Kleon encourages creators to share their journey rather than just the final result. This approach helps build a narrative around your work, making it more relatable and engaging for your audience. By being transparent about your process, you invite others to learn and grow with you, fostering a sense of community.

Think Process, Not Product

Sharing your work publicly means opening yourself up to criticism. Kleon advises developing a thick skin and learning to handle negative feedback constructively. Use criticism as an opportunity to improve and grow, but don’t let it discourage you from sharing your work.

Learn To Take A Punch

Kleon advises creators to share their inspirations and influences. By opening up your “cabinet of curiosities,” you provide context for your work and show the sources of your creativity. This transparency helps others understand your creative process and can spark their own ideas.

Open up Your Cabinet of Curiosities

So go on, get angry. But keep your mouth shut and go do your work.

Teaching others what you’ve learned is a powerful way to share your work and establish yourself as an expert. Kleon encourages creators to share tips, tutorials, and insights that can help others. Teaching not only benefits your audience but also reinforces your own understanding and skills.

Teach What Do You Know

Every piece of work has a story behind it. Kleon highlights the importance of storytelling in making your work more engaging. By sharing the challenges, breakthroughs, and lessons learned during your creative journey, you create a narrative that resonates with your audience and makes your work more memorable.

Tell Good Stories

Persistence is key to building a successful creative career. Kleon emphasizes the importance of sticking around and continuing to share your work, even when progress seems slow. Over time, consistent effort and sharing will help you build a loyal audience and establish your presence in your field.

Stick Around

Regularly sharing small snippets of your work can build momentum and keep your audience engaged. Kleon suggests posting daily updates, whether it’s a sketch, a behind-the-scenes photo, or a brief insight. This consistent sharing keeps your audience invested in your progress and makes the creative process more dynamic.

Share Something Small Every Day

While sharing your work is essential, Kleon warns against becoming overly self-promotional. The goal is to provide value and build genuine connections, not to bombard your audience with constant self-promotion. Engage with your audience authentically and focus on contributing to the community.

Don’t Turn Into Human Spam

Google everything. I mean everything. Google your dreams, Google your problems. Don’t ask a question before you Google it. You’ll either find the answer or you’ll come up with a better question.

Kleon starts by debunking the myth that you need to be a genius to share your work. He emphasizes that everyone has something valuable to contribute. By documenting and sharing your creative process, you can inspire and connect with others. The key is to focus on the process, not just the finished product.

You Don’t Have To Be A Genius

These ideas from “Show Your Work” by Austin Kleon offer a practical guide for creators to share their work, connect with their audience, and build a sustainable creative career.

In his New York Times bestseller Steal Like an Artist, Austin Kleon showed readers how to unlock their creativity by “stealing” from the community of other movers and shakers. Now, in an even more forward-thinking and necessary book, he shows how to take that critical next step on a creative journey—getting known. 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. In chapters such as You Don’t Have to Be a Genius; Share Something Small Every Day; and Stick Around, Kleon creates a user’s manual for embracing the communal nature of creativity— what he calls the “ecology of talent.” From broader life lessons about work (you can’t find your voice if you don’t use it) to the etiquette of sharing—and the dangers of oversharing—to the practicalities of Internet life (build a good domain name; give credit when credit is due), it’s an inspiring manifesto for succeeding as any kind of artist or entrepreneur in the digital age.

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I’m a writer who draws. I make art with words and books with pictures. Author of Steal Like An Artist and other bestsellers. Visit my website: http://austinkleon.com/