Highlights
Scenius: A whole scene of people, contemporaries, who support each other, looking at each other's work, copying from each other, stealing ideas and contributing ideas. They make up an "ecology of talent". This means that good work is hardly done in a vacuum and creativity is a collaboration.
In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind, there are few. — Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki
The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act. On the spectrum of creative work, the difference between the mediocre and the good is vast. Mediocrity is, however, still on the spectrum; you can move from mediocre to good in increments. The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something — Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus
Good nonfiction is a chance to watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lives. — David Foster Wallace
If you want people to know about what you do and the things you care about, you have to share.
Obituaries are like near-death experiences for cowards. Reading them is a way to think about death while also keeping it at arm's length.
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. This is similar to what Jack Butcher talked about with the saw dust.
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.
Daily Dispatch: Once a day, after you've done your day's work, go back to your documentation and find one little piece of your process you can share. Where you are in the 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.
Don't say you don't have enough time. We're all busy, but we all get 24 hours a day. Find time. Find time like you find spare change: in the nooks and crannies. Find the gaps between the important, big stuff — commute, lunch break, between meetings. Look for it and you will find it.
Stock and Flow: An economic concept that writer Robin Sloan adapted into a metaphor for media: Flow is the feed. It's the posts and the tweets. It's the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It's the content you product that's interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It's what people discover via search. It's what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time. The magic formula is to maintain your flow while working on your stock in the background.
Have a personal website on your domain. 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.
Wunderkammern: A wonder chamber or a cabinet of curiosities. If you happen to be wealthy and educated and alive in the 16th and 17th century Europe, it was fashionable to have a Wunderkammern. It's a collection of treasure that one might be curious about. It's a precursor to our modern day museums.
Before we're ready to take he leap of sharing our own work with the world, we can share our tastes in the work of others. Where do you get your inspiration? What sorts of things do you fill your head with? What do your read? Do you subscribe to anything? What sites do you visit on the Internet? What music do you listen to? What movies do you see? Do you look at art? What do you collect? What's inside your scrapbook? Who's done work that you admire? Who do you steal ideas from? Do you have any heroes? Who do you follow online? Who are the practitioners you look up to in your field? You influences are worth sharing because they clue people in to who you are and what you do — sometimes even more than your work.
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 marvellous examples. — Michel de Montaigne, On Experience
When you share your taste and your influences, have the guts to own all of it. Don't give in to the pressure to self-edit too much. 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.
Art forgery is a strange phenomenon. "You might think that the pleasure you get from a painting depends on its color and its shape and its pattern. And if that's right, it shouldn't matter whether it's an original or a forgery. But our brains don't work that way. 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." "Stories are such a powerful driver of emotional value that their effect on any given object's subjective value can actually be measured objectively." — Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker, Significant Objects
Your work doesn't exist in a vacuum. Whether you realize it or not, you're already telling a story about your work. Every email you send, every text, every conversation, every blog comment, every tweet, every photo, every video — they're all bits and pieces of a multimedia narrative you're constantly constructing. If you want to be more effective when sharing yourself and your work, you need to become a better storyteller. You need to know what a good story is and how to tell one.
A character wants something, goes after it despite opposition (perhaps including his own doubts), and so arrives at a win, lose, or draw. — John Gardner
Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. — George Orwell
You don't get the feeling that any of this is calculated, it's just how they (Franklin Barbeque) operate — they started out as beginners, and so they feel an obligation to pass on what they've learned.
In their book, Rework, Jason Fried and DHH encourage businesses to emulate chefs by out-teaching their competition. "What do you do? What are your recipes? What's your cookbook? What can you tell the world about how you operate that's informative, educational, and promotional?" They encourage businesses to figure out the equivalent of their own cooking show.
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. Shut up and listen once in a while. Be thoughtful. Be considerate. Don't turn into human spam. Be an open node.
"Connections don't mean shit. I've never had any connections that weren't a natural outgrowth of doing things I was doing anyways." — Steve Albini. He 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.
How to take punches:
- Relax and breathe: Bad criticism is not the end of the world. Take a deep breath and accept whatever comes.
- Strengthen your neck: Practice taking a hit a lot by putting out a lot of work.
- Roll with the punches: Keep moving. Every criticism is an opportunity for more work. You can't control what people say about your work. You can only control how you react to it. Sometimes it's fun to push back and make something they will hate even more.
- Protect your vulnerable areas: If the work is too close to you, keep it hidden. But remember that "Compulsive avoidance of embarrassment is a form of suicide." — Colin Marshall.
- Keep your balance: Your work is something that you do. It's not who you are. Don't take it personally.
Don't be jealous when the people you like do well — celebrate their victory as if it's your own.
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.
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. Just do the work that's in front of you, and when it's finished, ask yourself what you missed, what you could've done better, or what you couldn't get to, and jump right into the next project.
Practical Sabbaticals: Three prime spots to turn off our brains and take a break from our connected lives — commute, exercise, and nature.
The thing is, you never start over. You don't lose all the work that's come before. Even if you try to toss it aside, the lessons that you've learned from it will seep into what you do next. So don't think of it as starting over. Think of it as beginning again. Go back to chapter one and become an amateur. Look for something new to learn, and when you find it, dedicate yourself to learning it out in the open. Document your progress and share as you go so that others can learn along with you. Show your work, and when the right people show up, pay close attention to them, because they'll have a lot to show you.
Top Lessons
- Good work is rarely done in isolation. It's done as a part of a group or community (scenius). Find a scenius you can be a part of.
- Become a documentarian of your work. Take screenshots, record short videos, write down notes or journal. Share them in a daily dispatch.
- Share your process and influences. Even if the work is not in a shareable state, you can share the process, ideas, influences, and inspirations.
- Stock and Flow: While doing daily dispatches (flow), keep working on long-term, searchable work (stock).
- Good stories follow a set template. Learn how to tell good stories. Stories without an end are called pitches.
- Teach what you learn. We were all beginners once so when we know more, pass it forward and teach with compassion.
- Don't be afraid to be a sellout.
- When you finish a project, do a little introspection, and jump right into the next project.
Actionable Advice
- Make sharing a part of the work (aka work is not done till it is shared):
- Take screenshots of fun things, checkpoints etc. Or record short videos.
- At the end of the day, send out a daily dispatch. Make daily dispatches a part of your todo list.
- Share ideas, inspirations, what you like, what you're reading, listening to, and watching.
- Work doesn't speak for itself. So you have to:
- Practice what story you tell about yourself and tailor it to the audience.
- Study good stories and try to emulate them.
- When finishing a project:
- Do a little introspection: what went well, what didn't, what you learned, what could be improved. Keep notes of the answers.
- Share the lessons distilled from the introspection.
- Start another project right away.