Show Your Work

Show Your Work! 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon

“Show your work” is something that math teachers drilled in to us back in school and something I’m sure most of us would like to forget. However, showing your work as an adult still has many benefits. As Kleon states . . .

“It sounds a little extreme, but in this day and age, if your work isn’t online, it doesn’t exist. We all have the opportunity to use our voices, to have our say, but so many of us are wasting it. If you want people to know about what you do and the things you care about, you have to share.

Perhaps we have a duty to share.

“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.”

Sometimes, amateurs have more to teach us than experts. “It often happens that two schoolboys can solve difficulties in their work for one another better than the master can,” wrote author C. S. Lewis. “The fellow-pupil can help more than the master because he knows less. The difficulty we want him to explain is one he has recently met. The expert met it so long ago he has forgotten.”

Maybe it’s not about sharing.

“Become a documentarian of what you do. Start a work journal: 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 video of you 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—these days, most of us carry a fully functional multimedia studio around in our smartphones.

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.”

That’s a great idea. I think I need to start showing my work more. I’m thinking of my role as a wedding DJ right now. That’s something that only people who are there see. But having recordings of gigs is beneficial for a lot of reasons.

I started to a TikTok to help showcase some of my DJ gigs, transitions, and tips. Please follow me and like some of my posts. It would mean a lot.