“Find your voice, shout it from the rooftops, and keep doing it until the people that are looking for you find you.” — Dan Harmon

It is intimidating to show your work online. While we have no reservations about sharing our candid photos on Instagram or our thoughts on Twitter, something about sharing actual work under our own name is scary. It feels like the quality of what we share is a reflection of our value, and that any material we publish must be complete and refined.

The premise of Austin Kleon’s book Show Your Work is that learning in public is the most effective way to learn faster and gain an audience. By sharing what you’re learning and how you’re applying this newfound knowledge, you create tight feedback loops that propel you towards mastery.

This is a great book that can easily be read in an afternoon. That being said, I had already been introduced to most of the ideas presented by the author by the likes of Ali Abdaal, and so I found it less thought-provoking than I might have otherwise.

Highlights

• Almost all of the people I look up to and try to steal from today, regardless of their profession, have built sharing into their routine.

• Imagine being a student and getting your first gig based on a school project you posted online.

• We can stop asking what others can do for us, and start asking what we can do for others.

• We’re all terrified of being revealed as amateurs, but in fact, today it is the amateur—the enthusiast who pursues her work in the spirit of love (in French, the word means “lover”), regardless of the potential for fame, money, or career—who often has the advantage over the professional.

• “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.”

• The best way to get started on the path to sharing your work is to think about what you want to learn, and 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.

• “Find your voice, shout it from the rooftops, and keep doing it until the people that are looking for you find you.” — Dan Harmon

• It sounds a little extreme, but in this day and age, if your work isn’t online, it doesn’t exist.

• “No one is going to give a damn about your résumé; they want to see what you have made with your own little fingers.”

• The day is the only unit of time that I can really get my head around. Seasons change, weeks are completely human-made, but the day has a rhythm. The sun goes up; the sun goes down. I can handle that.

• “When I ask them to show me work, they show me things from school, or from another job, but I’m more interested in what they did last weekend.”

• Don’t say you don’t have enough time. We’re all busy, but we all get 24 hours a day.

• I had a professor in college who returned our graded essays, walked up to the chalkboard, and wrote in huge letters: “SO WHAT?” She threw the piece of chalk down and said, “Ask yourself that every time you turn in a piece of writing.”

• My blog has been my sketchbook, my studio, my gallery, my storefront, and my salon. Absolutely everything good that has happened in my career can be traced back to my blog.

• “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.”

• When you find things you genuinely enjoy, don’t let anyone else make you feel bad about it.

• Being open and honest about what you like is the best way to connect with people who like those things, too.

• Don’t share things you can’t properly credit. Find the right credit, or don’t share.

• 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.

• Your stories will get better the more you tell them.

• Remember what the author George Orwell wrote: “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.”

• Bios are not the place to practice your creativity. We all like to think we’re more complex than a two-sentence explanation, but a two-sentence explanation is usually what the world wants from us. Keep it short and sweet.

• He said that having his work out in the world was “a free education that goes on for a lifetime.”

• 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.

• 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.”

• “Whatever excites you, go do it. Whatever drains you, stop doing it.” —Derek Sivers

• If, after hanging out with someone you feel worn out and depleted, that person is a vampire. … Should you find yourself in the presence of a vampire, be like Brancusi, and banish it from your life forever.

• I love the phenomenon of “meetups”—an online community throwing a party at a bar or a restaurant and inviting everybody to show up at a certain place and time.

• Put out a lot of work. Let people take their best shot at it. Then make even more work and keep putting it out there. The more criticism you take, the more you realize it can’t hurt you.

• If you spend your life avoiding vulnerability, you and your work will never truly connect with other people.

• “Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough,”

• The thing is, you never really 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.