Podcast: Download (Duration: 14:57 — 20.9MB)
One of the books I consistently read is Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon, a small book full of wisdom and insights on how to live the creative life. In this episode of Getting Work To Work, I’m going to share some reflections on why showing your work is important for others to see the work you do, a way to measure your levels of growth and stagnation over time, and to provide a path of vision and differentiation.
I love this quote from Show Your Work: “When you feel like you’ve learned whatever there is to learn from what you’re doing, it’s time to change course and find something new to learn so that you can move forward. You can’t be content with mastery; you have to push yourself to become a student again.”
The W’s of Showing Your Work?
Who benefits from you showing your work?
- You do
- Your clients
- Your stakeholders
- Your coworkers
- Potential clients
What are you going to show?
- Documentation of your process.
- A glimpse at what it took to get to a final product. Stages of thoughts and ideas.
- Journey of curiosity
- Experimentation
- Images
- Case Studies
- Portfolios
- Stories
When do you show your work?
- When it’s fresh
- After the project launches
- Reflection after a longer period of time
Where do you show your work?
- Social media
- Your own site
- An intranet or private Slack group
Why do we show our work?
- Identifies growth and stagnation
- Allows for feedback
- Helps to illuminate strengths and weaknesses
- Learning opportunities as we experiment and try new things
- Chances for collaboration
- Allows for self-comparison of where you were then versus where you are now.
Show Links
- Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon
- Support Getting Work To Work on ChrisMartinStudios.shop!
- Sign up for my weekly newsletter: The Curiosity Lab
