Document your progress and share as you go so that others can learn along with you.

source

5. Tell Good Stories

---

Work doesn’t speak for itself

1. Art forgery is a strange phenomenon. Accordingly, when shown an object, or given a food, or shown a face, people’s assessment of it – how much they like it, how valuable it is – is deeply affected by what you tell them about it
2. “My work speaks for itself” but the truth is, our work doesn’t speak for itself. 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 effects how they value it
3. Why should we describe the frustrations and turning points in the lab, or all the hours of groundwork and failed images that precede the final outcomes? – because, rarified exceptions aside, our audience is a human one, and humans want to connect.
4. 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.

Structure is everything

1. An important part of a story is its structure. A good story structure is tidy, sturdy, and logical.
2. Basic plot of nearly all stories is this: “a character wants something, goes after it despite oppositions, and so arrives at a win, lose, or draw.”
3. Shape of most creative work:
   1. You get a great idea, you go through the hard work of executing the idea, and then you release the idea out into the world, coming to a win, lose, or draw.
   2. Formula for almost any type of work project: there’s the initial problem, the work done to solve the problem, and then the solution.
   3. A good pitch: first act is the past, the second act is the present, and the third act is the future.
      1. What you want, how you came to want it, and what you’ve done so far to get it
      2. Where you are now in your work and how you’ve worked hard and used up most of your resources
      3. Where you’re going, and how exactly the person you’re pitching can help you get there
4. Learn to speak. Learn to write.
5. Be a good storyteller, but it doesn’t come easy. So study the great stories and then go find some of your own. Your stories will get better the more you tell them.

Talk about yourself at parties

(?????)

6. Teach what you know

---

Share your trade secrets

1. Teaching doesn’t mean instant competition.
2. J. Fried and D. Heinemeier Hansson encourage businesses to emulate chefs by out-teaching their competition.
   1. What do you do? What are you ‘recipe’? What’s your ‘cookbook’?
   2. What can you tell the world about how you operate that’s informative, educational, and promotional?
3. The minute you learn something, turn around and teach it to others. Share a reading list. Point to helpful reference materials. Create tutorials and post them online.
   1. Use pictures, words and video.
   2. Take people step-by-step through part of your process.

“Make people better at something they want to be better at.”

1. 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.
2. The great things about putting out a book are that “it brings you into contact with people whose opinions you should have canvassed before you ever pressed pen to paper”.

7. Don’t turn into human spam

---

Shut up and listen.

“The writing community is full of lame-o people who want to be published in journals even though they don’t read the magazines that they want to be published in”

1. These are human spam, they don’t want to pay their dues, they want their piece right here, right now.

2. You should feel pity for these people and their delusions.

3. 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.

4. If you want to get, you have to give. If you want to be noticed, you have to notice.

5. Shut up and listen once in a while.

6. Be an open node.

You want hearts, not eyeballs.

1. Stop worrying about how many people follow you online and start worrying about the quality of people who follow you.
   1. Don’t waste time reading how to get more followers
   2. Don’t waste time following people online just because you think it’ll get you somewhere.
   3. Don’t talk to people you don’t want to talk to
   4. Don’t talk about stuff you don’t want to talk about
2. If you want followers, be someone worth following.
3. “Have you tried making yourself a more interesting person?”
   1. To be “interst-ing” is to be curious and attentive, and to practice “continual projection of interest.”
   2. If you want to be interesting you have to be interested.
4. It’s true that life is all about “who you know”. But who you know is largely dependent on who you are and what you do, and the people you know can’t do anything for you if you’re not doing good work.
5. How many people waste time and energy trying to make connections instead of getting good at what they do, when
   1. “being good at things is the only thing that earns you clout or connections.”
6. 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.
7. Don’t be creepy. Don’t be a jerk. Don’t waste people’s time. Don’t ask too much. And don’t ever ever ask people to follow you.
   1. “Follow me back?” is the saddest question on the internet.

The Vampire Test

1. Vampire test is a simple way to know who you should let in and out of your life. If, after hanging out with someone you feel worn out and depleted, that person is a vampire.
   1. It works on many things in our lives, not just people – you can apply it to jobs, hobbies, places, etc.
2. Vampires cannot be cured. Banish it forever from your life forever.

Identify your fellow knuckleballers

1. As you put yourself and your work out there, you will run into your fellow knuckleballers. These are your real peers – the people who share your obsessions, the people who share a similar mission to your own, the people with whom you share mutual respect.

Meetup in Meatspace

1. Meeting people online is awesome, but turning them into IRL (in real life) friends is even better.

8. Learn to Take a punch

---

Let ‘em take their best shot

1. Don’t take criticism personally
2. When you put your work into the world, you have to be ready for the good, the bad, and the ugly. Here’s how to take punches
   1. Relax and breathe
      • Take a deep breath and accept whatever comes
   2. Strengthen your neck
      • Practice getting hit a lot
      • Put out a lot of work
   3. Roll with the punches
      1. Keep moving. Having your work hated by certain people is a badge of honor.
   4. 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.
   5. Keep your balance
      • You have to remember that your work is something you do, not who you are.

Don’t feed the trolls

1. First step in evaluating feedback is sizing up who it came from.
2. Be extra wary of feedback from anybody who falls outside your circle

9. Sell Out

---

Even the renaissance had to be funded

• Whether an artist makes money off his work or not, money has to come from somewhere, be it a day job, a wealthy spouse, a trust fund, an arts grant, or a patron.
• Don’t be jealous when the people you like do well – celebrate their victory as if it’s your own.

Pass around the hat.

• "Like this? Buy me a coffee."
• Don’t be afraid to charge for your work, but put a price on it that you think is fair.

Keep a mailing list.

• Some multimillion-dollar business off of their mailing lists. The model is very simple: they give away great stuff on their sites, they collect emails, and then when they have something remarkable to share to sell, they send an email. You’ll be amazed at how well the model works.
• Keep your own list, or get an account with an email newsletter company like MailChimp
• NOTE: never ever add someone’s email address to your mailing list without her permission

Make more work for yourself.

• There’s a point in one’s life when one cares about selling out and not selling out. What really matters is doing good work and taking advantage of every opportunity that comes your way.
• “I have to feel that I’m after something. If I have money, fine. But I’d rather be striving. It’s the striving, man, it’s that I want.”
• Be ambitious. Keep yourself busy. Think bigger. Expand your audience.

Pay it forward.

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

10. Stick Around

---

Don’t quit your show.

1. The people who get what they’re after are very often the ones who just stick around long enough. It’s very important not to quit prematurely.

“I guess, whatever you do, don’t quit your show."
JUST KEEP GOING!

Chain-smoke

1. Whether you’ve just won big or lost big, you still have to face the question:

“What’s next?”

1. Chain-smoking: You avoid stalling out in your career by never losing momentum.
2. Instead of taking a break in between projects, waiting for feedback, and worrying about what’s next, use the end of one project to light up the next one.
3. Just do the work that’s in front of you, and when it’s finished, ask yourself what you missed, what you could’ve done better, or what you couldn’t get to, and jump right into the next project.

Go away so you can come back.

1. At some point you might burn out and need to go looking for a match. The best time to find one is while taking a sabbatical.
2. Three prime spots to turn off our brain and take a break from our connected lives:
   1. Commute
   2. Exercise
   3. Nature
      • Go to a park
      • Take a hike
      • Get outside in the fresh air.
      • Disconnect from anything and everything electronic

Begin Again (start over?)

1. You can’t be content with mastery; you have to push yourself to become a student again.
2. When you get rid of old material, you push yourself further and come up with something better – you’re actually making room for new work.
3. I need to sort of tear down everything I’ve done and rebuild from scratch
4. The thing is, you never really start over. You don’t lose all the work that comes before. So don’t think of it as starting over. Think of it as beginning again.
5. Look for something new to learn, and when you find it, dedicate yourself to learning it out in the open.

Document your progress and share as you go so that others can learn along with you.

Call to Action

• [x] Go online and post what you’re working on right now with the tag #showyourwork
• [x] Plan a “show your work!” night colleagues or friends. Use this book as a guide – share work in-progress and your curiosities, tell stories, and teach one another.
• [x] Give a copy of this book away to somebody who needs to read it.

^{Disclaimer: this is a summary of the book Show Your Work by Austin Kleon.}