Book Review: Show your work!

This book from Austin Kleon revolves around a simple concept: whatever work you are doing, start showing it with the world.

This seems like a controversial argument, because many of us prefer to keep our work concealed from the public, fearing that others will steal our work and our knowledge, but in reality the opposite is often true.

Even if you are a "master" in something, it doesn't mean that just by teching what you do to others, they are able to steal your work or beat you at your own game.

If a renowed chef makes cooking tutorials and show how he or she makes his masterpieces, it doesn't mean that whoever watches that tutorial is automatically a chef master himself or herself. It takes years of practice an errors before you can replicate the success of others and rarely (maybe never) success happens overnight.

Starting from this advice, the author invites us to share our daily work or passion, because by sharing freely with the world you can start making followers that share our same passion or do our same work, and this can grow overtime and even create links in real life instead of just virtual connections.

Another advice from the author is to be cautious with sharing your work or thoughts only via social networks, because the followers you get from that platforms is never really yours. They are ofter users lent from the platform to you based on algorithms that could change overnight depending on the interests of the owning company, to stimulate user attention and attract more money.

The real option is to own your content, buying your own domain name and starting a blog or website that is yours and represents your brand and your thoughts. This, coupled with the use of an old but always effective method to get your user up to date on important news. That old piece of technology is the newsletter, because one way or another, if you subscribe to it chances are that you are really interested in getting updates on the topic.

You should not get feared by the idea of sharing something not good enough. Everybody when starting will probably make mediocre content, but with time and practice the quality will improve and you will grow more followers, and this in the long time will help people find you and it could also become a full time job, like it is for many YouTubers and content creators around the world.

One thing to be careful about is feedback, because Internet (and the real world) is full of haters and dumb people ready to insult you and to show how stupid a human being could be. But this should not stop you, you must grow the ability to filter evil comments from real ones from people really interested in commenting and continuing the conversation.

In the end Show Your Work! is a relly nice small book that you should read if you are interested in becoming a content creator or you just want to share your passion with others. It's a quick read (about 130 pages) and it's packed with valuable advices and quotes that are useful to guide you through the path of of sharing your work or passion online.