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AK#Notes

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Show your work

Author: Austin Kieon Created time: March 19, 2021 9:03 PM Page No.: 224 Progress: ✔️

What I am going to do after reading it?

Points

Meaning

Human spam - They just post content but don't engage with others people content.

Hoarder - They don't post many thing just engage for something in return.

Contributor - They engage and put good stuff also.

Troll - Who isn’t interested in improving your work, only provoking you with hateful, aggressive, or upsetting talk.

Stories

John T. Unger tells this terrific story from his days as a street poet. He would do a poetry reading and afterward some guy would come up to him and say, “Your poem changed my life, man!” And John would say, “Oh, thanks. Want to buy a book? It’s five dollars.” And the guy would take the book, hand it back to John, and say, “Nah, that’s okay.” To which John would respond, “Geez, how much is your life worth?”

In 2013, the Internet fell in love with astronaut Chris Hadfield, commander of the International Space Station. Three years earlier, Hadfield and his family were sitting around the dinner table, trying to figure out ways to generate interest for the Canadian Space Agency, which, like many space programs, faced major budget cuts and needed more public support. “Dad wanted a way to help people connect with the real side of what an astronaut’s life is,” said Hadfield’s son Evan. “Not just the glamour and science, but also the day-to-day activities.”

Commander Hadfield wanted to show his work.

Things fell into place when his sons explained social media to him and got him set up on Twitter and other social networks. During his next five-month mission, while performing all his regular astronautical duties, he tweeted, answered questions from his followers, posted pictures he’d taken of Earth, recorded music, and filmed YouTube videos of himself clipping his nails, brushing his teeth, sleeping, and even performing maintenance on the space station. Millions of people ate it all up, including my agent, Ted, who tweeted, “Wouldn’t normally watch live video of a couple of guys doing plumbing repair, but IT’S IN SPACE!”

When George Lucas was a teenager, he almost died in a car accident. He decided “every day now is an extra day,” dedicated himself to film, and went on to direct Star Wars . Wayne Coyne, lead singer of The Flaming Lips, was 16 when he was held up while working at a Long John Silver’s. “I realized I was going to die,” he says. “And when that gets into your mind . . . it utterly changed me . . . I thought, _I’m not going to sit here and wait for things to happen, I’m going to make them happen, and if people think I’m an idiot I don’t care._”

Tim Kreider, in his book We Learn Nothing , says that getting stabbed in the throat was the best thing to ever happen to him. For a whole year, he was happy and life was good. “You’d like to think that nearly getting killed would be a permanently life-altering experience,” Kreider writes, but “the illumination didn’t last.” Eventually, he was back to “the busy work of living.” The writer George Saunders, speaking of his own near-death experience, said, “For three or four days after that, it was the most beautiful world. To have gotten back in it, you know? And I thought, if you could walk around like that all the time, to really have that

When the late film critic Roger Ebert went through several intense surgeries to treat his cancer, he lost the ability to speak. He lost his voice either scribble responses on a pad of paper, or type on his Mac and have the awkward computer voice read it out loud through his laptop speakers.

Cut off from everyday conversation, he poured himself into tweeting, posting to Facebook, and blogging at rogerebert.com . He ripped out posts at a breakneck speed, writing thousands and thousands of words about everything he could think of—his boyhood in Urbana, Illinois, his love for Steak ’n Shake, his conversations with famous movie actors, his thoughts on his inevitable death. Hundreds and hundreds of people would respond to his posts, and he would respond back. Blogging became his primary way of communicating with the world. “On the web, my real voice finds expression,” he wrote.

Resources

Quote

“Connections don’t mean shit, I’ve never had any connections that weren’t a natural outgrowth of doing things I was doing anyway.”

“Books are made out of books.”

“Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough,”

“Whenever Picasso learned how to do something, he abandoned it.”

“We work because it’s a chain reaction, each subject leads to the next.”

“Work is never finished, only abandoned.”

“We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.”

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

“I ain’t going to give up. Every time you think I’m one place, I’m going to show up someplace else. I come pre-hated. Take your best shot.”

“You and I will be around a lot longer than Twitter, and nothing substitutes face to face.”

“It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others.”

“Part of the act of creating is in discovering your own kind. They are everywhere. But don’t look for them in the wrong places.”

“Whatever excites you, go do it. Whatever drains you, stop doing it.”

“When people realize they’re being listened to, they tell you things.”

“Whatever we say, we’re always talking about ourselves.”

“You got to make your case.”

“In the first act, you get your hero up a tree. The second act, you throw rocks at him. For the third act, you let him down.”

“‘The cat sat on a mat’ is not a story. ‘The cat sat on the dog’s mat’ is a story.”

Work doesn’t speak for itself .

“To fake a photograph, all you have to do is change the caption. To fake a painting, change the attribution.”

“Do what you do best and link to the rest.”

“I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. If you f---ing like something, like it.”

“You’re only as good as your record collection.”

“All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste, But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer.”

“I’m basically a curator, Making books has always felt very connected to my bookselling experience, that of wanting to draw people’s attention to things that I liked, to shape things that I liked into new shapes.”

“Carving out a space for yourself online, somewhere where you can express yourself and share your work, is still one of the best possible investments you can make with your time.”

“If you work on something a little bit every day, you end up with something that is massive.”

“Post as though everyone who can read it has the power to fire you.”

“The Internet is a copy machine, Once anything that can be copied is brought into contact with the Internet, it will be copied, and those copies never leave.”

“Make no mistake: This is not your diary. You are not letting it all hang out. You are picking and choosing every single word.”

“One day at a time. It sounds so simple. It actually is simple but it isn’t easy: It requires incredible support and fastidious structuring.”

Overnight success is a myth. Dig into almost every overnight success story and you’ll find about a decade’s worth of hard work and perseverance.

“Put yourself, and your work, out there every day, and you’ll start meeting some amazing people.”

“You have to make stuff, No one is going to give a damn about your résumé; they want to see what you have made with your own little fingers.”

David Carr

“In order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen—really seen.”

Brené Brown

“A lot of people are so used to just seeing the outcome of work. They never see the side of the work you go through to produce the outcome.”

—Michael Jackson

The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead

David Shields

“Find your voice, shout it from the rooftops, and keep doing it until the people that are looking for you find you.”

— Dan Harmon

“Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.”

—John Cleese

“Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare to think.”

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“That I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Thom Yorke

“That’s all any of us are: amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else.”

—Charlie Chaplin

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