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

by Austin Kleon

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.”

If we forget about genius and think more about how we can nurture and contribute to a scenius, we can adjust our own expectations and the expectations of the worlds we want to accept us.

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.

Explained in Making Music too.

“In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities,” said Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki. “In the expert’s mind, there are few.”

“On the spectrum of creative work, the difference between the mediocre and the good is vast. Mediocrity is, however, still on the spectrum; you can move from mediocre to good in increments. The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.” Amateurs know that contributing something is better than contributing nothing.

The world is changing at such a rapid rate that it’s turning us all into amateurs. Even for professionals, the best way to flourish is to retain an amateur’s spirit and embrace uncertainty and the unknown.

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

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.

30 day production challenge.

Reading about people who are dead now and did things with their lives makes me want to get up and do something decent with mine. Thinking about death every morning makes me want to live.

By sharing her day-to-day process—the thing she really cares about—she can form a unique bond with her audience.

“By putting things out there, consistently, you can form a relationship with your customers. It allows them to see the person behind the products.”

Audiences not only want to stumble across great work, but they, too, long to be creative and part of the creative process.

In fact, 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.

Whether you share it or not, 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.

Consider a progress journal in Notion and store content in pages for every step.

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 have lots of projects out into the world, you can report on how they’re doing—you can tell stories about how people are interacting with your work.

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.”

“Sometimes you don’t always know what you’ve got,” says artist Wayne White. “It really does need a little social chemistry to make it show itself to you sometimes.”

Always be sure to run everything you share with others through The “So What?” Test.

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.”

“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.”

These collections often juxtaposed both natural and human-made marvels, revealing a kind of mash-up of handiwork by both God and human beings.

Pulse

that of wanting to draw people’s attention to things that I liked, to shape things that I liked into new shapes.”

Pulse

“All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste,” says public radio personality Ira Glass. “But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer.”

Before we’re ready to take the leap of sharing our own work with the world, we can share our tastes in the work of others.

Your influences are all worth sharing because they clue people in to who you are and what you do—sometimes even more than your own work.

“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.

When you find things you genuinely enjoy, don’t let anyone else make you feel bad about it. Don’t feel guilty about the pleasure you take in the things you enjoy.

Being open and honest about what you like is the best way to connect with people who like those things, too.

But that’s only half of the story—if you fail to properly attribute work that you share, you not only rob the person who made it, you rob all the people you’ve shared it with.

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.

“When shown an object, or given a food, or shown a face, people’s assessment of it—how much they like it, how valuable it is—is deeply affected by what you tell them about it.”

Human beings want to know where things came from, how they were made, and who made them. The stories you tell about the work you do have a huge effect on how people feel and what they understand about your work, and how people feel and what they understand about your work affects how they value it.

Personal stories can make the complex more tangible, spark associations, and offer entry into things that might otherwise leave one cold.”

“‘The cat sat on a mat’ is not a story. ‘The cat sat on the dog’s mat’ is a story.”

The most important part of a story is its structure. A good story structure is tidy, sturdy, and logical.

“Once upon a time, there was _____. Every day, _____. One day, _____. Because of that, _____. Because of that, _____. Until finally, _____.”

You get a great idea, you go through the hard work of executing the idea, and then you release the idea out into the world, coming to a win, lose, or draw.

This simple formula can be applied to almost any type of work project: There’s the initial problem, the work done to solve the problem, and the solution.

The third act is where you’re going, and how exactly the person you’re pitching can help you get there.

Everybody loves a good story, but good storytelling doesn’t come easy to everybody. It’s a skill that takes a lifetime to master. So study the great stories and then go find some of your own. Your stories will get better the more you tell them.

You should be able to explain your work to a kindergartner, a senior citizen, and everybody in between.

If you have a weird hybrid job, say something like, “I’m a writer who draws.”

Remember what the author George Orwell wrote: “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.”

Strike all the adjectives from your bio. If you take photos, you’re not an “aspiring” photographer, and you’re not an “amazing” photographer, either. You’re a photographer. Don’t get cute. Don’t brag. Just state the facts.

Think about what you can share from your process that would inform the people you’re trying to reach.

As blogger Kathy Sierra says, “Make people better at something they want to be better at.”

He said that having his work out in the world was “a free education that goes on for a lifetime.”

“When people realize they’re being listened to, they tell you things.”