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

by Austin Kleon

“If you want a happy ending,” actor Orson Welles wrote, “that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”

The people who get what they’re after are very often the ones who just stick around long enough.

You can’t count on success; you can only leave open the possibility for it,

“You gotta play till the ninth inning, man.”

Bob Pollard, the lead singer and songwriter for Guided by Voices, says he never gets writer’s block because he never stops writing. Author Ernest Hemingway would stop in the middle of a sentence at the end of his day’s work so he knew where to start in the morning. Singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell says that whatever she feels is the weak link in her last project gives her inspiration for the next.

Add all this together and you get a way of working I call chain-smoking. You avoid stalling out in your career by never losing momentum. Here’s how you do it: 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.

“Every two or three years, I knock off for a while. That way, I’m constantly the new girl in the whorehouse.” —Robert Mitchum

When you feel like you’ve learned whatever there is to learn from what you’re doing, it’s time to change course and find something new to learn so that you can move forward. You can’t be content with mastery; you have to push yourself to become a student again. “Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough,” writes author Alain de Botton.