Do Good Work & Share It

This weeks chapter of Austin Kleon's Steal Like An Artist was all about doing work and sharing it with others. He starts by giving you advice to take advantage of where you're at in your life. Maybe you're still in college; take advantage of how much attention your work has for the time being and take what you can out of it. Maybe you're out of college and on your way to starting your career; take advantage of your obscurity. Use that time to create whatever the hell you want because there are no consequences. When you start asking yourself "How do I become known?" that's when you start sharing your work with the world. Post online; One-up the person doing the same thing; Keep searching for the thing no one is paying attention to and make it the next trend. 

All in all, do good work and share it.

I like a lot of the advice Kleon gives us. It gives me a newfound appreciation for being so unknown right now and also motivates me to keep sharing the good work that I do, no matter how nerve-wracking it can be.

Near the end of the chapter, he says that the Internet can be an incubator for ideas that aren't fully formed, and that's right after writing that people go to the Internet to find something to say. I think an interpretation of this could be: the Internet is a good place to go to find other people who are passionate about the same things as you, but it's also a place to find new things that you're passionate about. Everyday millions of new topics, images, videos, ideas, and news gets circulated for people to find. For you to find. So, in a way the Internet is the place to go to find the topics that you didn't even know you cared about yet and to expose us to ideas that we didn't know we were thinking about.

At some points, Kleon feels that having a public online presence can be a kick in the pants. By this he means that because of how websites and blogs are set-up, online visitors that go to your domain are always going to see your latest post first. In Kleon's words "You're only as good as your last post." which is true. If you aren't trying to one-up yourself every time, you run the risk of losing viewers. The truth is, if people don't find your page interesting, then it's not worth their time to scroll through your blog until they get to the interesting part. There's not enough time in the day and with today's fast, fast, fast approach to everything, people just don't have the attention span. But by pushing yourself a little harder than your previous effort, you get to improve just a little more.

To start sharing my work and thoughts that don't usually leave my head, I've started a new blog. You can find it here.

That's all for this week.

— B