JEAN PHILIP DE TENDER

Steal like an artist, then show your work !

Twee jaar geleden schreef Austin Kleon een zeer fijn boekje “Steal like an artist”. Iedereen heeft creativiteit was zijn adagio. Nu is er een vervolg op dat grafisch werkje, helemaal in dezelfde stijl : “Show your work ! 10 ways to share your creativity and get discovered”.  Als iedereen creatief is dan mag die creativiteit gezien worden. “If my previous book was about stealing influence from other people, then this book is about how to influence others by stealing from you”, zegt Kleon.

Wat ik heb genoteerd :

You don’t have to be a genius.

Don’t believe the myth of the lone genius, the superman talent who appears out of nowhere.

Brian Eno speaks of a “scenius” : under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals – artist, curators, thinkers and other tastemakers – who make up an “ecology of talent”.

Good work isn’t created in a vacuum. Creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds.

Stop thinking about what others can do for you, and start asking what you can do for others.

Be an amateur ! “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind, there are few”, said Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki

Think process, not product.

“In order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen – really seen”, said Brené Brown.

Become a documentarian of what you do. Start a work journal : write your thoughts down in a notebook, or speak them into an audio recorder. Keep a scrapbook.

Share something small every day.

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

90 % of everything is crap. The same is true of our own work. The trouble is, we don’t always know what’s good and what sucks. That’s why it’s important to get things in front of others and see how they react.

Build a good domain name.

Open up your cabinet of curiosities.

If you happened to be wealthy in and educated and alive in the 16th- and 17th-centure Europe, it was fashionable to have a Wunderkammern, a “wonder chamber”, or a “cabinet of curiosities” in your house – a room filled with rare and remarkable objects that served as a kind of external display of your thirst for knowledge of the world.

Your influences are all worth sharing because they clue people in to who you are and what you do – sometimes even more than your own work.

Don’t turn into human spam.

If you want followers, be someone worth following. If you want to be interesting, you have to be interested.

“Show your work !”, Austin Kleon, Workman Publishing Company, 2014.