Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered (Austin Kleon)

When an audience starts gathering for the work that you’re freely putting into the world, you might eventually want to take the leap of turning them into patrons.

You can’t plan on anything; you can only go about your work, as Isak Dinesen wrote, “every day, without hope or despair.” You can’t count on success; you can only leave open the possibility for it, and be ready to jump on and take the ride when it comes for you.

If you want people to know about what you do and the things you care about, you have to share.

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.

Add all this together and you get a way of working I call chain-smoking. You avoid stalling out in your career by never losing momentum. Here’s how you do it: 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.

Don’t think of your website as a self-promotion machine, think of it as a self-invention machine. Online, you can become the person you really want to be. Fill your website with your work and your ideas and the stuff you care about.

spending the majority of your time, energy, and attention practicing a craft, learning a trade, or running a business, while also allowing for the possibility that your work might attract a group of people who share your interests. All you have to do is show your work.

It is actually 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. “Connections don’t mean shit,” says record producer Steve Albini. “I’ve never had any connections that weren’t a natural outgrowth of doing

Try it: Start reading the obituaries every morning.