Show Your Work

If your work isn’t online, it doesn’t exist.

I wasn’t a proponent of showing your work until it’s done and dusted. But then I read a book called Show Your Work by Austin Kleon and I’m not the same person anymore.

A lot of what the book had to say revolves around how so many of the projects we undertake in our lives aren’t going to be completed. And since they aren’t going to see the light of the day, there is a very big chance that no one would ever know about them. Austin offers an alternate approach.

Here’s the thing. Humans love stories more than they love statistics or facts. We’re masters of story building. Nothing can ever inspire us as powerfully as a good story can. So why not tell stories about your work? Why not just show your journey rather than always wait up for the end?

Austin says that by sharing a little detail about your work every day, you offer a sneak peek into your life. This detail can be in any form: tweets, posts, or blogs. What matters is that people know what you’re building and how you’re building it. There are many advantages of putting your work out there:

• You get early feedback.
• You curate your life’s work in a more authentic and presentable way.
• Your other goals in life (such as job hunting, career advancement, etc.) can benefit from this information.
• You might end up building a community of people who are like you and who want to support you.
• You can monetize your content if you want to.

But what if someone steals my ideas?

I had the same question in my mind. And luckily Austin offers some advice around that.

• You don’t have to share everything and anything. Nobody is going to throw you out or shut you down for choosing not to share.
• People don’t steal as much as we think they do. How often did we steal and do anything of substance from it?
• By sharing, you increase the chances of making some genuine returns from your work which would otherwise be much harder to market.
• Nothing under the sun is ever new. Any idea that you come up with, probably a million others have had the same one before you. Ideas are only worth as much as the execution that goes behind them.

How do I get started?

There are a couple of suggestions that we get out of this book.

• Every time you sit for work, take pictures of your workpiece, of your workplace, of yourself in the process, and so on. At the end of the day, you’d have collected a bunch of them. Choose one or more from your day’s collection and post it.
• Learn to knit a good story around your content. Our lives are just too complex and complicated to sit finely into a storyline. But that doesn’t mean we can’t weave a good, compelling story around it. Steve Jobs did it so magnificently (which Apple continues to do so). Just learn to tell a good story and apply that skill set to your everyday work. While we are at that, Austin asks us to refrain from dishonesty or lies. Be authentic and truthful, and just stitch words together in a symphony.
• Think of giving before taking. History stands to prove that a strategy of giving before receiving always works.

What not to do?

• Stop being human spam. Do not post someone else’s work without crediting them. Be truthful about the source.
• Don’t share every little detail about your life. Some things ought to be kept private. Respect and uphold your privacy.
• Don’t try to monetize from your work from day one. Build trust in your audience and then when the time is right, price your product fairly. Don’t overprice or underprice.
• Self-invention over self-promotion. Your website, Instagram page, Twitter handle, etc. shouldn’t be a self-promotion machine. Rather make it into a self-inventing machine.
• Stick around. Don’t give up easily. Most often than not, results are bound to come to those who are patient and persevering. Patience always beats talent. Perseverance always beats trends.

Epilogue of sorts

Austin Kleon is a pioneer of blackout poetry and does such a good show of his work across his website and Twitter handle. Kleon is a modern author with advice that is up-to-date and relevant to our times.

Show Your Work is a brilliant book. It reads fast, has simple language, and lands its message right at home. It’s worth every penny that it costs. The book is more than what I have captured here. A definite read for anyone in their early years (teens and twenties).