 We are living in the era of the internet and opportunity is everywhere. This tiny piece of tech allowed us to share our work across the world and a link nowadays has multiple functionalities and can take down the Pentagon. A link nowadays has such a big potential that if it ends up in the proper hands, it can exponentially and radically change your life. Hello everyone and welcome back to my book summary series. Here I want to outline summarize and distill the main ideas from my favorite books and today we are talking about a tiny one called Show Your Work by Austin Cleon, which is about the power of sharing your work with the world and getting yourself noticed and other nicely crafted bits of tips and how and why you should get yourself out there and let the other see your creative work. And one thing I wanted to mention is that you can actually read the book in something like under one hour, which is quite high utility for the time invested. And the book is actually divided into 10 key ideas and you'll have timestamps in the description down below. And I want to get something out of the way and start with the key idea number one, which is you don't have to be a genius. That's right, you don't have to be a genius. The author starts talking about this myth about creativity, which is the myth of the lone genius. And the lone genius is a person with superhuman gifts and talents that essentially pops up out of nowhere at specific points throughout history. And when the inspiration strikes, that lone genius will start producing astonishing work out of nowhere, only to share it with the world later and also being cherished afterwards. But what if you can replace the word genius and come up with a word that sort of involves us the mortals as well. And this is where the author comes in and brings this new word to the table, which is, genius. Now, when thinking about creativity through the lenses of a genius, what you will notice is that great ideas often come to life from an actual group of individuals connecting and interacting with each other. You can think about poets, painters, coders, curators, thinkers, and much more. And these people end up creating an ecology of talent. And when the genius part can often come in as an ego system, genius is an ecosystem. And if you look back closely at history, many of the people who we think as lone geniuses were actually 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. Which is actually a pretty productive thing you can do. Thinking as genius as a genius as a whole, a mix of sparkling cocktail of love and song, you can actually bring yourself together and push more of yourself out there. Now the next key idea is to think about the process and not about the product. And what this actually means is that you need to document your process and share it with the world along the way. If we go back and look at the pre-digital era, we can see that various artists, such as painters, composers, writers, had to come up with a finished product in order to share it with the world. It wouldn't be productive for, say, Mark Twain to start sharing one page or one chapter of his upcoming book in something like a newspaper, and it would make more sense to share the whole book at once. But we are living in a digital era, so what a writer might do nowadays is to start sharing his process with the world using the abundance of the internet. The writer might share a couple of passages on Twitter, an illustration on Instagram and even a teaser video on YouTube. This is how you can keep people engaged, so ideally you don't need to have a finished product to start sharing it with the world. And just think about it, a lot of books nowadays start as actually blog posts or YouTube scripts. And taking people behind the scenes with you, sharing what you are currently working on, the status of your project, the resources you are using might be indeed the best thing to do. And there is this interesting idea about becoming a curator instead of a creator. And you can start doing that by, again, sharing a snap of what you are currently reading, scribbling your books, hunting for quotes, digesting and filtering email newsletters and processing and sharing all of that information with the world. So you can stop thinking about what is the actual goal of me sharing a random quote on Twitter as there is no specific goal tied to it. You have no end product in mind, it's just you sharing your ideas to the world and watching them sort of go up and interact with each other into this sort of like interconnected web of macro ideas. And again, this translates into thinking about this process and not about the end product. And you can try following this process every single day, which leads us to our next idea, which outlines that you should share something small with the world every day. And again, the internet has made this easier than ever. You have all these means and channels you can use to start sharing your projects, your writing, your photos, your code. And you can actually start doing this right now. You can pick up your phone and just like scribble something and post it online. It's not that hard and it will take some time and you will have some typing to do, but trust me, it will pay off and you'll have the abundance of the digital space and the unlimited potential of Google that will support your next internet searches. You must remember that you are a note in a network and what you do and share can actually have tremendous impact on a person that might even be on the other side of the planet. And even if you think that what you are sharing has already been said, just remember that what might be common for you might be mind blowing to others as every single person, every single one of us is in a different state on our life's journey. So open yourself up and start sharing, which leads us to our key idea number four, which is about opening up your cabinet of curiosities. So in the past, wealthy people used to have a so-called cabinet of curiosities that came in simply as an actual cabinet or could have extended to a room filled with all sorts of interesting things such as, you know, old books, journals, minerals, strained jewels, exotic stones and other pieces of weird art. And what this type of activity did was actually fueling the possessor's imagination. And you can consider the stuff you are actually reading and curating as fuel for your future work and the diversity of it can even be extreme. And I remember watching an episode of Breaking Bad where one of the characters was reciting a poem and that particular character was a great chemist as well, but he was also fond of poetry. And poetry was the thing that fueled his creative engine so that he could produce great work. And do not let anyone tell you and make you feel bad about the things you really like and enjoy because if you really like it, you like it. There's no such thing as a guilty pleasure. And that's really okay. That's really what makes us special. Everyone likes different things and sharing all of these different things with the world while also crediting and labeling what you are sharing will come back in your favor. And the next big thing, the next key idea you might think about improving when sharing your work is learning to tell good stories. And you can follow the Storycycle model outlined in the book, which is the one Dan Harmon uses. And Dan Harmon is the co-creator of Reek and Morty. But keep in mind that you can also find variations of this online as well. And essentially, if you want to tell good stories, you might want to follow this particular cycle. Now the character starts in a zone of comfort, but also the character wants something. And in order to achieve that particular something, the character must go out of his comfort zone and enter an unfamiliar situation, learn and adapt. The character will get whatever she or he wants, while paying an oftentimes heavy price for it, only to return back to your home and overall stable and familiar situation. But the character is now a new human. Now this is an invisible structure you can use to tell your stories either in a video format, in a portfolio, a piece of writing and even live when talking to actual people. And people are actually attracted to this type of invisible framework because it actually works. Now another key point I wanted to highlight is that you should teach people what you already know. And I believe that this is indeed a nice tactic one can follow to first crystallize what you already know by explaining it to someone. And second to expand and add up on what you already know. Because when you're talking and chatting to people and speaking about your processes and the tools you use, you might be surprised that even people who are on the other side of the spectrum in terms of what you do, even they will have something to say about your work. Thus you will be building interconnected feedback loops that will catapult both you and the audience forward. And you and they have nothing to lose. And a few things you can do to keep this office to start building an email list, sending a newsletter where you are sharing things you are passionate about. And even if your mom is the only person reading it, it can still be a very useful writing exercise you can perform every week or month. You can also start a blog for free and adjust it along the way. In fact, this is what I did when I started my personal newsletter. I first had the blog which was in my native language and then I decided to switch to English so that I can reach more people. And slowly you will see that you will start building small pieces of assets and content and also a personal writing history that can be useful if you want to do a yearly review and see how and why you evolved. Now a non-shameless blog you can sign up for my Friday treats newsletter in the description and pinned comment down below. And each Friday you'll get a short email from me sending you off to your weekend with a few fun and useful stuff to ponder. Things related to tech productivity, research on building better mental frameworks, noticing confusion, rationality and other tactical advice you can use. Now that's funny because the next point of the book is about not turning into human spam. And the word spam and spammer I believe started once emails got more and more popular and when people started sending irrelevant messages that you didn't sign up for. And if we apply the same label to us humans, we can sometimes behave like spam. We want to push more content, we want to show ourselves to the world, we want to be everywhere and nowhere. But what we can do instead is to learn to be part of a community where we can share our ideas, interact, exchange thoughts and give feedback instead of simply pushing and pointing people to your work all the time. Now it's not about you, it's more about us. And this is where you should see yourself as an open node, essentially being ready to just both give and also receive. Once you'd also consider behaving like a human and not like a company or product and just like start talking to people in a casual way without actually giving them the feeling that they are talking to a bot. And this organic approach will most likely lead you to create a real connection with the person who's at the end of the line and someday who knows, meet them in real life. So you should give, give, give, give, give, give, give, give, give, give and then do the ask. And when doing the ask, you actually need to learn how to take a punch. And the punch can come in various forms. The punch can be the criticism in the YouTube comment section, a tag on Twitter, memes about your name, face or hair and even a strange email sent to you at 2am. And when sharing your work online, this will happen quite a lot. And learning to take it, absorb it and ultimately let it fuel you is indeed a meta skill you might want to start working on. Always remember that you cannot make everyone on the planet agree with what you are saying or writing. You might also want to remember that people in general always care about themselves first. So even if someone might hate on you when writing a piece of harsh criticism, you know, after they send that out, they will most likely move on with your life and stop thinking about you for the rest of the day. And this is exactly the same reason you should not care. Instead, you should focus on the positive energies and vibes you're getting from people who do really enjoy your work and with whom you can actually connect. This of course doesn't mean that you should remove yourself from full criticism, but only try scanning and finding the one that is really valuable and productive for your overall growth. A steady ross will put it, it is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out on how the strongman stumbles, or where the doer of deeds would have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena. Now, within the abundance of the digital era, one needs to learn how and when to sell out, which is the next key point of the book. And the problem nowadays is that more and more people have ego-related issues, and they actually prefer being starving artists instead of trying to find ways to convert their work into their daily bread. But throughout history, what you will notice is that the most well-known pieces of art were actually made for money. The painter Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, only because the Pope commissioned him. The godfather was written by Mario Puzo, because he was 45 and something like 20k dollars in debt, so you need to learn and understand the sex, cash, theory. And this is essentially a way of understanding that the creative person has two jobs. The sexy one is the one you would do for free, the one you really enjoy, the one that fills you with joy and song. But then you will also have the cash-related one, the one that pays the bills. The idea is to get yourself into that sweet spot where you can cover both, but you will find situations when this is not going to be the case. And the final piece of advice is to stick around and keep going, which is actually the next book of this author I might do a review of that one as well. And but what you must understand is that there is no ultimate recipe. This change often comes from the compound effect of daily work that will, in the long run, change how we view and interact with the world.