. This is normal, and it’s a good sign— if we did not feel embarrassed by where we were, then we haven’t moved and haven’t learned anything.
In a way, sharing combats Impostor Syndrome. You can’t be an impostor if you’re open about how much you don’t know.
We’re all amateurs anyway
Having a Growth Mindset is not just desirable; it’s necessary in a world like ours where ideas are shared freely and learning can occur at an unprecendented pace. Recognizing that none of us is an “expert” may be helpful in getting over Impostor Syndrome.
What to share
Learning in public
While Kleon never mentions it directly, he promotes learning in public, even when (and especially when) you are new at something. He says that those who are not afraid to make mistakes in public are the most likely to learn the fastest, because they get immediate feedback.
Working with the garage door up
Kleon agrees with Gary Vaynerchuk’s motto, Document, don’t create. Sharing work, for him, does not necessarily mean writing blog posts or creating anything new; it could be simply working with the garage door up and letting others see your process or your unfinished products. There is value in sharing something yet unpolished.
Daily dispatch
It’s not enough to share work; we should also share frequently. Kleon recommends publishing a daily feed of what we’re doing, and argues that such a daily dispatch is a better indication to others of what our strengths are than a CV, which describes what we’ve done in the past. A daily dispatch could be a blog post, tweet, video, or anything else.
stock vs flow
Kleon distinguishes between “flow” and “stock”. Flow is information that is raw and shared in a daily dispatch. Stock is evergreen content that has already been processed and is in a more polished format. Both are necessary, but flow is more important than stock. Stock can build over time.
Finding the balance between flow and stock is the difficult part.
Kleon’s description of flow vs stock is very much like the Zettelkasten methodology, where fleeting notes become evergreen notes— except that it tackles the output side, rather than the input side.
How to share
Because there is so much weight placed in sharing our work, communication skills become even more important. We should always share with our audience in mind, even if that’s ourselves.
Be careful how much you share
It can be easy to get caught up in sharing work; don’t forget to actually do the work as well. Kleon is an advocate of Deep Work, even if he probably wouldn’t ascribe to Allen’s ascetic digital isolation in the long term.
The ugly side of sharing
Brace yourself for trolls. Being in public means that you’ll also get nasty comments. Combat the nastiness by getting used to it— put out even more content. Keep making yourself vulnerable, and you’ll find more people who connect with you than those who want to bring you down.
At the same time, Kleon recommends deleting nasty comments. Prune with impunity, and then move on.
Plan to make money
Practical tips
Collect email addresses of people who are interested in your work, even if you aren’t selling anything right now. Engage with them, but not to the point where you’re finding it difficult to do your work.
Holding Office Hours once a week is a good way to engage with the community while not selling your soul to the email gods.
Citation
[^kleon]: Kleon, A. (2014). _Show your work!: 10 ways to share your creativity and get discovered_. Adams Media. [[Show Your Work!|Highlights]] and [[Show Your Work|literature notes]].