Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

It’s very important to separate your work from the rest of your life. As my wife said to me, “If you never go to work, you never get to leave work.”

The minute you learn something, turn around and teach it to others. Share your reading list. Point to helpful reference materials. Create some tutorials and post them online. Use pictures, words, and video. Take people step-by-step through part of your process. As blogger Kathy Sierra says, “Make people better at something they want to be better at.”

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

Whether you’re telling a finished or unfinished story, always keep your audience in mind. Speak to them directly in plain language. Value their time. Be brief. Learn to speak. Learn to write. Use spell-check. You’re never “keeping it real” with your lack of proofreading and punctuation, you’re keeping it unintelligible.

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

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

Joni Mitchell says that whatever she feels is the weak link in her last project gives her inspiration for the next.

Whether you’ve just won big or lost big, you still have to face the question “What’s next?”

You can’t count on success; you can only leave open the possibility for it, and be ready to jump on and take the ride when it comes for you.

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