Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered (Austin Kleon)

You have to have the courage to get rid of work and rethink things completely.

Chain-smoking is a great way to keep going, but at some point, you might burn out and need to go looking for a match. The best time to find one is while taking a sabbatical.

Nature. Go to a park. Take a hike. Dig in your garden. Get outside in the fresh air. Disconnect from anything and everything electronic.

The thing is, you never really start over. You don’t lose all the work that’s come before. Even if you try to toss it aside, the lessons that you’ve learned from it will seep into what you do next.

Go online and post what you’re working on right now with the tag #showyourwork. Plan a “Show Your Work!” night with colleagues or friends. Use this book as a guide — share works-in-progress and your curiosities, tell stories, and teach one another. Give a copy of this book away to somebody who needs to read it.

So don’t think of it as starting over. Think of it as beginning again. Go back to chapter one—literally!—and become an amateur. Look for something new to learn, and when you find it, dedicate yourself to learning it out in the open. Document your progress and share as you go so that others can learn along with you. Show your work, and when the righ

Add all this together and you get a way of working I call chain-smoking. You avoid stalling out in your career by never losing momentum. Here’s how you do it: Instead of taking a break in between projects, waiting for feedback, and worrying about what’s next, use the end of one project to light up the next one.

the reality is that most of us just don’t have the flexibility in our lives to be able to walk away from our work for a full year. Thankfully, we can all take practical sabbaticals—daily, weekly, or monthly breaks where we walk away from our work completely. Writer Gina Trapani has pointed out three prime spots to turn off our brains and take a bre

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.”