I definitely had problems and second thoughts on publishing my thoughts and my work, until yesterday. Yesterday i finished reading “Show your work” by Austin Kleon.
Although I already published a number of articles when working in science earlier in my career I still worry about what people might think of the work, especially when it is work in progress, with all the imperfections. This book by Austin Kleon does a wonderful job in turning this fear into energy that can be used to show your work. In fact, you read this post because of this book.Above all this book is a very short, it takes about an hour to finish it. In the short ten chapters Austin Kleon tarrgets the following topics. I cited some of the best parts below, if not stated otherwise, these are direct quotes from the book:
- Your don’t have to be a genius
- “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.”
- Amateurs might lack formal training, but they’re all lifelong learners, and they make a point of learning in the open, so that others can learn from their failures and successes.
- “That’s all any of us are: amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else.” —Charlie Chaplin
- Think Process, not product
- But human beings are interested in other human beings and what other human beings do.
- “In order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen—really seen.” —Brené Brown
- Share something small every day
- “Put yourself, and your work, out there every day, and you’ll start meeting some amazing people.” —Bobby Solomon
- Don’t let sharing your work take precedence over actually doing your work.
- “If you work on something a little bit every day, you end up with something that is massive.” —Kenneth Goldsmith
- Don’t think of your website as a self-promotion machine, think of it as a self-invention machine.
- “Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises. Don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work . . . and if you can build a good name, eventually that name will be its own currency.”
- Open up your cabinet of curiosities
- “The problem with hoarding is you end up living off your reserves. Eventually, you’ll become stale. If you give away everything you have, you are left with nothing. This forces you to look, to be aware, to replenish. . . . Somehow the more you give away, the more comes back to you.” —Paul Arden
- “You’re only as good as your record collection.” —DJ Spooky
- Tell good stories
- “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.”
- Words matter. Artists love to trot out the tired line, “My work speaks for itself,” but the truth is, our work doesn’t speak for itself. 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.
- Teach what you know
- The minute you learn something, turn around and teach it to others. Share your reading list. Point to helpful reference materials. Create some tutorials and post them online. Use pictures, words, and video. Take people step-by-step through part of your process. As blogger Kathy Sierra says, “Make people better at something they want to be better at.”
- Don’t Turn Into Human Spam
- “When people realize they’re being listened to, they tell you things.” —Richard Ford
- 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.
- Stop worrying about how many people follow you online and start worrying about the quality of people who follow you.
- To put it more simply: If you want to be interesting, you have to be interested.
- Learn to take a punch
- “The trick is not caring what EVERYBODY thinks of you and just caring about what the RIGHT people think of you.” —Brian Michael Bendis
- Sell out
- Because, of course, the worst troll is the one that lives in your head. It’s the voice that tells you you’re not good enough, that you suck, and that you’ll never amount to anything.
- Keep your own list, or get an account with an email newsletter company like MailChimp and put a little sign-up widget on every page of your website.
- Stick around
- You just have to be as generous as you can, but selfish enough to get your work done.
- “Work is never finished, only abandoned.” —Paul Valéry
- “We work because it’s a chain reaction, each subject leads to the next.” —Charles Eames
- “If you never go to work, you never get to leave work.”
- “Every two or three years, I knock off for a while. That way, I’m constantly the new girl in the whorehouse.” —Robert Mitchum
- You can’t be content with mastery; you have to push yourself to become a student again.
Critics:
If there is one point to criticise then that at some point it seems to be inconsistent. In the first chapters he talks about the fact that you really should publish your work, even and especially as an amateur, if possible every day. The reader strongly gets the feeling of “just do it”. However, later int he book, he says that you still should not publish all your work just the good one. If you have second thoughts on the quality wait with publishing or do not publish at all. Second, publishing your work should not t prevent you from working in the first place.
Of course we all wish to produce something every day, that is of high quality, and publishing it is an easy step, almost not time consuming, so it does not prevent us from our real work. But thats not the case. Almost everything takes its time, most people have second thoughts on the quality of their work.Th author misses to explain how to approach combine both, the quality of the things we publish and the time constraints.
But I guess this might be a topic on its own. Apart from that, the Author wrote 2 more books. “Steal like an artist”and “keep going”. Two more candidates to read…