Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

A troll is a person who isn’t interested in improving your work, only provoking you with hateful, aggressive, or upsetting talk. You will gain nothing by engaging with these people. Don’t feed them, and they’ll usually go away.

“If you work on something a little bit every day, you end up with something that is massive.”

fellowship, feedback, or patronage.

put a little sign-up widget on every page of your website. Write a little bit of copy to encourage people to sign up. Be clear about what they can expect, whether you’ll be sending daily, monthly, or infrequent updates. Never ever add someone’s email address to your mailing list without her permission.

“When people realize they’re being listened to, they tell you things.” —Richard Ford

to practice your creativity. We all like to think we’re more complex than a two-sentence explanation, but a two-sentence explanation is usually what the world wants from us. Keep it short and sweet.

“You have to make stuff,” said journalist David Carr when he was asked if he had any advice for students. “No one is going to give a damn about your résumé; they want to see what you have made with your own little fingers.”

Your website doesn’t have to look pretty; it just has to exist. Don’t think of your website as a self-promotion machine, think of it as a self-invention machine.

off. A good pitch is set up in three acts: The first act is the past, the second act is the present, and the third act is the future.

“Have you tried making yourself a more interesting person?” This seems like a really mean thing to say, unless you think of the word interesting the way writer Lawrence Weschler does: For him, to be “interest-ing” is to be curious and attentive, and to practice “the continual projection of interest.” To put it more simply: If you want to be interes