I recently finished reading Austin Kleon’s second book Show Your Work! Being a fan of his previous book Steal Like An Artist, I was super excited to get my hands on Show Your Work! The basic premise of this book is to well….show your work. In this short yet insightful read Kleon offers 10 tips for showing your work and getting noticed.
The biggest takeaway that I had from reading this book is that creatives don’t need to find an audience for their work, the audience finds you. As an educator I there are a ton of parallels between Kleon’s artistic sharing and the sharing that we do with students. We no longer work in a world were our student’s only share their work with their teacher. When leveraged correctly, teachers can use technology to help students show their work to a broader audience. By doing this we are showing our students that their work matters beyond just getting a grade.
Another takeaway I had from reading this book is Kleon’s process for deciding what he posts online. Kleon uses a very simple process to decipher what to post and what not to post. I’m sure we can all agree that this is something that we need to be teaching our students. Kleon says to
Ask yourself is this helpful is it entertaining this is something I would be comfortable with with my boss or mother seeing.
Overall I highly recommend checking out Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work. To properly write a review of this book I would need to basically rewrite it. There is no filler here and it’s a very fast yet motivating read. For more on the book you can check out my book notes by clicking here.