1. YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE A GENIUS #
- Find a scenius: Great ideas are birthed by a group of creative individuals. So-called geniuses were part of “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”.
- Being a part of a scenius is not necessarily about how smart or talented you are, but about what you have to contribute the ideas you share, the quality of the connections you make, and the conversations you start.
- Be an amateur: the enthusiast who pursues her work in the spirit of love often has the advantage over the professional. Use whatever tools you can get your hands on to get your ideas into the world; make a commitment to learn what you want to learn in front of others; be on the lookout for voids that you can fill with your own efforts; don’t hesitate to do work that others think of as silly.
- Read obituaries: reading about people who are dead now and did things with their lives makes me want to get up and do something decent with mine. Thinking about death every morning makes me want to live.
2. THINK PROCESS. NOT PRODUCT. #
- Take people behind the scenes: By letting go of our egos and sharing our process, we allow for the possibility of people having an ongoing connection with us and our work, which helps us move more of our product.
“People really do want to see how the sausage gets made.” — Designers Dan Provost and Tom Gerhardt
- Whatever the nature of your work, there is an art to what you do, and there are people who would be interested in that art, if only you presented it to them in the right way.
- Become a documentarian of what you do: scoop up the scraps and the residue of your process and shape them into some interesting bit of media that you can share. Turn the invisible into something other people can see.
- Whether you share it or not, documenting and recording your process as you go along enables you 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.
3. SHARE SOMETHING SMALL EVERY DAY #
- Focus on days. The day is the only unit of time that I can really get my head around.
- Send out a daily dispatch: Once you’ve done your day’s work, go back to your documentation and find one little piece of your process that you can share. A daily dispatch is 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. The trouble is, we don’t always know what’s good and what sucks. That’s why it’s important to get things in front of others and see how they react.
- Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You find time in the cracks between the big stuff in your day, but don’t let sharing your work take precedence over actually doing your work.
- The principle of the act of sharing: Is it useful or interesting? Yes - share it; No - Toss it; I don’t know - save it for later. Let it sit for 24 hours and come back later.
- Turn your flow into stock: 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.
- Don’t think of your website as a self-promotion machine, think of it as a self-invention machine. Fill your website with your work and your ideas and the stuffs you care about.
4. OPEN UP YOUR CABINET OF CURIOSITIES #
- Before we’re ready to take the leap of sharing our own work with the world, we can share our tastes in the work of others. 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.
- We all love things that other people think are garbage. You have to have the courage to keep loving your garbage, because what makes us unique is the diversity and breadth of our influences. When you share your taste and your influences, have the guts to own all of it.
- Always credit the work of others and share where you found the work that you’re sharing. Leave a bread-crumb trail that people you’re sharing with can follow back to the sources of your inspiration.
5. TELL GOOD STORIES #
- People’s assessment of any given object-how much they like it, how valuable it is, is deeply affected by what you tell them about it.
- Structure is everything: study story structures and fill them with characters, situations, and settings from your own life.
- Treat self-introduction as opportunities to connect with somebody by honestly and humbly explaining what it is that you do. “By day I’m a web designer, and by night I write poetry.” “I’m a writer who draws.”
- Same principles for your bio. strike all the adjectives from your bio. If you take photos, you’re not an “aspiring” or “amazing” photographer. You’re an photographer.
6. TEACH WHAT YOU KNOW #
- Teaching doesn’t mean instant competition. Just because you know the master’s technique doesn’t mean you’re going to emulate it right away.
- When you teach someone how to do your work, you are generating more interest in your work. People feel closer to your work because you’re letting them in on what you know.
7. DON’T TURN INTO HUMAN SPAM #
- Human spam: only focus on themselves; oversharing; uninterested in others’ stuff or opinions
- “If you want to be accepted by a community, you have to first be a good citizen of that community.”
- Be an open mode: If you want to be noticed, you have to notice. If you want to be interesting, you have to be interested.
8. LEARN TO TAKE A PUNCH #
- Relax and breathe: Fear is often just the imagination taking a wrong turn. Bad criticism is not the end of the world.
- Strengthen your neck: Practice getting hit a lot. Put out a lot of work. The more criticism you take, the more you realize it can’t hurt you.
- Roll with the punches: Every piece of criticism is an opportunity for new work. Sometimes when people hate something about your work, it’s fun to push that element even further.
- Protect your vulnerable areas: Hide work that is too sensitive when necessary.
- Keep your balance: Your work is something you do, not who you are.
- Don’t feed the trolls: You want feedback from people who care about you and what you do. Be extra wary of feedback from a troll who isn’t interested in improving your work, only provoking you with hateful, aggressive, or upsetting talk.
9. SELL OUT #
- When an audience starts gathering for the work that you’re freely putting into the world, you might eventually want to take the leap of turning them into patrons.
- ask for donations; crowdfunding with Kickstarter and Indiegogo; just sell your products or services
- Ask for money in return for your work is a leap you want to take only when you feel confident that you’re putting work out into the world that you think is truly worth something. Don’t be afraid to charge for your work, but put a price on it that you think is fair.
- Keep a mailing list: the people who sign up for your list will be some of your biggest supporters, just by the simple fact that they signed up for the potential to be spammed by you. Build you list and treat it with respect.
- When you have success, you have to be as generous as you can to throw opportunities in others’ way, but selfish enough to get your work done.
10. STICK AROUND #
- Chain-smoking way of working: Never lose momentum. 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. Ask yourself what you missed, what you could’ve done better, or what you couldn’t get to, and jump right into the next project.
- Go away at some point: chain-smoking is a great way to keep going, but you also need a sabbatical. If not for a full year, take practical sabbaticals-daily, weekly, or monthly breaks where we walk away from our work completely.
- Three prime spots to turn off our brains and take a break from our connected lives: commute; exercise; nature.
- Begin again: You have to have the courage to get rid of work and rethink things completely. When you throw out old work, what you’re really doing is making room for new work. It’s not start over. The lessons that you’ve learned from the past will seep into what you do next.