Key takeaways from Show Your Work

Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work! is a must read for founders and creators.

The main idea is:

• Whatever work you do, share your process, journey, and ideas online. Keep on putting something out there - Share what you're learning or what you've built. Don’t be a hoarder.

And if you keep on doing that:

• The right people will find you, and you will build a community around what you do. Stick to this process and opportunities will come your way.

Here are some bite-sized practical lessons from the book:

Be an amateur. Someone who is not afraid to make mistakes or worry about others’ opinion. Amateurs are willing to share anything and have an advantage over the professionals.

Share something small everyday. Send out a daily dispatch. Anything you've learned, a small feature you added, some cool app you found, or what thoughts you had today.

Build a good (domain) name. But don’t think of your website as a self-promotion machine. Think of it as a self-invention machine. Fill it up with your ideas and the stuff you care about. Whether people show up or not, you’re out there, doing your thing, ready whenever they are. And most importantly, don’t give up on it. Ever.

Share your influences and interests. Who do you follow? Where do you get your inspiration from? Who do you subscribe to? Curate your collections. They clue people in to who you are, sometimes more than your work.

Austin debunks one of the biggest misconceptions about work that is, work speaks for itself. It doesn’t. You have to speak for it. At the same time, you’ll need to learn how to be a good story teller. The stories you tell people about the work you do have a huge effect on how people feel.

Teach what you know. Share your secrets. Teaching doesn’t mean instant competition. Just because you know the master’s technique doesn’t mean you can emulate it right away. When you teach something, you end up generating more interest about your work and people feel closer to you.

Your followers will be a natural outgrowth of doing things that you keep on doing. You don't need to chase followers or worry about the number of likes your posts are getting. Make stuff you love and talk about the stuff you love, and you’ll attract people who love that kind of stuff.

Learn to take a punch. The more you put stuff out there, the more chances of attracting some criticism. But let ‘em take their best shot. Never take any criticism personally. The more criticism you can take, the more you realize it can’t hurt you.

Don’t shy away from asking for money. Put up a ‘buy me a coffee’ sign. If people are loving what you do they’ll throw away a few bucks your way. If you feel that the work you’re putting is truly worth something, don’t be afraid to charge for your work. Put a price on it that you think is fair.

Don’t quit your show. Every career is full of ups and downs. The people who get what they’re after are very often the ones who just stick around long enough.

Chain-smoke. Instead of taking a break between projects, waiting for feedbacks, and worrying what’s next, use the end of one project to light up the next one. Don’t lose momentum. You still shouldn’t burn out though, and it’s okay to take breaks and mini-sabbaticals when you feel like it. You have to go away to come back.

And that is all. We covered all the core messages from a great book for creators. What now? Go online and post what you’re working on.