Show Your Work! Quotes

“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.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.” —Annie Dillard”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. If you f---ing like something, like it.” —Dave Grohl”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“The Vampire Test. It’s a simple way to know who you should let in and out of your life. 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.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“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.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“Social media sites are the perfect place to share daily updates. Don’t worry about being on every platform; pick and choose based on what you do and the people you’re trying to reach.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“But whatever the nature of your work, there is an art to what you do, and there are people who would be interested in that art, if only you presented it to them in the right way.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“Even for professionals, the best way to flourish is to retain an amateur’s spirit and embrace uncertainty and the unknown.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“Whatever we say, we’re always talking about ourselves.” —Alison Bechdel”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“I had a professor in college who returned our graded essays, walked up to the chalkboard, and wrote in huge letters: “SO WHAT?” She threw the piece of chalk down and said, “Ask yourself that every time you turn in a piece of writing.” It’s a lesson I never forgot.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“Writer David Foster Wallace said that he thought good nonfiction was a chance to “watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lives.” 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.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“Obituaries are like near-death experiences for cowards.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“When you get rid of old material, you push yourself further and come up with something better. When you throw out old work, what you're really doing is making room for new work.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“You have to remember that your work is something you do, not who you are.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“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. Don’t”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.” —Walt Disney”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“Teaching people doesn’t subtract value from what you do, it actually adds to it.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“if you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader first.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“Don’t say you don’t have enough time. We’re all busy, but we all get 24 hours a day. People often ask me, “How do you find the time for all this?” And I answer, “I look for it.” You find time the same place you find spare change: in the nooks and crannies. You find it in the cracks between the big stuff—your commute, your lunch break, the few hours after your kids go to bed. You might have to miss an episode of your favorite TV show, you might have to miss an hour of sleep, but you can find the time if you look for it. I like to work while the world is sleeping, and share while the world is at work.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“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, _____.”
― Emma Coats, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“If you want fans, you have to be a fan first. If you want to be accepted by a community, you have to first be a good citizen of that community. If you’re only pointing to your own stuff online, you’re doing it wrong. You have to be a connector.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“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.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“When people realize they’re being listened to, they tell you things.” —Richard Ford”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“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.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“You just have to be as generous as you can, but selfish enough to get your work done”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“When I was younger, I never really knew what this meant. I used to worry a lot about voice, wondering if I had my own. But now I realize that the only way to find your voice is to use it.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“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.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“Pablo Picasso was notorious for sucking the energy out of the people he met. His granddaughter Marina claimed that he squeezed people like one of his tubes of oil paints. You's have a great time hanging out all day with Picasso, and then you's go home nervous and exhausted, and Picasso would go back to his studio and paint all night, using the energy he'd sucked out of you.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“In the first act, you get your hero up a tree. The second act, you throw rocks at him. For the third act, you let him down."- George Abbott”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“When you find something 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. Celebrate them.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered