BOOK REVIEW: SHOW YOUR WORK BY AUSTIN KLEON

source: austinkleon.com

Hello!

I’m back with new kind of article, a review. 
I already planned that i want to write many review article, but for now, because i just finished reading a book, then i will write about a book review.

If you think that I’m a bookworm girl, then you’re wrong. I do wear thick glasses, but the reason is because of my genetics (both my parents wear glasses) and I love to play games on my laptop since elementary school. I don’t even buy any textbook when I’m in college, just when I first entered the college and the books ended up become my laptop base, without I read it even once. Well I do like to read books in the past, especially a self-development book or detective novel. But as I’m getting older, I find it hard to see many words in a page, so when my friend recommended this book to me, I pushed it aside at first. But when I search it on google (at first I just want to download its PDF to add it to my PDF collection that I don’t even read, LOL, but there isn’t any free PDF), I find out that the book doesn’t have much text, with the small page, and has many illustration (even though it just black and white colored). So I said to my friend that I want to try to read the book and asked where I could buy it, and eventually she said that she has it and can lend me.

So I got the book, but I didn’t read it straightaway. It was really hard for me to start reading after almost 5 years I never read any physical book. So I just put the book on my bed, with a hope that I would start to open its page and read it. Until finally I really started to read it after almost 1 week. I just read the first page and I immediately love the book because of its inspiring words. 

“Be so good they can’t ignore you" - Steve Martin

And it just my resolution to start write things I love on my blog (not all things though, for example I love the movie I watched last weekend but I don’t have the urge to write its review) so I started to take notes while I’m reading the book.

A NEW WAY OF OPERATING

- It's not about self-promotion

- "Be so good they can't ignore you" - Steve Martin. 

If you just focus on getting really good, people will come to you. 

You don't really find an audience for your work, they find you

- Instead of wasting their time “networking”, they’re taking advantages of the network

1. YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE GENIUS

a. Find A Scenius

- … when inspiration comes, it strikes like a lightning bolt, a lightbulb switches in his head

- The internet is basically a bunch of sceniuses connected together, divorced from physical geography

b. Be An Amateur

- 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

- "In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few" - Zen Monk Shunryu Suzuki

- Amateurs are not afraid to make mistakes... They're in love...

- Amateur might lack formal training, but they're all lifelong learners...

- "The stupidest possible creative art is still a creative art" - Clay Shirky in his book Cognitive Surplus

c. You Can't Find Your Voice If You Don't Use It

- Talk about the things you love. Your voice will follow

- We all have the opportunity to use our voices…but so many of us are wasting it

d. Read Obituaries

- When George Lucas was a teenager, he almost died in a car accident. He decided "Every day now is an extra day"

- Thinking about death every morning makes me want to live

2. THINK PROCESS, NOT PRODUCT

a. Take People Behind The Scenes

- Human beings are interested with other human beings and what other human beings do "People really do want to see how the sausages gets made"

- Audiences not only want to stumble across great work, but they, too long to be creative and part of the creative process

b. Become A Documentarian Of What You Do

- Story of Chris Hadfield, astronaut who makes a video about how to brush teeth, sleeping etc. in space station

3. SHARES SOMETHING SMALL EVERYDAY

a. Send Out A Daily Dispatch

- Overnight success is a myth. 

Dig into almost every overnight success story and you'll find about a decade worth of hard work and perseverance

- A good daily dispatch is like getting all DVD extras, before a movie comes out

- Forget about years, months, instead focus on a day

- "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" - artist Ze Frank

- "90 percent of everything is crap" - Theodore Sturgeon (science fiction writer).

We don’t always know what’s good and what’s sucks

- "How do you find the time for all of this?" "I look for it"

b. The "So What?" Test

- If you're unsure about whether to share something, let it sit

- The Save As Draft button is like a prophylactic - it might not feel as good in the moment, but you'll be glad to used it later

c. Turn Your Flow Into Stock

- Social media sites function a lot like public notebooks

d. Build A Good (Domain) Name

- The beauty of owning your own turf is that you can do whatever you want with it

- Whether people show up or they don't, you're out there, doing your thing, ready whenever they are

4. OPEN UP CABINET OF CURIOSITIES
a. Don’t Be A Hoarder

- We all have our own treasured collections

b. No Guilty Pleasures

- Being open and honest about what you like is the best way to connect with people who like these things too

c. Credit Is Always Due

- You should always share the work of others as if it were your own, treating it with respect and care

- Without attribution, all the people you've shared it with have no way to dig deeper into the work or find more of it

- The most important form of attribution online is a hyperlink

- Don't share things you can't properly credit. Find the right credit or don't share

5. TELL GOOD STORIES
a. Work Doesn't Speak For Itself

- Words matter. Human beings want to know where things come from, how they were made and who made them

- The stories you tell about the work you do have a huge effect on how people feel and what they understand about your work, and how people feel and what they understand about your work affects how they value it

- Humans want to connect

b. Structure Is Everything

- Everybody loves a good story but good storytelling doesn't come easy to everybody. It's a skill that takes a lifetime to master

c. Talk About Yourself At Party

- Tell the truth and tell it with dignity and self-respect

- I’m a writer who draws

- Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful -George Orwell

6. TEACH WHAT YOU KNOW
a. Share Your Trade Secrets

- There's an intuition that you only gain through the repetition of practice

- Teaching doesn't mean instant competition. Just because you know the master's technique doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to emulate it right away

- Teaching people doesn't subtract value from what you do, it actually adds to it

7. DON'T TURN INTO HUMAN SPAM
a. Shut Up And Listen

- Human spam -- 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. They can't find the time to be interested in anything other than themselves

- ... The experience of art is always a two-way street, incomplete without feedback

- Be an open node

b. You Want Hearts, Not Eyeballs

- If you want followers, be someone worth following

- If you want to be interesting, you have to be interested

- Make stuff you love and talk about stuff you love and you'll attract people who live that kind of stuff. It's that simple

c. The Vampire Test

- Vampire test -- if after hanging out with someone you feel worn out and depleted. That person is a vampire. It works on many things in our lives, not just people, but also jobs, hobbies, places, etc.

- Vampires cannot be cured, banish it from your life forever

d. Identify Your Fellow Knuckleballers

- Once a hood knuckleball is thrown, it's equally unpredictable to the batter, the catcher and the pitcher who threw it (sounds a lot like a creative process huh?)

- as you put yourself and your work out there, you will run into your fellow knuckleballers... The people who share your obsessions... 

e. Meat Up In Meatspace

8. LEARN TO TAKE A PUNCH
a. Let ‘Em Take Their Best Shot

- How to take a punches:

- Relax and breathe: fear is often just the imagination taking a wrong turn
- Strengthen your neck: make even more work and keep putting it out there. The more criticism you take, the more you realize it can't hurt you
- Roll with the punches: keep moving. Having your work hated by certain people is a badge of honor
- Protect your vulnerable areas: if you have work that is too sensitive or too close to you to be exposed to criticism, keep it hidden. But if you spend you life avoiding vulnerability, you and your work will never truly connect with other people
- keep your balance: your work is something you do, not who you are

- "The trick is not caring what EVERYBODY thinks of you and just caring about what the RIGHT people think of you" -Brian Michael Bendis

b. Don't Feed The Trolls

- A troll is a person who isn't interested in improving your work, only provoking you with hateful, aggressive, or upsetting talk. You will gain nothing by engaging with these people. Don’t feed them

- The worst troll is the one that lives in your head. Its the voice that tells you you’re not good enough, that you suck, and that you'll never amount to anything

- "If someone took a dump in your living room, you wouldn't let it sit there, would you?"

- There's never a space under paintings in a gallery where someone writes their opinion. Let them talk about your work in their own spaces all they want as long as it's not in yours

9. SELL OUT

“Sell out… I’m not crazy about that word. We’re all entrepreneurs…” – Bill Withers

a. Even The Renaissance Had To Be Funded

- Everybody says they want artists to make money and then when they do. Everybody hated them for it

b. Pass Around The Hat

- 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 the things

- 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

c. Keep A Mailing List

- People who run multimillion-dollar business off if their mailing list: they give away great stuff on their sites, they collect emails, and then when they have something remarkable to share or sell, they send an email

- The people who sign up for your list will be some of your biggest supporters, just by the simple fact that they signed up for the potential to be spammed by you. 

d. Make More Work For Yourself

- Life of creativity is all about change -- moving forward, taking chances, exploring new frontiers

- "The real risk is in not changing" saxophonist John Coltrane

- Try new things. If an opportunity comes along that will allow you to do more of the kind of work you want to do, say Yes. If an opportunity comes along that would mean more money, but less of the kind of work you want to do, say No

e. Pay It Forward

- The biggest problem of success is that the world conspires to stop you doing the thing that you do, because you’re successful

- You have to be as generous as you can, but selfish enough to get your work done

10. STICK AROUND
a. Don’t Quit Your Show

- "If you want a happy ending that depends, of course, on where you stop your story" actor Orson Welles

- The people who get what they're after are very often the ones who just stick around long enough

b. Chain-smoke

- As every author knows, your last book isn’t going to write your next one for you. A successful or failed project is no guarantee if another success or failure. Whether you’ve just won big or lost big, you still have to face the question "What’s next?"

- Artist who've managed to achieve lifelong careers have the same pattern: they all have been able to persevere, regardless of success or failure

- You avoid stalling out in your career by never losing momentum

c. Go Away So You Can Come Back

- The power of sabbatical

- The designer Stefan Sagmeister, every 7 years shuts down his studio and takes a year off

- We dedicate the first 25 years or so of our lives to learning, the next 40 to work, and the last to retirement

- What are you hoping to express if all you see is four walls?

- To pick up a signal, cut off mobile service

- Don’t die, simply disappear a while

- Gina Trapani has pointed out 3 prime spots to turn off out brain and take a break from our connected lives

- Commute: a moving train or subway car is perfect time to write, doodle, read. Or just stare out the window. 

- Exercise: using our body relaxes our mind, and when our mind gets relaxed, it opens up to having new thoughts. If you hate exercise, get a dog

- Nature: go to a park. Take a hike. Dig in your garden. Get outside in the fresh air. Disconnect from anything and everything electronic

d. Begin Again

- "Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough" - author Alain de Botton

- When you get rid of old material, you push yourself further and come up with something better. 

- 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 lesson that you’ve learned from it will seep into what you do next

- Go back to chapter one, become an amateur. Look for something new to learn

BEHIND THE SCENES

- The best thing to do is click publish and walk away

- A drawer is a kind of time machine, to put away your work just to look at it later

- Not knowing is the engine that creativity runs on

- Your dumbest idea could be the one that takes off

What I wrote on my notes are the sentences I love, the ones which inspired me. It could be different with yours, so I suggest you to read the book so you can find your own inspiration. 
For me, the book is easy to read, simple, either its explanation and design. The writer gives easy examples for any parables. The book has illustration page in almost every 2 pages, consists with photos, illustrations, quotes, charts, and newspaper blackouts. 
I very recommend Show Your Work book, not only for artist, but also for everyone, since everyone have their own work.