Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon

How strongly I recommend this book: 7 / 10

Date read: June 03, 2025

Get this book on Amazon

Summary

I’m reminded of the story about the Dyson vacuum; it sold far more units once people learned the story behind its creation. This book emphasizes that same point. Sharing more of your creative process enables people to connect with your work on a deeper level. More importantly, sharing those stories helps you improve your own process, because creativity is something that’s built within a community, not in isolation. You can see some of my quick thoughts on this below.

Favorite Quotes and Chapter Notes

I went through my notes and captured key quotes from all chapters below.

P.S. – Highly recommend Readwise if you want to get the most out of your reading.

Highlights and Notes

A New Way of Operating

Comedian Steve Martin famously dodges these questions with the advice,“Be so good they can’t ignore you.” If you just focus on getting really good, Martin says, people will come to you. I happen to agree: You don’t really find an audience for your work; they find you. But it’s not enough to be good. In order to be found, you have to be findable. I think there’s an easy way of putting your work out there and making it discoverable while you’re focused on getting really good at what you do.
Almost all of the people I look up to and try to steal from today, regardless of their profession, have built sharing into their routine. These people aren’t schmoozing at cocktail parties; they’re too busy for that. They’re cranking away in their studios, their laboratories, or their cubicles, but instead of maintaining absolute secrecy and hoarding their work, they’re open about what they’re working on, and they’re consistently posting bits and pieces of their work, their ideas, and what they’re learning online. Instead of wasting their time“networking,” they’re taking advantage of the network. By generously sharing their ideas and their knowledge, they often gain an audience that they can then leverage when they need it— for fellowship, feedback, or patronage.

1. You Don’t Have to Be a Genius.

If we forget about genius and think more about how we can nurture and contribute to a scenius, we can adjust our own expectations and the expectations of the worlds we want to accept us. We can stop asking what others can do for us, and start asking what we can do for others.
We’re all terrified of being revealed as amateurs, but in fact, today it is the amateur— the enthusiast who pursues her work in the spirit of love(in French, the word means“lover”), regardless of the potential for fame, money, or career— who often has the advantage over the professional.
The world is changing at such a rapid rate that it’s turning us all into amateurs. Even for professionals, the best way to flourish is to retain an amateur’s spirit and embrace uncertainty and the unknown. When Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke was asked what he thought his greatest strength was, he answered,“That I don’t know what I’m doing.”
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. Find a scenius, pay attention to what others are sharing, and then start taking note of what they’re not sharing. Be on the lookout for voids that you can fill with your own efforts, no matter how bad they are at first. Don’t worry, for now, about how you’ll make money or a career off it. Forget about being an expert or a professional, and wear your amateurism(your heart, your love) on your sleeve. Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you.
But now I realize that the only way to find your voice is to use it. It’s hardwired, built into you. Talk about the things you love. Your voice will follow.
It sounds a little extreme, but in this day and age, if your work isn’t online, it doesn’t exist. We all have the opportunity to use our voices, to have our say, but so many of us are wasting it. If you want people to know about what you do and the things you care about, you have to share.
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything— all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure— these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked.”—Steve Jobs
Tim Kreider, in his book We Learn Nothing, says that getting stabbed in the throat was the best thing to ever happen to him. For a whole year, he was happy and life was good.“You’d like to think that nearly getting killed would be a permanently life- altering experience,” Kreider writes, but“the illumination didn’t last.” Eventually, he was back to“the busy work of living.” The writer George Saunders, speaking of his own near- death experience, said,“For three or four days after that, it was the most beautiful world. To have gotten back in it, you know? And I thought, if you could walk around like that all the time, to really have that awareness that it’s actually going to end. That’s the trick.”
It’s for this reason that I read the obituaries every morning. Obituaries are like near- death experiences for cowards. Reading them is a way for me to think about death while also keeping it at arm’s length. Obituaries aren’t really about death; they’re about life.“The sum of every obituary is how heroic people are, and how noble,” writes artist Maira Kalman. Reading about people who are dead now and did things with their lives makes me want to get up and do something decent with mine. Thinking about death every morning makes me want to live.

2. Think Process, Not Product.

But human beings are interested in other human beings and what other human beings do.“People really do want to see how the sausage gets made.” That’s how designers Dan Provost and Tom Gerhardt put it in their book on entrepreneurship, It Will Be Exhilarating.“By putting things out there, consistently, you can form a relationship with your customers. It allows them to see the person behind the products.” Audiences not only want to stumble across great work, but they, too, long to be creative and part of the creative process. By letting go of our egos and sharing our process, we allow for the possibility of people having an ongoing connection with us and our work, which helps us move more of our product.
How can you show your work even when you have nothing to show? The first step is to scoop up the scraps and the residue of your process and shape them into some interesting bit of media that you can share. You have to turn the invisible into something other people can see.“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.” 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. This isn’t about making art, it’s about simply keeping track of what’s going on around you. Take advantage of all the cheap, easy tools at your disposal— these days, most of us carry a fully functional multimedia studio around in our smartphones. Whether you share it or not, documenting and recording your process as you go along has its own rewards: You’ll start to see the work you’re doing more clearly and feel like you’re making progress. And when you’re ready to share, you’ll have a surplus of material to choose from.

“Put yourself, and your work, out there every day, and you’ll start meeting some amazing people.”—Bobby Solomon
Once a day, after you’ve done your day’s work, go back to your documentation and find one little piece of your process that you can share. Where you are in your process will determine what that piece is. If you’re in the very early stages, share your influences and what’s inspiring you. If you’re in the middle of executing a project, write about your methods or share works in progress. If you’ve just completed a project, show the final product, share scraps from the cutting- room floor, or write about what you learned. If you have lots of projects out into the world, you can report on how they’re doing— you can tell stories about how people are interacting with your work.
Facebook asks you to indulge yourself, with questions like“How are you feeling?” or“What’s on your mind?” Twitter’s is hardly better:“What’s happening?” I like the tagline at dribbble.com:“What are you working on?” Stick to that question and you’ll be good. Don’t show your lunch or your latte; show your work.
The trouble is, we don’t always know what’s good and what sucks. That’s why it’s important to get things in front of others and see how they react.“Sometimes you don’t always know what you’ve got,” says artist Wayne White.“It really does need a little social chemistry to make it show itself to you sometimes.”
Always be sure to run everything you share with others through The“So What?” Test. Don’t overthink it; just go with your gut. If you’re unsure about whether to share something, let it sit for 24 hours.
Ask yourself,“Is this helpful? Is it entertaining? Is it something I’d be comfortable with my boss or my mother seeing?” There’s nothing wrong with saving things for later.
Once you make sharing part of your daily routine, you’ll notice themes and trends emerging in what you share. You’ll find patterns in your flow. When you detect these patterns, you can start gathering these bits and pieces and turn them into something bigger and more substantial. You can turn your flow into stock. For example, a lot of the ideas in this book started out as tweets, which then became blog posts, which then became book chapters. Small things, over time, can get big.
A blog is the ideal machine for turning flow into stock: One little blog post is nothing on its own, but publish a thousand blog posts over a decade, and it turns into your life’s work. My blog has been my sketchbook, my studio, my gallery, my storefront, and my salon. Absolutely everything good that has happened in my career can be traced back to my blog. My books, my art shows, my speaking gigs, some of my best friendships— they all exist because I have my own little piece of turf on the Internet.
Fill your website with your work and your ideas and the stuff you care about. Over the years, you will be tempted to abandon it for the newest, shiniest social network. Don’t give in. Don’t let it fall into neglect. Think about it in the long term. Stick with it, maintain it, and let it change with you over time.
When she was young and starting out, Patti Smith got this advice from William Burroughs:“Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises. Don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work… and if you can build a good name, eventually that name will be its own currency.”

4. Open Up Your Cabinet of Curiosities.

“The problem with hoarding is you end up living off your reserves. Eventually, you’ll become stale. If you give away everything you have, you are left with nothing. This forces you to look, to be aware, to replenish…. Somehow the more you give away, the more comes back to you.”—Paul Arden
Our tastes make us what we are, but they can also cast a shadow over our own work.“All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste,” says public radio personality Ira Glass.“But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer.” Before we’re ready to take the leap of sharing our own work with the world, we can share our tastes in the work of others.
Your influences are all worth sharing because they clue people in to who you are and what you do— sometimes even more than your own work.
More than 400 years ago, Michel de Montaigne, in his essay“On Experience,” wrote,“In my opinion, the most ordinary things, the most common and familiar, if we could see them in their true light, would turn out to be the grandest miracles… and the most marvelous examples.” All it takes to uncover hidden gems is a clear eye, an open mind, and a willingness to search for inspiration in places other people aren’t willing or able to go.
If you share the work of others, it’s your duty to make sure that the creators of that work get proper credit. Crediting work in our copy- and- paste age of reblogs and retweets can seem like a futile effort, but it’s worth it, and it’s the right thing to do. You should always share the work of others as if it were your own, treating it with respect and care.

5. Tell Good Stories.

Words matter. Artists love to trot out the tired line,“My work speaks for itself,” but the truth is, our work doesn’t speak for itself. Human beings want to know where things came from, how they were made, and who made them. 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.“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?” asks artist Rachel Sussman.“Because, rarified exceptions aside, our audience is a human one, and humans want to connect. Personal stories can make the complex more tangible, spark associations, and offer entry into things that might otherwise leave one cold.”
The cat sat on a mat’ is not a story. ‘The cat sat on the dog’s mat’ is a story.”—John le Carré
Every client presentation, every personal essay, every cover letter, every fund- raising request— they’re all pitches. They’re stories with the endings chopped 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.
Everybody loves a good story, but good storytelling doesn’t come easy to everybody. It’s a skill that takes a lifetime to master. So study the great stories and then go find some of your own. Your stories will get better the more you tell them.

6. Teach What You Know.

“The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”—Annie Dillard
Teaching doesn’t mean instant competition. Just because you know the master’s technique doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to emulate it right away. You can watch Franklin’s tutorials over and over, but are you ready to start spending 22 hours a day smoking meat that will sell out in two hours? Probably not. If you’re me, you’ll pay the $ 13 a pound even more gladly. The Franklins also just genuinely love barbecue, and they go out of their way to share their knowledge. People often stop by with their own attempts at brisket, and Aaron is always gracious and patient when answering their questions. You don’t get the feeling that any of this is calculated, it’s just the way they operate— they started out as beginners, and so they feel an obligation to pass on what they’ve learned.
The minute you learn something, turn around and teach it to others. Share your reading list. Point to helpful reference materials. Create some tutorials and post them online. Use pictures, words, and video. Take people step- by- step through part of your process. As blogger Kathy Sierra says,“Make people better at something they want to be better at.” Teaching people doesn’t subtract value from what you do, it actually adds to it. 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. Best of all, when you share your knowledge and your work with others, you receive an education in return.

7. Don’t Turn Into Human Spam.

If you want fans, you have to be a fan first. If you want to be accepted by a community, you have to first be a good citizen of that community. 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. If you want to get, you have to give. If you want to be noticed, you have to notice.
Stop worrying about how many people follow you online and start worrying about the quality of people who follow you. Don’t waste your time reading articles about how to get more followers.
If you want followers, be someone worth following. Donald Barthelme supposedly said to one of his students,“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 interesting, you have to be interested.
Albini laments how many people waste time and energy trying to make connections instead of getting good at what they do, when“being good at things is the only thing that earns you clout or connections.” 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.
Brancusi practiced what I call The Vampire Test. It’s 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. If, after hanging out with someone you still feel full of energy, that person is not a vampire. Of course, The Vampire Test works on many things in our lives, not just people— you can apply it to jobs, hobbies, places, etc.

9. Sell Out.

We all have to get over our“starving artist” romanticism and the idea that touching money inherently corrupts creativity. Some of our most meaningful and most cherished cultural artifacts were made for money. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling because the pope commissioned him. Mario Puzo wrote The Godfather to make money: He was 45 years old, tired of being an artist, and owed $ 20,000 to assorted relatives, banks, bookmakers, and shylocks. Paul McCartney has said that he and John Lennon used to sit down before a Beatles songwriting session and say,“Now, let’s write a swimming pool.”
Keep your own list, or get an account with an email newsletter company like MailChimp and 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.
The people who sign up for your list will be some of your biggest supporters, just by the simple fact that they signed up for the potential to be spammed by you. Don’t betray their trust and don’t push your luck. Build your list and treat it with respect. It will come in handy.

10. Stick Around.

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. The comedian Dave Chappelle was doing a stand- up gig in Dallas not long ago and he started joking about walking away from his lucrative deal with Comedy Central for his program, Chappelle’s Show. He said he was asked to come to a high school class and give some advice.“I guess, whatever you do, don’t quit your show,” he said.“Life is very hard without a show, kids.”
The designer Stefan Sagmeister swears by the power of the sabbatical— every seven years, he shuts down his studio and takes a year off. His thinking is that we dedicate the first 25 years or so of our lives to learning, the next 40 to work, and the last 15 to retirement, so why not take 5 years off retirement and use them to break up the work years? He says the sabbatical has turned out to be invaluable to his work:“Everything that we designed in the seven years following the first sabbatical had its roots in thinking done during that sabbatical.”
You can’t be content with mastery; you have to push yourself to become a student again.“Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough,” writes author Alain de Botton. The comedian Louis C.K. worked on the same hour of material for 15 years, until he found out that his hero, George Carlin, threw out his material every year and started from scratch. C.K. was scared to try it, but once he did, it set him free.“When you’re done telling jokes about airplanes and dogs, and you throw those away, what do you have left? You can only dig deeper. You start talking about your feelings and who you are. And then you do those jokes and they’re gone. You gotta dig deeper.” When you get rid of old material, you push yourself further and come up with something better. When you throw out old work, what you’re really doing is making room for new work.