★★★☆☆ | Writing | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads

An amusing mishmash of quotes and editorializing on the benefits of showing up and sharing your work, including the messy sausage making process. I read this on a Kindle, so may have missed out on the visual aspects of Kleon’s work. But to me, it felt more like a commonplace book of inspirational (and sometimes disconnected) quotes.
1. You Don’t Have to Be a Genius.
Many of the people who we think of as lone geniuses were actually part of a whole scene of people who were supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, copying from each other, stealing ideas, and contributing ideas.
David Foster Wallace said that he thought good nonfiction was a chance to “watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lives.”
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.
2. Think Process, Not Product.
To many artists, particularly those who grew up in the pre-digital era, this kind of openness and the potential vulnerability that goes along with sharing one’s process is a terrifying idea. Here’s the author Edgar Allan Poe, writing in 1846: “Most writers—poets in especial—prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy—an ecstatic intuition—and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes.”
Note – Writing about the tools and process may be interesting to others in this web world.
3. Share Something Small Everyday.
I like to work while the world is sleeping, and share while the world is at work.
A lot of the ideas in this book started out as tweets, which then became blog posts, which then became book chapters. Small things, over time, can get big.
5. Tell Good Stories.
Human beings want to know where things came 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.
John Gardner said the basic plot of nearly all stories is this: “A character wants something, goes after it despite opposition (perhaps including his own doubts), and so arrives at a win, lose, or draw.” I like Gardner’s plot formula because it’s also the shape of most creative work: You get a great idea, you go through the hard work of executing the idea, and then you release the idea out into the world, coming to a win, lose, or draw.
George Orwell wrote: “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.”
6. Teach What You Know.
The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes. —Annie Dillard
8. Learn to Take a Punch.
The trouble with imaginative people is that we’re good at picturing the worst that could happen to us. Fear is often just the imagination taking a wrong turn.
10. Stick Around.
The designer Stefan Sagmeister swears by the power of the sabbatical—every seven years, he shuts down his studio and takes a year off. His thinking is that we dedicate the first 25 years or so of our lives to learning, the next 40 to work, and the last 15 to retirement, so why not take 5 years off retirement and use them to break up the work years?