Show Your Work! (Austin Kleon)

Kleon is a writer of, not one but, five New York Times bestselling books. In his “trilogy”, the order and themes are as follows:

1. Steal Like an Artist — Never mind originality. Just do art because creativity is simply undetected plagiarism.
2. Show Your Work! — After doing the art, it’s now about the creative journey on getting known. (sounds scammy, like a business book, but it’s a genuinely a good read)
3. Keep Going — Discard your internal biases and celebrate living. Stay creative, focused and true to yourself. These are the rules to having a more sustainable and productive life.

I’m not sure why I didn’t write it in chronological order but alas!

🌎 Impressions

All three books are amazing. My love for each of them are linearly beyond the charts. In this edition, he emphasises on documenting your work — whether small or big — everyday. It talks about the value of sharing your art online, and being curious, courageous and open in public.

Encouraging at best.

🧩 Top 3 Quotes

• The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something. Amateurs know that contributing something is better than contributing nothing.
• Be on the lookout for voids that you can fill with your own efforts, no matter how bad they are at first. Don’t worry, for now, about how you’ll make money or a career off it. Forget about being an expert or a professional, and wear your amateurism (your heart, your love) on your sleeve. Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you.
• Imagine if your next boss didn’t have to read your résumé because he already reads your blog. Imagine being a student and getting your first gig based on a school project you posted online.

🌳 How the Book Changed Me

• That’s all any of us are: amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else. (Charlie Chaplin) This was moving in a sense that people who I admire are, fundamentally, just regular people. The major deviator is that they are obsessed by their thing and spend a ton of time thinking out loud about it.
• Sadly, I’m still a student which is irrevocably the age where you question your life’s purpose. My biggest challenges, as of the moment, is figuring out what I like to be doing. But “we’re always being told find your voice. When I was younger, I never really knew what this meant. I used to worry a lot about voice, wondering if I had my own. But now I realize that the only way to find your voice is to use it. It’s hardwired, built into you. Talk about the things you love. Your voice will follow.”
• I have developed a new habit and it’s reading the New York Times’ obituaries every morning. Why? “Take inspiration from the people who muddled through life before you — they all started out as amateurs, and they got where they were going by making do with what they were given, and having the guts to put themselves out there.”
• 🔑 Absolute gold: When you share your taste and your influences, have the guts to own all of it. Don’t give in to the pressure to self-edit too much.
• Kleon has tainted itself all over the work I do. I’ve started this Desklamp publication because of him and hopefully, he’ll give you the courage to do the same too: “The minute you learn something, turn around and teach it to others. Share your reading list. 🔖 Point to helpful reference materials. 🗺 Create some tutorials and post them online. 🏋🏼‍♂️ Use pictures, words, and video. Take people step-by-step through part of your process. As blogger Kathy Sierra says, “Make people better at something they want to be better at.”

📒 Summary + Notes

• 🪦 Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. (Steve Jobs)
• 🎲 If you work on something a little bit every day, you end up with something that is massive. (Kenneth Goldsmith)
• 🗑 “Dumpster diving” is one of the jobs of the artist — finding the treasure in other people’s trash, sifting through the debris of our culture, paying attention to the stuff that everyone else is ignoring, and taking inspiration from the stuff that people have tossed aside for whatever reasons.
• 👯‍♀️ Protect your vulnerable areas. If you have work that is too sensitive or too close to you to be exposed to criticism, keep it hidden. But remember what writer Colin Marshall says: “Compulsive avoidance of embarrassment is a form of suicide.” If you spend your life avoiding vulnerability, you and your work will never truly connect with other people.
• 💩 “If someone took a dump in your living room, you wouldn’t let it sit there, would you?” Nasty comments are the same — they should be scooped up and thrown in the trash.
• ❤️ We all have to get over our “starving artist” romanticism and the idea that touching money inherently corrupts creativity. Some of our most meaningful and most cherished cultural artifacts were made for money.
• 💸 We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies. (Walt Disney)
• ⏰ You just have to be as generous as you can, but selfish enough to get your work done.
• 🖼 Go away so you can come back. “The minute you stop wanting something you get it.” (Andy Warhol)
• 📳 Document your progress and share as you go so that others can learn along with you. Show your work, and when the right people show up, pay close attention to them, because they’ll have a lot to show you.

Thanks for reading :) If you enjoyed this article, you might like the previous one.

This publication is a collection of my books on my desk lamp (hence, Desklamp Notes) where I compile it to include the summary, notes and highlights.

Thanks to Ali Abdaal — where I took the format of this article.