I’ve highlighted some passages from the really great book “Show Your Work!’ by Austin Kleon. Here’s my favorites:

We’re all terrified of being revealed as amateurs, but in fact, today it is the amateur – the enthusiast who pursues her work in the spirit of love (in french, the word means “lover”), regardless of the potential for fame, money, or career – who often as advantage over the professional. Because they have little to lose, amateurs are willing to try anything and share the results. They take chances, experiment, and follow their whims.

Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time. Sloan says the magic formula is to maintain you flow while working on your stock in the background.

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. My blog has been my sketchbook, my studio, my gallery, my storefront, and my salon. Absolutely everything good that has happened in my career can be traced back to my blog. My books, my art shows, my speaking gigs, some of my best friendships, they all exist because I have my own little piece of turf on the internet.

Don’t think of your website as a self-promotion machine, think of it as a self-invention machine. Online, you can become the person you really want to be. Fill your website with your work and your ideas and the stuff you care about.

Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises. DOn’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work… and if you can build a good name, eventually that name will be its own currency. Whether people show up or they don’t, you’re out there doing your thing, ready whenever they are.

Colin Marshall says: “Compulsive avoidance of embarrassment is a form of suicide.” If you speed your life avoiding vulnerability, you and your work will never truly connect with other people.

The trick is not caring what EVERYBODY thinks of you and just caring about what the RIGHT people think of you.

Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck – and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.