Show Your Work!: Difference between revisions
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📅 '''3 – Share something small every day.''' End each day by picking one tiny, useful fragment to post: a line from your notebook, a photo of a step, a diagram, a link that shaped your thinking. Early on, share influences; in the messy middle, show methods and rough cuts; after release, share outtakes and what you learned. Keep a lightweight routine—a daily “dispatch” that takes minutes, not hours—and apply a simple “so what?” test to avoid noise and oversharing. Over weeks, this stream becomes a searchable archive of breadcrumbs that lets others see your trajectory. The book links this rhythm to Robin Sloan’s “stock and flow”: your daily stream (flow) accumulates into durable pieces (stock) you can refine into articles, talks, or products. The psychology is anti‑perfection: small units lower friction, encourage practice, and invite steady feedback; the economics is compounding attention, where many tiny touchpoints build familiarity and trust. Done consistently, you convert incremental progress into a visible body of work and an audience that grows with you. ''Once a day, after you’ve done your day’s work, find one little piece of your process that you can share.''
🗃️ '''4 – Open up your cabinet of curiosities.''' Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro’s habit of keeping handwritten notebooks and a personal “cabinet of curiosities” models how a creator curates inputs—sketches, clippings, and odd objects—to feed future work. The chapter treats a studio as an archive in progress, with shelves, folders, and bookmarks that make influences visible and retrievable. Instead of hoarding taste, it urges sharing sources: books you underline, reference images you pin, tools you rely on, and the makers who shaped your choices. Proper attribution is non‑negotiable; link back, name names, and pass along context so others can trace the lineage. There’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure—if it sparks you, log it and admit it—because honesty about influence helps others map their own. The practical system is simple: keep a commonplace book or digital scrap file, tag everything, and publish a periodic selection with credits. Over time, your public collection becomes a signal of taste that attracts like‑minded collaborators and teaches newcomers how to look. The central move is to open your research cabinet so people can see the ecosystem behind your work and discover adjacent makers. The mechanism is editorial curation and social proof: consistently crediting and sharing influences builds trust, strengthens networks, and makes your own output more legible.
📖 '''5 – Tell good stories.''' Kurt Vonnegut’s chalkboard “shapes of stories” diagram—rising and falling arcs that trace fortune over time—shows why raw facts need narrative form before anyone can care. Using that lens, the chapter turns process into plot by framing what you share as a sequence: before and after, obstacle and turning point, mistake and fix. It swaps art‑speak for plain talk, advising concrete nouns and active verbs over abstract adjectives. A simple press‑release outline—what it is, who it’s for, why it matters now—keeps you from rambling, while photos and captions anchor the words in evidence. Parties and Q&As become practice grounds: answer directly, avoid hedging, and tell the truth about constraints and trade‑offs. Good stories also include stakes; explain what hung in the balance so progress feels earned rather than inevitable. By narrating decisions and dead ends, you give audiences a reason to root for the next chapter. The essential move is to pair the work with a human‑scaled narrative that explains origin, struggle, and meaning. The mechanism is coherence and identification: a clear arc reduces cognitive load and invites empathy, which in turn deepens attention and perceived value.
🧑🏫 '''6 – Teach what you know.''' A compact studio workshop offers the template: write the steps on a whiteboard, demonstrate once at real speed, again slowly with commentary, then hand out a short checklist so people can try it themselves. The chapter treats tutorials, recipes, and annotated screenshots as generous artifacts that travel farther than mere self‑promotion. It cites the enduring truth behind cookbooks and open‑source READMEs: giving away methods doesn’t exhaust your advantage, it expands the circle of people who understand your craft. Break complex techniques into small lessons, start with tool basics, and point to further reading so motivated learners can keep going. Keep boundaries—share know‑how, not private data or unsafe details—and always credit where a method came from. Teaching in public sharpens your thinking; questions reveal gaps, and your own explanations become a reusable reference. As a library of lessons grows, it doubles as proof of work and a path for newcomers to join the scene. The key move is to turn personal expertise into public instruction that others can apply immediately. The mechanism is reciprocity and compounding attention: useful teaching earns goodwill and steady feedback, which attracts the very audience that sustains future work.
🚫 '''7 – Don’t turn into human spam.'''
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