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

John T. Unger tells this terrific story from his days as a street poet. He would do a poetry reading and afterward some guy would come up to him and say, “Your poem changed my life, man!” And John would say, “Oh, thanks. Want to buy a book? It’s five dollars.” And the guy would take the book, hand it back to John, and say, “Nah, that’s okay.” To

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.

You have to have the courage to get rid of work and rethink things completely. “I need to sort of tear down everything I’ve done and rebuild from scratch,” said director Steven Soderbergh about his upcoming retirement from making films. “Not because I’ve figured everything out, I’ve just figured out what I can’t figure out and I need to tear it

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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.

But now I realize that the only way to find your voice is to use it.

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 a mutual respect. There will only be a handful or so of them, but they’re so, so important. Do what you can to

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