Show Your Work! Quotes

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

“One day at a time. It sounds so simple. It actually is simple but it isn’t easy: It requires incredible support and fastidious structuring.” —Russell Brand”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“Art forgery is a strange phenomenon. “You might think that the pleasure you get from a painting depends on its color and its shape and its pattern,” says psychology professor Paul Bloom. “And if that’s right, it shouldn’t matter whether it’s an original or a forgery.” But our brains don’t work that way. “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.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“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. Attribution is about putting little museum labels next to the stuff you share.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“The form of what you share doesn’t matter. Your daily dispatch can be anything you want—a blog post, an email, a tweet, a YouTube video, or some other little bit of media. There’s no one-size-fits-all plan for everybody.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“Once a day, after you’ve done your day’s work, go back to your documentation and find one little piece of your process that you can share. Where you are in your process will determine what that piece is. If you’re in the very early stages, share your influences and what’s inspiring you. If you’re in the middle of executing a project, write about your methods or share works in progress. If you’ve just completed a project, show the final product, share scraps from the cutting-room floor, or write about what you learned. 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.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“The day is the only unit of time that I can really get my head around. Seasons change, weeks are completely human-made, but the day has a rhythm. The sun goes up; the sun goes down. I can handle that.”
― 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

“A lot of us go about our work and feel like we have nothing to show for it at the end of the day.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“In order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen—really seen.” —Brené Brown”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“Audiences not only want to stumble across great work, but they, too, long to be creative and part of the creative process. By letting go of our egos and sharing our process, we allow for the possibility of people having an ongoing connection with us and our work, which helps us move more of our product.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“By putting things out there, consistently, you can form a relationship with your customers. It allows them to see the person behind the products.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“As in all kinds of work, there is a distinction between the painter’s process, and the products of her process.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“the only way to find your voice is to use it. It’s hardwired, built into you. Talk about the things you love. Your voice will follow.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“Talk about the things you love. Your voice will follow.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“I’m an artist, man,” said John Lennon. “Give me a tuba, and I’ll get you something out of it.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

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

“By generously sharing their ideas and their knowledge, they often gain an audience that they can then leverage when they need it—for fellowship, feedback, or patronage.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“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 can stop asking what others can do for us, and start asking what we can do for others.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“If you believe in the lone genius myth, creativity is an antisocial act, performed by only a few great figures—mostly dead men with names like Mozart, Einstein, or Picasso. The rest of us are left to stand around and gawk in awe at their achievements.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“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. 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 can stop asking what others can do for us, and start asking what we can do for others.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“that creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds. What I love about the idea of scenius is that it makes room in the story of creativity for the rest of us: the people who don’t consider ourselves geniuses.”
― Austin Kleon, 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. The writer Blake Butler calls this being an open node. If you want to get, you have to give. If you want to be noticed, you have to notice. Shut up and listen once in a while. Be thoughtful. Be considerate. Don’t turn into human spam. Be an open node.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“In my opinion, the most ordinary things, the most common and familiar, if we could see them in their true light, would turn out to be the grandest miracles . . . and the most marvelous examples.” All it takes to uncover hidden gems is a clear eye, an open mind, and a willingness to search for inspiration in places other people aren’t willing or able to go.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“Whether you share it or not, documenting and recording your process as you go along has its own rewards:”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“By putting things out there, consistently, you can form a relationship with your customers.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“Don't think of your website as a self-promotion machine, think of it as a self-invention machine.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

“For example, a lot of the ideas in this book started out as tweets, which then became blog posts, which then became book chapters. Small things, over time, can get big.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

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