SHOW YOUR WORK! (Austin Kleon)
10 WAYS TO SHARE YOUR CREATIVITY AND GET DISCOVERED
作者：Austin Kleon
豆瓣：?https://book.douban.com/subject/25857796/
> Show Your Work! is about why generosity trumps genius. It’s about getting findable, about using the network instead of wasting time “networking.” It’s not self-promotion, it’s self-discovery—let others into your process, then let them steal from you. Filled with illustrations, quotes, stories, and examples, Show Your Work! offers ten transformative rules for being open, generous, brave, productive.
A New Way of Operating
“Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.”
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.
All you have to do is show your work.
1. You Don’t Have to Be a Genius.
the “l(fā)one genius” myth
There’s a healthier way of thinking about creativity that the musician Brian Eno refers to as “scenius.” Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals—artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers—who make up an “ecology of talent.”
If you look back closely at history, many of the people who we think of as lone geniuses were actually part of “a whole scene of people who were supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, copying from each other, stealing ideas, and contributing ideas.” Scenius doesn’t take away from the achievements of those great individuals; it just acknowledges that good work isn’t created in a vacuum, and that creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds.
Amateurs might lack formal training, but they’re all lifelong learners, and they make a point of learning in the open, so that others can learn from their failures and successes.
“Mr. Ebert writes as if it were a matter of life and death,” wrote journalist Janet Maslin, “because it is.” Ebert was blogging because he had to blog—because it was a matter of being heard, or not being heard. A matter of existing or not existing.
Start reading the obituaries every morning. Take inspiration from the people who muddled through life before you
2. Think Process, Not Product.
She can form a unique bond with her audience.
3. Share Something Small Everyday.
A daily dispatch is even better than a résumé or a portfolio, because it shows what we’re working on right now.
Don’t worry about everything you post being perfect. Science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon once said that 90 percent of everything is crap.
Of course, don’t let sharing your work take precedence over actually doing your work.
The act of sharing is one of generosity—you’re putting something out there because you think it might be helpful or entertaining to someone on the other side of the screen.
In my experience, your stock is best made by collecting, organizing, and expanding upon your flow.
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
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.
“Dumpster diving” is one of the jobs of the artist—finding the treasure in other people’s trash, sifting through the debris of our culture, payingattention to the stuff that everyone else is ignoring, and taking inspiration from the stuff that people have tossed aside for whatever reasons.
Don’t be the lame guys at the record store arguing over who’s the more “authentic” punk rock band. Don’t try to be hip or cool. Being open and honest about what you like is the best way to connect with people who like those things, too.
“Do what you do best and link to the rest.”
So, what makes for great attribution? Attribution is all about providing context for what you’re sharing: what the work is, who made it, how they made it, when and where it was made, why you’re sharing it, why people should care about it, and where people can see some more work like it.
Attribution is about putting little museum labels next to the stuff you share.
5. Tell Good Stories.
When shown an object, or given a food, or shown a face, people’s assessment of it—how much they like it, how valuable it is—is deeply affected by what you tell them about it.
Your work doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Whether you realize it or not, you’re already telling a story about your work.
The most important part of a story is its structure. A good story structure is tidy, sturdy, and logical. Unfortunately, most of life is messy, uncertain, and illogical.
You’re never “keeping it real” with your lack of proofreading and punctuation, you’re keeping it unintelligible.
The way to get over the awkwardness in these situations is to stop treating them as interrogations, and start treating them as opportunities to connect with somebody by honestly and humbly explaining what it is that you do.
You should be able to explain your work to a kindergartner, a senior citizen, and everybody in between. Of course, you always need to keep your audience in mind: The way you explain your work to your buddies at the bar is not the way you explain your work to your mother.
Have empathy for your audience. Anticipate blank stares. Be ready for more questions. Answer patiently and politely.
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.
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.
They don’t want to pay their dues, they want their piece right here, right now. They don’t want to listen to your ideas; they want to tell you theirs. They don’t want to go to shows, but they thrust flyers at youon the sidewalk and scream at you to come to theirs. You should feel pity for these people and their delusions. At some point, they didn’t get the memo that the world owes none of us anything.
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 things I was doing anyway.” 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.”
“Follow me back?” is the saddest question on the Internet.
There’s a funny story in John Richardson’s biography, A Life of Picasso. Pablo Picasso was notorious for sucking all the energy out of the people he met. His granddaughter Marina claimed that he squeezed people like one of his tubes of oil paints. You’d have a great time hanging out all day with Picasso, and then you’d go home nervous and exhausted, and Picasso would go back to his studio and paint all night, using the energy he’d sucked out of you.
“Part of the act of creating is in discovering your own kind. They are everywhere. But don’t look for them in the wrong places.” —Henry Miller
I love meeting my online friends “IRL.” (IRL = in real life.) There’s never any small talk—we know all about one another and what one another does. We can just sip beer or some other social lubricant and talk about big ideas.
8. Learn to Take a Punch.
Protect your vulnerable areas
If you spend your life avoiding vulnerability, you and your work will never truly connect with other people
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.
The worst troll is the one that lives in your head. It’s the voice that tells you you’re not good enough, that you suck, and that you’ll never amount to anything.
My wife is fond of saying, “If someone took a dump in your living room, you wouldn’t let it sit there, would you?” Nasty comments are the same—they should be scooped up and thrown in the trash.
9. Sell Out.
We all have to get over our “starving artist” romanticism and the idea that touching money inherently corrupts creativity.
“We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.”
Yet a life of creativity is all about change—moving forward, taking chances, exploring new frontiers.
You just have to be as generous as you can, but selfish enough to get your work done.
“Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also hadluck—and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.” —Michael Lewis
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.
“Work is never finished, only abandoned.”
“We work because it’s a chain reaction, each subject leads to the next.”
Author Ernest Hemingway would stop in the middle of a sentence at the end of his day’s work so he knew where to start in the morning
Chain-smoking is a great way to keep going, but at some point, you might burn out and need to go looking for a match. The best time to find one is while taking a sabbatical.
“Whenever Picasso learned how to do something, he abandoned it.”—Milton Glaser
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 down and start over again.”
