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

by Austin Kleon

When I have the privilege of talking to my readers, the most common questions they ask me are about self-promotion. How do I get my stuff out there? How do I get noticed? How do I find an audience? How did you do it?

How to get noticed

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.

I wanted to create a kind of beginner’s manual for this way of operating, so here’s what I came up with: a book for people who hate the very idea of self-promotion.

I’m going to try to teach you how to think about your work as a never-ending process, how to share your process in a way that attracts people who might be interested in what you do, and how to deal with the ups and downs of putting yourself and your work out in the world.

Imagine if your next boss didn’t have to read your résumé because he already reads your blog. Imagine being a student and getting your first gig based on a school project you posted online. Imagine losing your job but having a social network of people familiar with your work and ready to help you find a new one. Imagine turning a side project or a hobby into your profession because you had a following that could support you.

Be so good at what you are doing that you can't help but to be seen.

All you have to do is show your work

Brian Eno refers to as “scenius.” Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals—artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers—who make up an “ecology of talent.”

The lost generation

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.

Being a valuable part of a scenius is not necessarily about how smart or talented you are, but about what you have to contribute—the ideas you share, the quality of the connections you make, and the conversations you start.

When Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke was asked what he thought his greatest strength was, he answered, “That I don’t know what I’m doing.” Like one of his heroes, Tom Waits, whenever Yorke feels like his songwriting is getting too comfortable or stale, he’ll pick up an instrument he doesn’t know how to play and try to write with it.

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.

But now I realize that the only way to find your voice is to use it. It’s hardwired, built into you.

When a painter talks about her “work,” she could be talking about two different things: There’s the artwork, the finished piece, framed and hung on a gallery wall, and there’s the art work, all the day-to-day stuff that goes on behind the scenes in her studio: looking for inspiration, getting an idea, applying oil to a canvas, etc. There’s “painting,” the noun, and there’s “painting,” the verb. As in all kinds of work, there is a distinction between the painter’s process, and the products of her process.

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.

Overnight success is a myth. Dig into almost every overnight success story and you’ll find about a decade’s worth of hard work and perseverance.

If you’re in the middle of executing a project, write about your methods or share works in progress.

A daily dispatch is even better than a résumé or a portfolio, because it shows what we’re working on right now. When the artist Ze Frank was interviewing job candidates, he complained, “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.”

As publicist Lauren Cerand says, “Post as though everyone who can read it has the power to fire you.”

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.

Once you make sharing part of your daily routine, you’ll notice themes and trends emerging in what you share. You’ll find patterns in your flow.

There’s not as big of a difference between collecting and creating as you might think. A lot of the writers I know see the act of reading and the act of writing as existing on opposite ends of the same spectrum: The reading feeds the writing, which feeds the reading. “I’m basically a curator,” says the writer and former bookseller Jonathan Lethem. “Making books has always felt very connected to my bookselling experience, that of wanting to draw people’s attention to things that I liked, to shape things that I liked into new shapes.”

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?

“You’re only as good as your record collection.” —DJ Spooky

“I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. If you f---ing like something, like it.” —Dave Grohl

If you share the work of others, it’s your duty to make sure that the creators of that work get proper credit. Crediting work in our copy-and-paste age of reblogs and retweets can seem like a futile effort, but it’s worth it, and it’s the right thing to do.

If you want to be more effective when sharing yourself and your work, you need to become a better storyteller. You need to know what a good story is and how to tell one.

The most important part of a story is its structure. A good story structure is tidy, sturdy, and logical. Unfortunately, most of life is messy, uncertain, and illogical.

Emma Coats, a former storyboard artist at Pixar, outlined the basic structure of a fairy tale as a kind of Mad Lib that you can fill in with your own elements: “Once upon a time, there was _____. Every day, _____. One day, _____. Because of that, _____. Because of that, _____. Until finally, _____.” Pick your favorite story and try to fill in the blanks. It’s striking how often it works.

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. You’re never “keeping it real” with your lack of proofreading and punctuation, you’re keeping it unintelligible.

So study the great stories and then go find some of your own. Your stories will get better the more you tell them.

Just because you’re trying to tell a good story about yourself doesn’t mean you’re inventing fiction. Stick to nonfiction. Tell the truth and tell it with dignity and self-respect. If you’re a student, say you’re a student. If you work a day job, say you work a day job.

All the same principles apply when you start writing your bio. Bios are not the place to practice your creativity. We all like to think we’re more complex than a two-sentence explanation, but a two-sentence explanation is usually what the world wants from us. Keep it short and sweet.

Best of all, when you share your knowledge and your work with others, you receive an education in return.

As every writer knows, if you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader first.

“The writing community is full of lame-o people who want to be published in journals even though they don’t read the magazines that they want to be published in,” says writer Dan Chaon. “These people deserve the rejections that they will undoubtedly receive, and no one should feel sorry for them when they cry about how they can’t get anyone to accept their stories.” I call these people human spam. They’re everywhere, and they exist in every profession. They don’t want to pay their dues, they want their piece right here, right now.

You should feel pity for these people and their delusions. At some point, they didn’t get the memo that the world owes none of us anything.

Stop worrying about how many people follow you online and start worrying about the quality of people who follow you.

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.

he’d sucked out of you. Most people put up with this because they got to hang out with Picasso all day, but not Constantin Brancusi, the Romanian-born sculptor. Brancusi hailed from the Carpathian Mountains, and he knew a vampire when he saw one. He was not going to have his energy or the fruits of his energy juiced by Picasso, so he refused to have anything to do with him.

If, after hanging out with someone you feel worn out and depleted, that person is a vampire. If, after hanging out with someone you still feel full of energy, that person is not a vampire. Of course, The Vampire Test works on many things in our lives, not just people—you can apply it to jobs, hobbies, places, etc. Vampires cannot be cured. Should you find yourself in the presence of a vampire, be like Brancusi, and banish it from your life forever.

Designer Mike Monteiro says that the most valuable skill he picked up in art school was learning how to take a punch. He and his fellow classmates were absolutely brutal during critiques.

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.

Be ambitious. Keep yourself busy. Think bigger. Expand your audience.

Author F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “There are no second acts in American life,” but if you look around you’ll notice that not only are there second acts, there are third, fourth, and even fifth ones. (If you’re reading the obituaries every morning, by now you already know this.)

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.

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.

Writer Gina Trapani has pointed out three prime spots to turn off our brains and take a break from our connected lives:

Commute.