Summary of Show Your Work
Show Your Work is a great little book, pretty short you can easily get through it in a couple of hours. It’s about Showing Your Work and how it doesn’t matter what other people think if you are enjoying it go for it. It speaks about how becoming good or an expert in an area is not an overnight process and the process of becoming is where the real achievement lies rather than at the end once the goal is achieved. One of the big concepts is around just doing it, it makes you wonder how many people refrain from doing something they want to do through the fear of other’s opinions or that they won’t be good at it.
It gives another example where a teacher splits a class of 30 photography students into two and tells them there will be the best photo competition, the first group to research everything they can on photography and related concepts but must take and submit just one picture. The other group must do no research but take at least one picture every day and submit their best, can you guess which group produced the best results?
My Takeaways from Show Your Work
I really liked the book, it’s kind of the basis of why I started blogging plus Atomic Habits, I cast a wide net with some of the topics I cover here but through posting weekly I should slowly improve and if it comes down to it who would you condier a better blogger/writter someone with a minorly succesful blog or someone that has all the credentails but has never published?
Favorite Quotes
“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.”
― Austin Kleon
“The worst troll is the one that lives in your head.”
― Austin Kleon
“The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.”
― Austin Kleon
“It sounds a little extreme, but in this day and age, if your work isn’t online, it doesn’t exist.”
― Austin Kleon
Closing Words
Austin Kleon does a few other books on my reading list, I am looking forward to Steal like an Artist.
Show Your Work is a great book I would encourage everyone to read it, it’s quite inspiring. It really makes you think about how people are more interested in the process more than the final product, while yea the final product can be great seeing it come to fruition as time goes on is even better like you are a passenger along for the ride.
If you enjoied this article please check out some of my others here.
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