Show Your Work!

Text in black are quotes; text in green are my notes. I sometimes write in Spanish.

• creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds. #

• We can stop asking what others can do for us, and start asking what we can do for others. #

• 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. #

• Find a scenius, pay attention to what others are sharing, and then start taking note of what they’re not sharing. #

• Become a documentarian of what you do. Start a work journal: Write your thoughts down in a notebook, or speak them into an audio recorder. Keep a scrapbook. 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. Take advantage of all the cheap, easy tools at your disposal—these days, most of us carry a fully functional multimedia studio around in our smartphones. #

• Science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon once said that 90 percent of everything is crap. The same is true of our own work. The trouble is, we don’t always know what’s good and what sucks. That’s why it’s important to get things in front of others and see how they react. #

• Always be sure to run everything you share with others through The “So What?” Test. Don’t overthink it; just go with your gut. #

• Don’t think of your website as a self-promotion machine, think of it as a self-invention machine. #

• “I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. If you f---ing like something, like it.” —Dave Grohl #

• Human beings want to know where things came from, how they were made, and who made them. The stories you tell about the work you do have a huge effect on how people feel and what they understand about your work, and how people feel and what they understand about your work affects how they value it. #

• If you want to be more effective when sharing yourself and your work, you need to become a better storyteller. You need to know what a good story is and how to tell one. #

• Remember what the author George Orwell wrote: “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.” #

• If you want fans, you have to be a fan first. If you want to be accepted by a community, you have to first be a good citizen of that community. If you’re only pointing to your own stuff online, you’re doing it wrong. You have to be a connector. The writer Blake Butler calls this being an open node. If you want to get, you have to give. If you want to be noticed, you have to notice. Shut up and listen once in a while. Be thoughtful. Be considerate. #

• 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. #

• You have to remember that your work is something you do, not who you are. This is especially hard for artists to accept, as so much of what they do is personal. #

• You just have to be as generous as you can, but selfish enough to get your work done. #