Show Your Work!

Hello people! How are you? Hope that you had a fantastic week. Mine was great as it was my parents' 27th wedding anniversary; so we decided to visit Shree Mahakaleshwar Temple in Ujjain. Today, I will be sharing a short summary, lessons and some of my favourite lines from the book, Show Your Work! A 215 pages long, non-fiction book- Show Your Work! is penned by the writer Austin Kleon. This book is a sequel to his New York Times bestseller book Steal Like an Artist, followed by Keep Going. Unfortunately, I couldn't get my hands on Steal Like an Artist, so here we are, reading the second one first.

A quick summary

The book is divided into ten chapters that explains ten key ideas to share your creativity and get discovered. It is a tiny, easy-to-read book with some thoughtful messages illustrated through pictures. The book explains the power of sharing your work with the world and getting yourself noticed; thus sharing some tips and tricks for the same even for people who hate self-promotion. Here are my five favourite lessons:

1. You Don’t Have to Be a Genius

Be an amateur. We’re all terrified of being revealed as amateurs, but in fact, today it is the amateur—the enthusiast, regardless of the potential for fame, money, or career —who often has the advantage over the professional as they have little to lose. Sometimes, in the process of doing things in an unprofessional way, they make new discoveries. 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. Don’t worry, for now, about how you’ll make money or a career off it. Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you.

2. Think Process, Not Product

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.

Today, by taking advantage of the Internet and social media, an artist can share whatever he/she wants, whenever he/she wants, at almost no cost. Now, let’s face it: We’re not all artists or some extraordinary people. A lot of us go about our work and feel like we have nothing to show for it at the end of the day. So, how can you show your work even when you have nothing to show? The first step is to scoop up the scraps and the residue of your process and shape them into some interesting bit of media that you can share. Become a documentarian of what you do. Write your thoughts down in a notebook. 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’re 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.

3. Share Something Small Everyday

Send out a daily dispatch. Once a day, after you’ve done your day’s work, go back to your documentation and find one little piece of your process that you can share. Don’t say you don’t have enough time. We’re all busy, but we all get 24 hours a day. People often ask me, “How do you find the time for all this?” And I answer, “I look for it.” You find time in the same place you find spare change: in the nooks and crannies.

4. Open Up Your Cabinet of Curiosities

Before we’re ready to take the leap of sharing our own work with the world, we can share our tastes in the work of others. Where do you get your inspiration? What sorts of things do you fill your head with? What do you read? Do you subscribe to anything? What sites do you visit on the Internet? What music do you listen to? What movies do you see? Who’s done work that you admire? Who do you steal ideas from? Do you have any heroes? Who are the practitioners you look up to in your field? 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.

5. Teach What You Know

Teaching people doesn’t subtract value from what you do, it actually adds to it. When you teach someone how to do your work, you are, in effect, generating more interest in your work. People feel closer to your work because you’re letting them in on what you know. The minute you learn something, turn around and teach it to others. Share your reading list. Take people step-by-step through part of your process.

My favourite quotes:

• “Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare to think.” —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
  

• “Make people better at something they want to be better at.” —Kathy Sierra
  

• “When people realize they’re being listened to, they tell you things.” —Richard Ford
  

• "The minute you stop wanting something you get it." —Andy Warhol

I hope you learnt something through reading this blog. If Yes, then make sure to like the blog, comment, share and subscribe to the email newsletter if you haven't yet. I post a blog every Monday at 7 pm IST, until then Happy Reading!