Date read: November 2020
How strongly would I recommend? 9/10
Lasting Thoughts
A welcome reminder that if you want to be creative, you have to share it with the world. People enjoy process. They like watching things get made. Be willing to share your journey and trust the practice.
Most Memorable Quote
“When people realize they’re being listened to, they tell you things.”
Richard Ford
For reference:
The bold highlights are my own emphasis
The blue highlights are passages I found notable or interesting
Ch 1 – You Don’t Have To Be A Genius
“Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare to think.” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“That’s all any of us are; amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else.” — Charlie Chaplin
Writer David Foster Wallace said that he thought good nonfiction was a chance to “watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sort of different stuff that most of us have a chance to in our daily lives.”
The best way to get started on the path to sharing your work is to think about what you want to learn, and then make a commitment to learning it in front of others.
Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you.
“You can’t find your voice if you don’t use it.” — Austin Kleon
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help 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
“The sum of every obituary is how heroic people are, and how noble.” — Maira Kalman
Ch 2 – Think Process, Not Product
“Most writers—poets in especial—prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy—an estate intuition—and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes.” — Edgar Allan Poe
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.
“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 resume; they want to see what you have made with your own little fingers.”
[things to share]
research, reference, drawings, plans, sketches, interviews, audio, photos, videos, pinboards, journals, drafts, prototypes, demos, diagrams, notes, inspiration, scrapbooks, stories, collections.
Ch 3 – Share Something Small Every Day
“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.
A daily dispatch is even better than a resume or a portfolio because it shows what we’re working on right now.
— The form of what you share doesn’t matter. Your daily dispatch can be anything you want—a blog post, an email, a tweet, a YouTube video, or some other little bit of media. There’s no one-size-fits-all for everybody.
“Sometimes you don’y always know what you’ve got. It really does need a little social chemistry to make it show itself to you sometimes.” — Wayne White
Don’t say you don’t have enough time. We’re all busy, but we all get 24 hours a day. People often ask me, “How do you find the time for all this?” And I answer, “I look for it.”
“One day at a time. It sounds so simple. It actually is simple but it isn’t easy: It requires incredible support and fastidious structuring.” — Russel Brand
SO WHAT? Ask yourself that every time you turn in a piece of writing.
‘Stock and flow’ is an economic concept that writer Robin Sloan has 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 produce that’s as 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.”
—– In my experience, your stock is best made by collecting, organizing, and expanding upon your flow.
—– 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.
———- 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.
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.
— 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.
[William Burroughs advice to a young Patti Smith] “Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises. Don’t worry about make 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.”
Ch 4 – Open Up Your Cabinet Of Curiosities
“All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is a gap. For the first couple of 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.” — Ira Glass
Your influences are worth sharing because they clue people in to who you are and what you do—sometimes even more than your own work.
“I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. If you fucking like something, like it.” — Dave Grohl
“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
“Do what you do best and link to the rest.” — Jeff Jarvis
Ch 5 – Tell Good Stories
In their book, Significant Objects, Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker recount an experiment in which they set out to test this hypothesis: “Stories are such a powerful driver of emotional value that their effect on any given object’s subjective value can actually be measured objectively.”
— First, they went out to thrift stores, flea markets, and yard sales and bought a bunch of “insignificant” objects for an average of $1.25 an object. Then, they hired a bunch of writers, both famous and not-so-famous, to invent a story “that attributed significance” to each object. Finally, they listed each object on eBay, using the invented stories as the object’s description, and whatever they had originally paid for the object as the auction’s starting price. By the end of the experiment, they had sold $128.74 work of trinkets for $3612.51.
Words matter. Artists love to trot the tired line, “My work speaks for itself,” but the truth is, our work doesn’t speak for itself.
— Personal stories can make the complex more tangible, spark associations, and offer entry into things that might otherwise leave one cold.
Most story structures can be traced back to myths and fairy tales. Emma Coats, a former storyboard artist at Pixar, outlined the basic structs of a daily tale as a kind of Mad Lib that you can fill in with your own elements:
“Once upon a time, there was ___. Every day, ___. One day, ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally, ___.”
— Pick your favorite story and try to fill in the blanks. It’s striking how often it works.
[the shape of most creative work] You get a great idea, you go through the hard work of executing the idea, and then you release the idea out into the work, coming to a win, lose, or draw.
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.
— The first act is where you’ve been—what you want, how you came to want it, and what you’ve done so far to get it. The second act is where you are now in your work and how you’ve worked hard and used up most of your resources. The third act is where you’re going, and how exactly the person you’re pitching to can help you get there.
—– Like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, this story shape effectively turns your listener into the hero who gets to decide how it ends.
Whether you’re telling a finished or unfinished story, always keep your audience in mind. Speak to them directly in plain language. Value their time. be brief. Learn to speak. Learn to write. Use spell-check.
If you happen to be a doctor or a teacher or a lawyer or a plumber, congratulations. You may proceed without caution. For the rest of us, we’re going to need to practice our answers.
— 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 honestly and humbly explaining what it is that you do.
— You should be able to explain your work to a kindergartener, 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.
If you’re unemployed, say so, and mention what kind of work you’re looking for. If you’re employed, but you don’t feel good about your job title, ask yourself why that is. Maybe you’re in the wrong line of work, or maybe you’re not doing the work you’re supposed to be doing.
— (There were many years where answering, “I’m a writer,” felt wrong because I wasn’t actually writing.
“Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.” — George Orwell
Ch 6 – Teach What You Know
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.”
Ch 7 – Don’t Turn Into Human Spam
“When people realize they’re being listened to, they tell you things.” — Richard Ford
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.
If you want followers, be someone worth following. Barry Hannah said to one of his students, “Have you tried making yourself a more interesting person?”
— If you want to be interesting, you have to be interested.
“Connections don’t mean shit. I’ve never had any connections that weren’t a natural outgrowth of doing things I was doing anyway.” — Steve Albini
— 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 your 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.
— Don’t be creepy. Don’t be a jerk. Don’t waste people’s time. Don’t ask too much. And don’t ever ask people to follow you.
—– “Follow me back?” is the saddest question on the internet.
As you put yourself and your work out there, you will run into your fellow knuckleballers. These are your real peers—the people who share your obsessions, the people who share a similar mission to your own, the people with whom you share a mutual respect. There will only be a handful or so of them, but they’re so, so important.
— Do what you can to nurture your relationships with these people. Sing their praises to the universe. Invite them to collaborate. Show them work before you show anybody else. Call them on the phone and share your secrets. Keep them as close as you can.
Ch 8 – Learn To Take A Punch
When you put your work out into the world, you have to be ready for the good, the bad, and the ugly. The more people come across your work, the more criticism you’ll face.
“There’s never a space under paintings in a gallery where someone writes their opinion. When you get to the end of a book, you don’t have to see what everyone else thought of it.” — Natalie Dee
Ch 9 – Sell Out
People need to eat and pay the rent. “An amateur is an artist who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint,” said artist Ben Shahn. “A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.” Whether an artist makes money off his work or not, money has to come from somewhere, be it a day job, a wealthy spouse, a trust fund, an arts grant, or a patron.
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.
— The easiest way to do this is to simply ask for donations: Put a little virtual tip jar or a donate now button on your website. These links do well with a little bit of human copy.
—– “Like this? Buy me a coffee?”
— If people are digging what you do, they’ll throw a few bucks your way.
Beware of selling the things that you love: When people are asked to get out their wallets, you find out how much they really value what you do.
— My friend John T. Unger tells this terrific story from his days as a street poet. He would do a poetry reading and afterward, some guy would come up to him and say, “Your poem changed my life, man!” And John would say, “Oh, thanks. Want to buy a book? It’s five dollars.” And the guy would take the book, bandit back to John, and say, “Nah, that’s okay.” To which John would respond, ‘Geez, how much is your life worth?”
Whether you ask for donations, crowdfund, or sell your products or services, asking for money in return for your work is a leap you want to take only when you feel confident that you’re putting work out into the world that you think is truly worth something. Don’t be afraid to charge for your work, but put a price on it that you think is fair.
… a life of creativity is all about change—moving forward, taking chances, exploring new frontiers.
“The real risk is in not changing. I have to feel that I’m after something. If I make money, fine. But I’d rather be striving. It’s the striving, man, it’s that I want.” — John Coltrane
“The biggest problem of success is that the world conspires to stop you redoing the thing that you do, because you are successful. There was a day when I looked up and realized that I had become someone who professionally replied to email, and who wrote as a hobby. I started answering fewer emails, and was relieved to find I was writing much more.” — Neil Gaiman
“Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck—and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.” — Micheal Lewis
Ch 10 – Stick Around
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.
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.
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 dedicated 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.”
“Every two or three years, I knock off for a while. That way, I’m constantly the new girl in the whorehouse.” — Robert Mitchum
“Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.” — Alain de Botton
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.
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