Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered
Purpose
I saw this book on sale and bought it a while ago. I've appreciated Austin's work before, but it tends to be on the short side.
Expectations
I already believe in showing your work, but I wanted to read this book more with the idea to learn how to market showing your work. As an aside, I'm thinking about mechanisms to describe or diagram systems or forces, and because Austin's work is very visual, I'm hopeful to get something valuable from it.
I'm expecting that this book should raise some questions for me, but probably won't provide many answers. Also, I doubt there will be many leads with respect to other books, so any research subjects that result will probably take a bit of legwork.
Relectations and further research
Works Cited
(list from loc 814)
- Brian Eno - A Year With Swollen Appendices
- Steve Johnson - Where Good Ideas Come From
- David Byrne - How Music Works
- Mike Monterio - Design Is a Job
- Kio Stark - Don't Go Back To School
- Ian Svenonius - Supernatural Strategies For Making A Rock 'n' Roll Group
- Sidney Lumet - Making Movies
- P.T. Barnum - The Art of Money Getting
Notes
A New Way of Operating
- 18 "Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating." - John Cleese
- 24 Today, successful people worth stealing from are already sharing
- 24 This is a book for people who hate the idea of self-promotion
- 33 Work as never ending process
- 33 Influence others by letting them steal from you
1 You Don't Have To Be A Genius
- Find A Scenius
- 50 Scenius - coined by Brian Eno - Ideas coming from a group - "Ecology of Talent"
- 72 Amateurs have advantage because they have little to lose
- 72 Cognitive Surplus - Clay Shirky - "The stupidest possible act is still a creative act."
- 90 Think about what you want to learn, do it in front of others & pay attention to what they aren't sharing
- 104 Use your voice to strengthen it
- 113 Roger Ebert knew his time was short & he wanted to share everything he could in the time he had left
- 117 If your work isn't online, it doesn't exist
- 131 We Learn Nothing - Tim Kreider - Getting stabbed was the best thing that ever happened to him
- 140 Austin reads obits to appreciate life
2 Think Process, Not Product
- Take People Behind the Scenes
- 152 Art and Fear - David Bayles & Ted Orland - "To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product: the finished artwork. To you, and you alone what matters is the process: the experience of shaping the artwork."
- 171 It Will Be Exhilarating - Dan Provost & Tom Gerhardt - "People really do want to see how the sausage gets made."
- 175 Become a documentarian of what you do
- 188 Sharing process might be most valuable if products not easily shared
3 Share Something Small Every Day
- Send out a daily dispatch
- 204 No overnight success, but a succession of days
- 207 Post something about what you are up to daily - LinkedIn for businesspeople, Twitter for writers
- 266 Robin Sloan - Flow - daily information feed; Stock - the durable lasting stuff
- 289 Website as self-invention machine
4 Open Up Your Cabinet of Curiosities
- Don't be a hoarder
- No guilty pleasures
- 338 Michel de Montaigne - ordinary things are grand miracles
- 351 Don't self edit too much
- Credit is always due
- 355 Attribute when you can
- 360 Give others a way to dig into it too
- 368 Find the right credit or don't share
5 Tell Good Stories
- Work doesn't speak for itself
- 368 Significant Objects - Joshua Glenn & Rob Walker
- 394 The story makes the idea
- Structure is everything
- 411 Most stories structurally are the same
- Talk about yourself at parties
6 Teach What You Know
- Share your trade secrets
- 472 BBQ with Franklin - Youtube
- 484 Teaching =! Competition
- 484 ReWork
- 493 Teach adds to your value
- 501 Christopher Hitchens - Publishing leads people to you that you should have seeked out
7 Don't Turn Into Human Spam
- Shut up and listen
- 510 Read in your subject so you are worth listening to
- Hoarder < Contributor < Spammer - Sharing information
- Hoarder > Contributor > Spammer - Consuming information
- 522 Artists are looking for co-conspirators
- 530 You have to be a fan first
- 530 Blake Butler - Being an open Node
- The Vampire Test
- 556 Picasso energy vampire
- 566 Vampires can't be cured
- Identify your fellow knuckleballers
- 571 Wherever I Wind Up - R. A. Dickey
- Meet up in meatspace
8 Learn To Take A Punch
- Let 'em take their best shot
- 605 Mike Monterio - Art School students are brutal
- 605 Creative people very good at dream up worst case
- 613 Put a lot out to experience criticism
- 617 Colin Marshall - compulsive avoidance = suicide
- Don't feed the trolls
- 624 Only take feedback from people who care
- 629 Worst troll is in your head
9 Sell Out
- Even the renaissance had to be funded
- 647 Pope paid Michelangelo to paint Sistine Chapel
- Pass around the hat
- 659 Virtual tip jar
- 668 Buy now & Hire me button
- Keep a mailing list
- 686 Email is old, but it works
- 686 Give away on site, share & sell on email list
- Make more work for yourself
- Pay your success forward
- 718 Neil Gaiman - " The biggest problem of success is that the World conspires to stop you doing the thing that you do, because you are successful."
- 718 Office hours to box distractions to your success
- 726 Michael Lewis - "You owe a debt to the unlucky."
10 Stick Around
- Don't Quit Your Show
- 732 Dave Chappelle regretted quitting his
- Chain-Smoke
- 750 Prior success doesn't mean you can let up
- 750 Hemmingway - left last sentence half written to create momentum for next day
- 759 Joni Mitchell - use weak links as inspiration for next work
- Go away so you can come back
- 767 Sabbatical as counter to burn out and inspiration
- 779 small sabaticals - commutes, exercise, nature
- Begin again
- 801 Learn something new once mastery of something else