Show Your Work

1. Don't be afraid of showing what yo do

2. Get discovered in a few simple steps and guidance

3. Put your work online

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1. Because they have little to lose, amateurs are willing to try anything and share the results. They take chances, experiment, and follow their whims.

2. I realize that 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.

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

A New Way Of Operating
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In order to be found, you have to be findable. Don't waste time networking. Share your ideas and your knowledge, this will lead to gain an audience that you can then leverage, when you need it.

This book is for people who hate the idea of self-promotion.

Imagine if you next boss didn't have to read your résumé because he already reads your blog. Image being a student and getting your first gig based on a school project you posted online.  Imagine losing your job but having a social network of people familiar with your work and ready to help you find a new one. Imagine turning a side project or a hobby into your profession because you had following that could support you.

Or imagine something simpler and just as satisfying: spending the majority of your time, energy, and attention practicing a craft, learning a trade, or running a business, while also allowing for the possibility that your work might a group of people who share your interests.

All you have to do is show your work.

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1. You Don't Have To Be A Genius

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Find a Scenius:

There are a lot of destructive myths about creativity, but one of the most dangerous is the "lone genius" myth.

There's a healthier way of thinking about creativity that the musician Brian Eno refers to as "scenius". Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals – artists, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers.

Scenius doesn't take away from the achievements of those great individuals; it just acknowledges that good work isn't created in a vacuums, and that creativity is always, in some sense, collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds.

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.

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

Online, everyone–the artist and the curator, the master and the apprentice, the expert and the amateur–has the ability to contribute something.

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Be an Amateur:

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.

Because they have little to lose, amateurs are willing to try anything and share the results. They take chances, experiment, and follow their whims.

Amateurs are not afraid to make mistakes or look ridiculous in public. "The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act".– Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus.

Amateurs know that contributing something is better than contributing nothing.

Amateurs might lack formal training, but they're all lifelong learners, and they make a point of learning in the open, so that other can learn from their failures and successes.

Even for professionals, the best to flourish is to retain an amateur's spirit and embrace uncertainty and the unknown.

The best way to get started on the path of sharing your work is to think about what you want to learn, and make a commitment to learning it in front of others.

Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you.

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You can't find your voice if you can't use it:

I realized that the only way to find your voice is to use it. It's hardwired, built int you. Talk about the things you love. Your voice will follow you.

In this day and age, if your work isn't online, it doesn't exist.

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Read Obituaries:

Thinking about death every morning makes me want to live.

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2. Think Process, Not Product

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Take people behind the scenes:

Traditionally, the artist has been trained to regard her creative process as something that should be kept to herself.

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

Humans beings are interested in other human beings and what other human beings do.

By putting things out there, consistently, you can form a relationship with your customers.

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Become a documentarian of what you do:

How can you show your work even when you have nothing to show? The first step is to scoop up the scraps and the residues of your process and shape them into something interesting bit of media that you can share.

No one is going to give a damn about your résumé; they want o see what you have made with your own little fingers.

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.

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3. Share Something Small Every Day

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Send out a daily dispatch:

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.

Social media sites are the perfect place to share daily updates.

Don't worry about everything you post being perfect.

I like to work while the world is sleeping, and share while the world is at work.

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The "So What?" Test:

Always remember that anything you post to the Internet has now become public.

Be open, share imperfect and unfinished work that you want feedback on, but don't share absolutely everything. There's a big, big difference between sharing and over-sharing.

Don't overthink it; just go with your gut. If you're unsure about whether to share something, let it sit for 24 hours. Ask yourself the next day, "Is this helpful? Is it entertaining? Is it something I'd be comfortable with my boss or my mother seeing?".

There's nothing wrong with later.

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Turn your flow into stock:

"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. Stock is the durable stuff. It's the content you produce that's as interesting in two months as it is today."

Stock is best made by collecting, organizing, and expanding upon your flow.

You can turn your flow into stock. 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.

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Build a good (domain) name:

A blog is the ideal machine for turning flow into stock: One little blog post is nothing on its own, but publish a thousand blog posts over a decade, and it urns into your life's work.

Go register a domain name. Buy a www.[insert your name here].com. If your name is common, or you don't like your name, come up with an alias.

Don't think of you website as a self-promotion machine, think of it as a self-invention machine. Fill your website with your work and your ideas and the stuff you care about.

Over the years, you will be tempted to abandon it for the newest, shiniest social networks. Don't give in. Don't let it fall into neglect. Think about it in the long term. Stick with it, maintain it, and let it change with you over time.

"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 a good work... and if you can build a good name, eventually that name will be its own currently." – William Burroughs.

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4. Open Up Your Cabinet Of Curiosities

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Don't be a hoarder:

Our tastes make us what we are, but they can also cast a shadow over own work. "All of us who 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."

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.

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No guilty pleasures:

Dumpster diving is one of the jobs of the artists–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.

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

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Credit is always due:

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 more work like it.

Attribution is about putting little museum labels next to the stuff you share.

Online, the most important form of attribution is a hyperlink pointing back to the website of the creator of the work.

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5. Tell The Good Stories

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Work doesn't speak for itself:

Stories are such powerful driver of emotional value that their effect on any given object's subjective value can actually be measure objectively.

Words matter.

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 effects how they value it.

Every email you send, every text, every photo, every video–they're all bits and pieces of a multimedia narrative you're constantly constructing.

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Structure is everything:

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, _______." Pick your favorite story and try to fill in the blanks. It's striking how often it works.

There's the initial problem, the work done to solve the problem, and the solution.

Always keep your audience in mind. Speak to them directly in plain language. Value their time. Be brief. 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.

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Talk about yourself at parties:

You should be able to explain your work to a kindergartner, a senior citizen, and everybody in between. Of course, you always need to keep your audience in mind.

Stick to nonfiction. Tell the truth and tell it with dignity and self-respect. If you're a student, say you're student.

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.

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6. Teach What You Know

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Share your trade secrets:

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, works and video. Take people step-by-step through part of your process.

"Make people better at something they want to be better at." – Kathy Sierra

Teaching people doesn't subtract value from what you do, it actually adds to it.

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7. Don't Turn Into The Human Spam

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Shut up and listen:‍

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 want to get, you have to give.

Shut up and listen once in awhile. Be thoughtful. Be considerate. Don't turn into human spam. Be an open node.

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You want hearts, not eyeballs:

Stop worrying about how many people follow you online and start worrying about the quality of people who follow you.

If you want followers, be someone worth following.

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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.

Vampires cannot be cured. Should you find yourself in the presence of a vampire, banish it from your life forever.

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Identify your fellow knuckleballers:

Form a kind of brotherhood and often get together and share tips with one another.

There are your real peers–the people who share your obsessions, the people who share a similar mission to your own, the people with whom you share a mutual respect. Keep them as close as you can.

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Meet up in meatspace:

Meetups is an online community where people throw party at a bar or a restaurant and invite everybody to show up at a certain place and time.

Meeting people online is awesome, but turning them into IRL friends is even better.

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8. Learn To Take a Punch

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Let 'em take  their best shot:‍

Relax and breathe. Bad criticism is not the end of the world. Take a deep breath and accept whatever comes.

Strengthen your neck. Let people take their best shot at it. The more criticism you take, the more you realize it can't hurt you.

Roll with the punches. You can't control what sort of criticism you receive, but you can control how you react to it.

Protect your vulnerable areas. If you have work what it is too sensitive or too close to you to be exposed to criticism, keep it hidden.

Keep your balance. You have to remember that that your work is something you do, not who you are.

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Don't feed the trolls:

A troll is a persona who isn't interested in improving your work, only provoking you with hateful, aggressive, or upsetting talk. You will gain nothing by engaging with these people. Don't feed them, and they'll usually go away.

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9. Sell Out:

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Even the renaissance had to be funded:

We all have to get over our "starving artist" romanticism and the idea that touching money inherently corrupts creativity.

Don't be afraid of value your time, efforts and creativity.

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Pass around the hat:

‍If you have work you want to attempt that requires some up-front capital, platforms like Kickstarted and Indiegogo make it easy to run fund-raising campaigns with tiered rewards for donors.

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Keep a mailing list:

Even if you don't have anything to sell right now, you should always be collecting email address from people who come across your work and wat to stay in touch.

The model is very simple: They give away great stuff on their sites, they collect emails, and they have something remarkable to share or sell, they send an email. You'd be amazed at how well the model works.

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Make more work for yourself:‍

Be ambitious. Keep yourself busy. Think bigger. Expand your audience. Don't hobble yourself in the name of "keeping it real", or "not selling out". Try new things. If an opportunity comes along that will allow you to do more of the kind of work you want to do, say Yes. If an opportunity comes along that would mean more money, but less of the kind of work you want to do, say No.

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Pay it forward:‍

At some point, you have to switch from saying "yes" a lot to saying "no" a lot. You have to be as generous as you can, but selfish enough to get your work done.

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10. Stick Around
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Don't quite your show:

Every career is full of ups and downs, just like with stories, when you're in the middle of living out your life and carer, you don't know whether you're up or down.

Work is never finished, only abandoned. – Paul Valéry

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Chain-smoke:

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.

Just do the work that's in front of you, and when it's finished, ask yourself what you missed, what you could've done better, or what you couldn't get to, and jump right into the next project.

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Go away so you can come back:

Commute, exercise and nature. It's very important to separate your work from the rest of your life. As my wife said to me, "If you never go to work, you never get to leave work."

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Start over, begin again:

You can't be content with mastery, you have to push yourself to become a student again.

The thing is, you never really start over. You don't lose all the work that's come before. Even if you try to toss it aside, the lessons that you've learned from it will seep into what you do next.

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