show your work vagavang

Show Your Work!: 10 ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

By Austin Kleon

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

  1. Show Your Work is a stylish read, with a vignette like writing style but well composed. It advocates that one should share their work and be generous to enable one to find their tribe and by doing so increase the curve of their work quality and community.
  2. One of the mantras of Show Your Work is that we should be generous with sharing as well as crediting others for things they like, and show strive to be able not only to talk about but to actually share out “what you are working on” on a daily cadence
  3. Ultimately Show Your Work is advocating that sharing is the way to do things, its not about being a lone genius or being smarter than everyone, its about showing how the sausage is made while at the same time having a process in place that enables you to make the best sausage you can at the end of it all. If you are proud of the sausage that you have made thats great, but it often won’t be up to you to be the arbiter of what is good or not, so don’t get bent out of shape.

🎨 Impressions

I liked his writing style, how we fused really well composed but highly colloquial writing with graphic presentations. It’s perhaps the best book about creativity in recent memory. He’s mastered his own personal voice and is sharing with us how its done as best as he can articulate. It makes me really excited to follow my passions and share them with platforms I build and makes me more inclined to develop the discipline I need to have to do this

How I Discovered It

The high recommendation of Ali Abdel, who is a YouTube Vlogger and entrepreneur that I stumbled upon because of Forte Labs, which I stumbled upon as I was googling things about Notion. I was delighted when I was able to get it from the Seattle Library [Libby App](https://www.overdrive.com/apps/libby?).

Who Should Read It?

Anybody interested in building a creative or interests based community and building a career or through creating any kind of content will enjoy Show Your Work. It is an empowering read, and if you can apply the lessons you’ll live a better and more productive life in general.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

💡 I vow to be a generous sharer of the things I’m working on. And I vow to work on things I enjoy. This book gave me a mindset and planted the seeds for an ethos to keep in mind on this journey. From a tactical point of view the thing that changed by thinking most was how one can think about stories and narratives as both templates and process diagrams. I put Show Your Work way up there in the books that have changed my perspective about how I should live my life.

✍️ My Top Quotes from Show Your Work

  1. Make stuff you love and talk about stuff you love and you’ll attract people who love that kind of stuff. It’s that simple.
  2. “Do what you do best and link to the rest.” — Jeff Jarvis
  3. Don’t think of your website as a self – promotion machine , think of it as a self – invention machine .
  4. 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.

📒 Summary + Notes

  • How does the new information contradict, correct, support, or add to what I already know?
    • This supports my desire to do what I like and share it. It changed how I think about it though, in that I hadn’t I considered the power of iterative open book sharing of your process and having an orientation to share at a daily cadence. It makes me see the need to speed all of this up for the next six months and then I can see where I land
  • How can I combine ideas to generate something new?
    • I really like his tone. I’d like to adapt this tone and the Mark Madsen irreverence to have my respectful rebellion mindfulness voice. One that is brutally honest but kind, one that says what he means and does what he wants
  • What questions are triggered by these new ideas?
    • I think I’ll need to learn more and experiment with channels. I’ve never liked putting myself in the lime light, but I think I’ll need to figure out how to promote myself and my work process in more than just my website presences. So far I think I’ll like TikTok best </aside>

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