Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon

Source Information

• Author: Austin Kleon
• Full Title: Show Your Work! 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered
• Publication Date: April 1, 2014
• Reading Started: June 18, 2023
• Type: Book

Key Content

Core Principles

• You don’t really find an audience for your work; they find you.
• In order to be found, you have to be findable.
• Build sharing into your routine.
• Consistently post bits and pieces of your work, your ideas, and what you are learning online.
• Instead of networking, take advantage of the network.
• Influence others by letting them steal from you.
• Show your work.

Scenius

Great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals—artists, curators, thinkers and other tastemakers—who make up an ’ecology of talent’. This ecology is called Scenius.

A whole scene of people who were supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, copying from each other, stealing ideas and contributing ideas. Good work isn’t created in a vacuum, and creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds.

This is opposite to the idea of “Lone Genius.”

Proposed by: Brian Eno

Lone Genius

An individual with superhuman talents appears out of nowhere at certain points in history, free of influences or precedent, with a direct connection to God or The Muse. When inspiration comes, it strikes like a lightning bolt, a lightbulb switches on in his head, and then he spends the rest of the time toiling away in his studio, shaping this idea into a finished masterpiece that he releases into the world to a great fanfare.

Be an Amateur

• Amateurs know that contributing something is better than nothing.
• You can move from mediocre to good in increments.
• “That’s all any of us are: amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else.” — Charlie Chaplin
• “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind, there are few.” — Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Monk

Process is Messy

• You have to make stuff.
• No one is going to give a damn about your resume; they want to see what you’ve made with your own little fingers.
• Share something small every day.

Become a Documentarian

• 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.

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 are 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.

What to Document:

• Research
• References
• Drawings
• Plans
• Sketches
• Interviews
• Prototypes
• Demos
• Inspiration
• Stories

How to Document:

• Audio
• Photographs
• Video
• Pinboards
• Journals
• Drafts
• Diagrams
• Notes
• Scrapbooks
• Collections

Advice

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 first.

Online Presence

• It sounds a little extreme, but in this day and age, if your work isn’t online, it doesn’t exist.
• “I’m not going to sit here and wait for things to happen, I am going to make them happen, and if people think that I’m an idiot, I don’t care.”

Mortality and Living

• “If you could walk around like that all the time, to really have that awareness that it’s actually going to end. That’s the trick.”
• 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.
• “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” — Steve Jobs

Shift in Thinking

• We can stop asking what others can do for us, and start asking what we can do for others.

Quotes

• [[Creativity is a Way of Operating - John Cleese]]
• “Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare to think” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• “That’s all any of us are: amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else.” — Charlie Chaplin (captured in [[Amateur Mindset]])
• “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind, there are few” — Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Monk (captured in [[Amateur Mindset]])
• “The stupidest possible creative art is still a creative art” — Clay Shirky
• [[Find Your Voice - Dan Harmon]]

Mentioned Books

• Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky
• Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland

Atomic Notes

• [[Scenius]] — collaborative creativity vs. lone genius
• [[Amateur Mindset]] — beginner’s mind and incremental improvement
• [[Lone Genius Myth]] — debunking the individual genius narrative
• [[Process Documentation]] — becoming a documentarian of your work
• [[Process is Messy]] — you have to make stuff
• [[Mortality Awareness]] — using death awareness to live fully

Related Concepts

• [[Scenius]] — collaborative creativity
• [[Amateur Mindset]] — beginner’s perspective
• [[Lone Genius Myth]] — debunking isolation myths
• [[Process Documentation]] — documenting your work
• [[Mortality Awareness]] — using death awareness
• [[Digital Garden]] — sharing work and ideas online
• [[Polymath]] — connecting diverse interests
• [[Growth Mindset vs Fixed Mindset]] — learning and improvement
• [[Resilience]] — continuing despite challenges

Source: Show Your Work! 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon (2014)