Show Your Work!

You Don’t Have to be a Genius

Great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals - artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers - who make up an ecology of talent by copying, stealing, and contributing ideas.
Amateurs know that contributing something is better than contributing nothing. They’ll use whatever tools they can get their hands on to try to get their ideas into the world. Be an amateur!
Obituaries aren’t really about death; they’re about life. Read them every morning for inspiration.

Become a documentarian of what you do. Starts a work journal: Write your thought down in a notebook, or speak them into a recorder. Keep a scrapbook. Take a lot of Photographs of your work at different stages in the process. Shoot videos of you working.
Don’t show your lunch or your latte; show your work.
Don’t post things online that you’re not ready for everyone in the world to see. There’s a big difference between sharing and oversharing. There’s nothing wrong with saving things for later.
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.
Build a domain. Don’t think of your website as a self-promotion machine; think of it as a self-invention machine.
Credit is always due; find the right credit, or don’t share.

Work doesn't speak for itself. 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 affects how they value it.
You need to know what a good story is and how to tell one.

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. The first act is where you’ve been - what you want, how you came to want it, and what you’ve done so far to get it. The second act is where you are now in your work and how you’ve worked hard and used up most of your resources. The third act is where you’re going, and how exactly the person you’re pitching can help you get there.