This is a summary of Show Your Work, Austin Kleon’s second book. You may also enjoy my summary of Kleon’s first book, Steal Like An Artist, a New York Times bestseller.
Buy Show Your Work at: Amazon | Kobo (affiliate links)
Key Takeaways from Show Your Work
The book hops around a little bit but I think the key takeaways from Show Your Work can be grouped into the following themes:
- Be part of a community. Be both a consumer and a producer in that community.
- Share your process, not just finished works.
- Share your influences (and credit them properly).
- Share your knowledge and secrets.
- Share daily, but don’t overshare.
- Keep up your momentum but also take breaks to prevent burnout.
- Stories create value, so practise storytelling.
- Criticism is inevitable. Learn to deal with it.
- Don’t be afraid of “selling out”. It’s fine to earn money for your work. It’s also fine to change.
- When you get some success:
- help others;
- set limits, learn to start saying no; and
- begin again – always keep learning.
Detailed Summary of Show Your Work
Be part of a community
- Good work isn’t created in a vacuum. The idea of a lone genius is a myth. Many people we think of as “lone geniuses” were actually part of a scene of people who all worked together, copied off each other and supported each other.
- You can be a valuable part of a scene by contributing ideas, making connections, and starting conversations. [Kleon uses the word “scenius” which I find a bit too twee to replicate here.]
- Take note of what others are not sharing in the scene. You could fill that void.
- Be a consumer in the community too. Art is a two-way street, involving feedback. To be accepted by a community, you first have to be a citizen of that community. If you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader first. Kleon uses the term “human spam” to describe people who want to tell you their ideas but don’t want to listen to yours.
- Quality, not quantity:
- Don’t worry about how many people follow you or read articles on how to get more followers. Quality matters more than quantity.
- If you want followers, be someone worth following. Be interesting. You will then get quality followers.
- Life is about who you know, but who you know mostly depends on who you are and what you do. Instead of wasting time trying to make connections, get good at what you do. Then connections will naturally come.
- Your “real peers” – the ones who share your obsessions and with whom you share a mutual respect – will be rare but they are very important. Nurture your relationships with them. Collaborate with them. Promote them to others. Get feedback from them before sharing your work with others.
Share your process, not just finished works
- With the Internet and social media, sharing is easier than ever. You can share uncompleted works like WIP, sketches, and ideas. You can also share your process – what you do, your tools, your inspirations.
- People like becoming involved in your creative process. If you form an ongoing connection with them by sharing your process, your work will resonate more with them.
- Even if you don’t share your process, recording it has benefits. You’ll be able to see your work more clearly and feel like you’re making progress. And you can always decide to share it later.
Share your influences
- Collect things that interest or influence you, and share them. There’s not that big a difference between collecting and creating. Reading feeds writing, which then feeds reading.
- Your influences are worth sharing because they clue people in to who you are. DJ Spooky said that a musician is judged by their record collection. Don’t be ashamed of “guilty pleasures” as they still influence you. What makes us unique is the diversity of our likes and influences. Have the guts to own it all; don’t self-edit too much.
- When sharing others’ work, make sure to credit it properly. If you don’t attribute it properly, you’re not only robbing the original creator but you’re also robbing your audience of the opportunity to dig deeper into that person’s work. If you don’t know where something came from, find out. If you can’t find out, don’t share it.
- It’s also good practice to attribute how you found the work. So if you found out about a particular blog through a podcast, link to that podcast as well.
Share your knowledge
- Teach others and share your secrets. Teaching others doesn’t mean instant competition. Just because you know how a master does something doesn’t mean you can emulate it right away. Teaching adds value to your work because it generates interest in your work (same idea as how sharing your process creates a connection with your audience).
- When you share your knowledge with others, you can get very helpful feedback. Christopher Hitchens said that having his work out in the world was a free education for a lifetime because people who are knowledgeable about the area will contact you and share their thoughts and knowledge with you.
Share daily, even if it’s small
- Most of your work will be crap, but you won’t necessarily know which parts are good. So just share your work and see how others react.
- Don’t let sharing your work take precedence over doing it.
- Don’t share everything. As yourself why you’re sharing something – is it helpful? Is it entertaining? Is it something you’re comfortable having your boss or mother see?
- If you’re not sure about sharing, let it sit for 24 hours.
- If you share regularly, over time you’ll build up a “stock” of ideas, posts, tweets, etc. You may notice themes and patterns in what you share, and choose to expand on parts of it. Kleon says many of the ideas in the book started out as tweets, which became blog posts, and later book chapters.
- Use the right social media site for sharing your work. You don’t need to be on every platform. Filmmakers tend to be YouTube or Vimeo, business people on LinkedIn, writers on Twitter, visual artists on Tumblr, Instagram, or Facebook.
- Get your own website and domain. Your website is your own personal space online. If you don’t know what you want to create, just use your own name or an alias (Kleon’s site is www.austinkleon.com). Fill your website with your work and ideas. Add to it regularly, don’t neglect it. Eventually it will be its own currency.
Keep up your momentum but also take breaks
- Success takes time. Stick around, don’t quit prematurely. Orson Welles said: “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”
- Keep up your momentum. Instead of taking a break between projects, use the end of one project to start the next one – jump right into the next project.
- Kleon does recognise that this advice can be recipe for burnout, so he suggests taking a sabbatical. Designer Stefan Sagmeister takes a year off every 7 years. He claims that everything designed in the 7 years following his first sabbatical had its roots in thinking done during that sabbatical. Kleon too says that a lot of the ideas he’s executed were ideas first had in his first two years out of college, working an undemanding part-time job.
- Even if you can’t take a full year off, you can take shorter sabbaticals – daily, weekly or monthly breaks. [I would hardly call a day off a sabbatical!] Make sure to take time off away from your work.
Practise telling stories
- Good stories can create value:
- In Significant Objects, Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker conducted an experiment that involved buying a variety of thrift store objects for, on average, $1.25. They then hired a bunch of writers to invent stories that “attributed significance” to each object and listed the objects on eBay with those stores. The ended up selling $128.74 worth of trinkets for $3,612.51. [This sounds a bit dishonest to me, though I guess it depends on whether the stories appeared to be truthful or not. When I first read this I thought that they must have told all the buyers the truth afterwards and given them refunds, but it seems the profits went to the contributing writers instead.]
- Our work doesn’t speak for itself. The stories you tell about your work have a huge effect on how people feel about, and value, your work.
- Good storytelling doesn’t come easily to everyone so practice telling more.
- Structure is important for a good story:
- Most of life is messy. Sometimes you have to do a lot of editing to fit life into something like a story.
- John Gardner, an author, described the basic plot of nearly all stories as being: “A character wants something, goes after it despite opposition (perhaps including his own doubts), and so arrives at a win, lose, or draw”.
- If your story is open-ended (in that you don’t know how it ends) you can still tell it. An open-ended story is a pitch – e.g. a cover letter, a fundraising request. The first act is the past, the second is the present, and the third is the future. The third act describes how the person you’re pitching to can shape the ending.
Learn to deal with criticism
- Criticism is inevitable. The more people come across your work, the more criticism you’ll receive.
- Relax and breathe. Bad criticism won’t kill you. Consider practising meditation.
- Practise getting hit a lot. Put out a lot of work. The more criticism you get, the less it will sting. Make sure you keep moving, keep putting out work.
- Protect your vulnerable areas. If you have work that is too sensitive or close to you to be exposed to criticism, don’t share it.
- Keep your balance. Your work is not who you are. Keep close to your family and friends – the people who love you for you, regardless of your work.
- Block people on social media and delete nasty comments if you want. You can even turn off comments completely.
Don’t be afraid of selling out
- Get over any romantic notions of being a “starving artist”. Money does not inherently corrupt creativity. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel because he was paid by the Pope.
- Asking for money for your work (whether in form of donations, crowdfunding or a price for your product) is a leap you want to take only if you feel confident your work is truly worth something to others. You can charge for your work but charge a price that you think is fair.
- Keep a mailing list. Even if you don’t have something to sell yet, a mailing list is a good way to get in touch with people who liked your work enough to sign up to your list (don’t ever add someone to your list without their permission). Those people will be some of your biggest supporters, so treat them with respect and don’t betray their trust. Be clear to your subscribers how often updates will be – daily, monthly, or infrequently.
- People who accuse others of being “sellouts” don’t want things to ever change. But creativity is all about change. You can change and be ambitious, expand your audience. Don’t hobble yourself in order to “not sell out”.
When you get success
- When you get success, do what you can to help along others who helped you get where you are. Extol your teachers, mentors, influences, peers, and fans. Give them opportunities to share their work.
- At some point you have to switch from saying “yes” to saying “no” because of time constraints. Kleon’s solution to not answering his emails is to hold “office hours” once a month. People can ask him anything on his website and he then publishes his answers so others can see. Be as generous as you can, but selfish enough to get your work done.
- Recognise that, if you’re successful, you have also had luck (see also Thinking in Bets).
- When you feel you’ve learned what you can, change course and find something new to learn. Don’t be content with mastery; push yourself to be a student again.
- Throw out your old material every now and again. You will then make room for new work and push yourself to come up with something better. You never really “start over” because you’ll still have the things you’ve learned sitting in your head somewhere.
Other Interesting Points
One tip Kleon had near the start was to read obituaries. He talked about how near-death experiences can be very motivating but he doesn’t want actual near-death experiences because of the danger involved. So he suggested reading obituaries as a substitute, since they will remind you of your mortality and you can get inspired by what other people who have gone before you did in their lives.
[I had a look after reading this but, in my country at least, obituaries are not that detailed. Most just describe who the deceased was related to and tell you where the funeral will be. I don’t know if obituaries in the US are different.]
My Thoughts
I didn’t enjoy Show Your Work quite as much as Kleon’s earlier book, Steal Like An Artist. I found the latter more motivating and comforting in general. Still, Show Your Work is a decent read. In my view, the most valuable suggestion was to show your process and unfinished works, because they could still be interesting to others. It’s not something I would have necessarily thought of doing otherwise.
Kleon’s writing is clear and concise, but he tends to be a bit unstructured. The book jumps from topic to topic and the order is not always logical. I have reordered some things in this summary. Some parts are also a bit random, like when Kleon talks about how he loves meeting his online friends in real life and how he loves the phenomenon “meetups”. I mean, good for him but it felt out of place. It didn’t tie back to the creative process – he wasn’t talking about how it helped him creatively to do so. Luckily, the book is relatively short so the weak structure can be forgiven.
Kleon has a colourful way of describing things – e.g. “learn to take a punch”, “don’t be human spam”. I have usually translated those in my summary with more bland, self-explanatory terms. The reason is because I think, if I look back on this summary in 5 years’ time, I won’t understand what “don’t be human spam” means.
Buy Show Your Work at: Amazon | Kobo <– These are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you make a purchase. I’d be grateful if you considered supporting the site in this way! 🙂
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