Be so good that people can’t ignore you
When you talk to creative people, the most basic questions they ask are: How do I, and my work, get known? How do I get noticed? How do I get my story read, or my movie seen? In the book Show Your Work!, author Austin Kleon shares some great advice: “Be so good they can’t ignore you.”
As comedian Steve Martin declared, “If you just focus on getting really good, people will come to you.”
While Kleon bought the idea that “you don’t really find an audience for work; they find you,” your work must be “findable.” You have to show it and share it. The act of showing and sharing is an act of generosity. It brings awareness to your person and your work. Kleon’s tome carved up these 10 innovative principles on “how to share your creativity and get discovered.” These simple yet profound insights provide interesting ways to make your creative life more meaningful and exciting.
You don’t have to be a genius. If you believe in the “lone genius” myth, creativity is an antisocial act, performed by only a few great figures — mostly dead men with names like Mozart, Einstein, or Picasso. The rest of us are left to stand around and gawk in awe at their achievements. Creativity is actually the result of connectedness — a concept musician Brian Eno labeled “scenius,” or a communal form of genius where ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals — artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers — who make up an “ecology of talents.” Being a valuable part of scenius is not necessarily about how smart or talented you are but about what you have to contribute — the ideas you share, the quality of the connections you make, and the conversations you start. If you forget about genius and think more about how you can nurture and contribute to scenius, you can adjust your own expectations and the expectations of the worlds you want to accept you. Switching your notion of creativity from the genius to the scenius model means that instead of thinking, “What do I have to give to the world?” you ask, “What does the world need from me?” Sometimes that’s an easier way to get started.
Think process, not product. Become a documentarian of what you do. 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 a video of yourself working. This isn’t about making art, it’s about simply keeping track of what’s going on around you. Take advantage of all the cheap, easy tools at your disposal. Utilize fully the functional multimedia studio available in your smartphone. Whether you share it or not, documenting and recording your process as you go along has its own rewards. You’ll start to see the work you’re doing more clearly and feel like you’re making progress. And when you’re ready to share, you’ll have a surplus of material to choose from.
Share something small every day. Bobby Solomon said, “Put yourself and your work out there every day, and you’ll start meeting some smashing people.” 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 plan for everybody. Social media sites are the perfect place to share daily updates. Don’t worry about being on every platform — pick and choose based on what you do and the people you’re trying to reach. Don’t say you don’t have enough time for sharing. We’re all busy, but we all get 24 hours a day. People may ask you, “How do you find the time for the things that you do?” You can always answer, “I look for it.” You find time the same place you find spare change in the nooks and crannies. “If you work on something a little bit every day, you end up with something that is massive, declared,” Kenneth Goldsmith says.
Open up your cabinet of curiosities. Don’t be a hoarder. “The problem with hoarding is you end up living off your reserve,” Paul Arden says. “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, and to replenish. Somehow the more you give away, the more comes back to you. You have your own treasured collections. They can be physical cabinets of curiosities — books, records or videos — or they can be more like intangible museums of the heart: memories of places you’ve been to, people you’ve met, or experiences you’ve accumulated. You carry around the weird and wonderful things you’ve come across while doing your work and living your life. These mental scrapbooks form your taste, and your taste influences your work. Be open and honest about what you like. It is the best way to connect with people who also like what you like.
Teach what you know. Teaching people doesn’t subtract value from what you do, it actually adds to it. When you teach someone how to do your work, you are, in effect, generating more interest in your work. People feel closer to your work because you’re letting them in on what you know. Best of all, when you share your knowledge and your work with others, you receive an education in return. American author Annie Dillard proclaimed, “The impulse to keep to ourselves what we have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything we do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to us. We open our safe and find ashes.” 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. As blogger Kathy Sierra articulated, “Make people better at something they want to be better at.” Best of all, when you share your knowledge and your work with others, you receive an education in return. It brings you in contact with people who give valuable opinions through their feedback.
Don’t turn into a human spam. “The writing community is full of lame-o people who want to be published in journals even though they don’t read the magazines that they want to be published in,” claims writer Dan Chaon. These people are called human spam. They’re everywhere, and they exist in every profession. They don’t want to pay their dues, they want their piece right here, right now. They don’t want to listen to your ideas; they want to tell you theirs. You should feel pity for these people and their delusions. At some point, they didn’t get the memo that the world owes none of us anything.
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. To be able to take punches, learn to relax and breathe, strengthen your neck, roll with the punches, protect your vulnerable areas and keep your balance. “The trick is not caring what everybody thinks of you and just caring about what the right people think of you,” advises Brian Michael Bandis.
Sell out. You have to get over the “starving artist” romanticism and the idea that touching money inherently corrupts creativity. Some of the most meaningful and most cherished cultural artifacts were made for money. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling because the pope commissioned him. Mario Puzo wrote The Godfather to make money. Bill Withers professed, “’Sellout’ … I’m not crazy about that word. We’re all entrepreneurs. To me, I don’t care if you own a furniture store or whatever — the best sign you can put up is ‘sold out.’” When you attain success, it’s important to use any income, clout or platform you’ve acquired to help along the work of the people who’ve helped you get where you are. Extol your teachers, mentors, your heroes, your influences, your peers, and your fans. “Above all, recognize you’ve had success; you’ve 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,” Michael Lewis declared.
Stick around. Every career is full of ups and downs, and just as with stories, when you’re in the middle of living out your life and career, you don’t know whether you’re up or down or what’s about to happen next. “If you want a happy ending,” actor Orson Welles wrote, “that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” Author F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed, “There are no second acts in life,” but if you look around you’ll notice that not only are there second acts, there are third, fourth and even fifth ones. 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.
Creativity is self-expression, but for work to be art or design, there has to be someone on the other end. The audience makes the work come alive. Connection creates meaning. It’s about balancing the desire to do something for the love of it, and sharing it in a way that contributes to the world. You’ve got to show your work and make people appreciate, support and buy it.
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