Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered (Austin Kleon)

by Austin Kleon

Amateurs are not afraid to make mistakes or look ridiculous in public.

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.

Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you.

Hoping to start this with my 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. 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.

“Put yourself, and your work, out there every day, and you’ll start meeting some amazing people.” —Bobby Solomon

Make stuff you love and talk about stuff you love and you’ll attract people who love that kind of stuff. It’s that simple.

The more people come across your work, the more criticism you’ll face.

Here’s how to take punches: Relax and breathe. The trouble with imaginative people is that we’re good at picturing the worst that could happen to us. Fear is often just the imagination taking a wrong turn. Bad criticism is not the end of the world. As far as I know, no one has ever died from a bad review. Take a deep breath and accept whatever comes. (Consider practicing meditation—it works for me.) Strengthen your neck. The way to be able to take a punch is to practice getting hit a lot. Put out a lot of work. Let people take their best shot at it. Then make even more work and keep putting it out there. The more criticism you take, the more you realize it can’t hurt you. Roll with the punches. Keep moving. Every piece of criticism is an opportunity for new work. You can’t control what sort of criticism you receive, but you can control how you react to it. Sometimes when people hate something about your work, it’s fun to push that element even further. To make something they’d hate even more. Having your work hated by certain people is a badge of honor. Protect your vulnerable areas. If you have work that is too sensitive or too close to you to be exposed to criticism, keep it hidden. But remember what writer Colin Marshall says: “Compulsive avoidance of embarrassment is a form of suicide.” If you spend your life avoiding vulnerability, you and your work will never truly connect with other people. Keep your balance. You have to remember that your work is something you do, ...

Don’t write off your friends because they’ve had a little bit of success. Don’t be jealous when the people you like do well—celebrate their victory as if it’s your own.

Don’t be afraid to charge for your work, but put a price on it that you think is fair.