Highlights from Show Your Work by Austin Kleon

Jun 21, 2026

I finally finished reading Show Your Work by Austin Kleon.

Instead of toiling away for weeks in the dark, emerging with something to show and hoping people see it, why not share the process from the start? The more you put out in public, the more visibility you get. That’s what this book is about.

One thing I’ve realized about reading is that a book’s impact only stays fresh in my mind for a week or two. I really feel like a changed person during that time. Then life happens and I’m back to where I started. I’ve never gone back and re-read the highlights. The book’s file gets lost in the filesystem jungle. Out of sight, out of mind.

Copying the highlights here makes it easy for me to revisit them and refresh my memories of what I learnt from the book.

I hope reading them inspires you to pick up the book yourself!

A New Way of Operating

Be so good they can’t ignore you.

But it’s not enough to be good. In order to be found, you have to be findable.

You Don’t Have to Be a Genius

Find a Scenius

“Scenius.” Great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals.

“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.”

The Internet is basically a bunch of sceniuses connected together, divorced from physical geography.

Be an Amateur

“In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities,” said Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki. “In the expert’s mind, there are few.”

Amateurs are not afraid to make mistakes or look ridiculous in public. They’re in love, so they don’t hesitate to do work that others think of as silly or just plain stupid. “The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act,” writes Clay Shirky in his book Cognitive Surplus.

Amateurs know that contributing something is better than contributing nothing.

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. Find a scenius, pay attention to what others are sharing, and then start taking note of what they’re not sharing. Be on the lookout for voids that you can fill with your own efforts, no matter how bad they are at first.

Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you.

You Can’t Find Your Voice if You Don’t Use It

“Find your voice, shout it from the rooftops, and keep doing it until the people that are looking for you find you.” —Dan Harmon

The only way to find your voice is to use it. It’s hardwired, built into you. Talk about the things you love. Your voice will follow.

In this day and age, if your work isn’t online, it doesn’t exist.

If you want people to know about what you do and the things you care about, you have to share.

Think Process, Not Product

Take People Behind the Scenes

“A lot of people are so used to just seeing the outcome of work. They never see the side of the work you go through to produce the outcome.” —Michael Jackson

Human beings are interested in other human beings and what other human beings do.

Become a Documentarian of What You Do

“In order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen—really seen.” —Brené Brown

How can you show your work even when you have nothing to show? The first step is to scoop up the scraps and the residue of your process and shape them into some interesting bit of media that you can share. You have to turn the invisible into something other people can see. “You have to make stuff,” said journalist David Carr when he was asked if he had any advice for students. “No one is going to give a damn about your résumé; they want to see what you have made with your own little fingers.”

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.

Send Out a Daily Dispatch

“Put yourself, and your work, out there every day, and you’ll start meeting some amazing people.” —Bobby Solomon

Once a day, after you’ve done your day’s work, go back to your documentation and find one little piece of your process that you can share.

If you’re in the very early stages, share your influences and what’s inspiring you. If you’re in the middle of executing a project, write about your methods or share works in progress. If you’ve just completed a project, show the final product, share scraps from the cutting-room floor, or write about what you learned. If you have lots of projects out into the world, you can report on how they’re doing—you can tell stories about how people are interacting with your work.

A daily dispatch is even better than a résumé or a portfolio, because it shows what we’re working on right now.

Don’t worry about everything you post being perfect. Science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon once said that 90 percent of everything is crap.

“Sometimes you don’t always know what you’ve got,” says artist Wayne White. “It really does need a little social chemistry to make it show itself to you sometimes.”

Don’t let sharing your work take precedence over actually doing your work.

“One day at a time. It sounds so simple. It actually is simple but it isn’t easy: It requires incredible support and fastidious structuring.” —Russell Brand

The “So What?” Test

Be open, share imperfect and unfinished work that you want feedback on, but don’t share absolutely everything.

Turn Your Flow into Stock

“If you work on something a little bit every day, you end up with something that is massive.” —Kenneth Goldsmith

“Stock and flow” is an economic concept that writer Robin Sloan has adapted into a metaphor for media: “Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.” Sloan says the magic formula is to maintain your flow while working on your stock in the background.

Build a Good (Domain) Name

A blog is the ideal machine for turning flow into stock: One little blog post is nothing on its own, but publish a thousand blog posts over a decade, and it turns into your life’s work. My blog has been my sketchbook, my studio, my gallery, my storefront, and my salon. Absolutely everything good that has happened in my career can be traced back to my blog. My books, my art shows, my speaking gigs, some of my best friendships—they all exist because I have my own little piece of turf on the Internet.

Your website doesn’t have to look pretty; it just has to exist.

Don’t think of your website as a self-promotion machine, think of it as a self-invention machine. Online, you can become the person you really want to be. Fill your website with your work and your ideas and the stuff you care about. Over the years, you will be tempted to abandon it for the newest, shiniest social network. Don’t give in. Don’t let it fall into neglect. Think about it in the long term. Stick with it, maintain it, and let it change with you over time.

Open Up Your Cabinet of Curiosities

Don’t Be Hoarder

“The problem with hoarding is you end up living off your reserves. 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, to replenish… . Somehow the more you give away, the more comes back to you.” —Paul Arden

Where do you get your inspiration? What sorts of things do you fill your head with? What do you read? Do you subscribe to anything? What sites do you visit on the Internet? What music do you listen to? What movies do you see? Do you look at art? What do you collect? What’s inside your scrapbook? What do you pin to the corkboard above your desk? What do you stick on your refrigerator? Who’s done work that you admire? Who do you steal ideas from? Do you have any heroes? Who do you follow online? Who are the practitioners you look up to in your field?

Your influences are all worth sharing because they clue people in to who you are and what you do—sometimes even more than your own work.

No Guilty Pleasures

“I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. If you f---ing like something, like it.” —Dave Grohl

“Do what you do best and link to the rest.” —Jeff Jarvis

The Credit Is Always Due

If you share the work of others, it’s your duty to make sure that the creators of that work get proper credit. Crediting work in our copy-and-paste age of reblogs and retweets can seem like a futile effort, but it’s worth it, and it’s the right thing to do. You should always share the work of others as if it were your own, treating it with respect and care.

Another form of attribution that we often neglect is where we found the work that we’re sharing. It’s always good practice to give a shout-out to the people who’ve helped you stumble onto good work and also leave a bread-crumb trail that people you’re sharing with can follow back to the sources of your inspiration. I’ve come across so many interesting people online by following “via” and “H/T” links—I’d have been robbed of a lot of these connections if it weren’t for the generosity and meticulous attribution of many of the people I follow.

Tell Good Stories

Work Doesn’t Speak for Itself

“To fake a photograph, all you have to do is change the caption. To fake a painting, change the attribution.” —Errol Morris

Words matter. Artists love to trot out the tired line, “My work speaks for itself,” but the truth is, our 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, and how people feel and what they understand about your work effects how they value it.

Structure Is Everything

You’re never “keeping it real” with your lack of proofreading and punctuation, you’re keeping it unintelligible.

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

Author Christopher Hitchens said that the great thing about putting out a book is that “it brings you into contact with people whose opinions you should have canvassed before you ever pressed pen to paper. They write to you. They telephone you. They come to your bookstore events and give you things to read that you should have read already.” He said that having his work out in the world was “a free education that goes on for a lifetime.”