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Show Your Work · Austin Kleon

“Imagine if your next boss didn’t have to read your résumé because he already reads your blog.”

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Why I Picked This Up

I’d already read Steal Like an Artist and it changed how I think about creativity. Show Your Work is its companion — where the first book says “it’s okay to borrow and remix,” this one says “now share what you’re making, while you’re making it.” I picked it up at a moment when I was sitting on a lot of ideas and outputs — engineering knowledge, Telugu poetry, productivity systems, book notes — but sharing almost none of it. I had this vague plan to “write a blog someday when I have enough polished material.” Kleon’s book convinced me that waiting for polish is the enemy of sharing, and sharing is the engine of growth. /avi exists because of this book. Not figuratively. Literally.

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The Core Ideas — And How They Built /avi

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1. You Don’t Have to Be a Genius

“Find a scenius — a community of practice — and contribute to it.”

Kleon’s argument: the myth of the lone genius is destructive. Great work emerges from communities where people share generously, build on each other’s ideas, and contribute without expecting perfection. How this changed me: I stopped waiting to be “qualified” to share engineering knowledge. I’m not a famous tech influencer with 100K followers. I’m a staff engineer in Sydney with specific experiences and perspectives. That’s enough. The barrier to sharing isn’t expertise — it’s willingness. I started /avi not as an expert dispensing wisdom, but as a practitioner documenting his process. The difference matters. An expert says “here’s the right way.” A practitioner says “here’s what I tried, here’s what worked, here’s what didn’t.”

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2. Think Process, Not Product

“By letting go of our egos and sharing our process, we allow for the possibility of people having an ongoing connection with us and our work.”

People connect with process more than polish. A perfectly edited blog post gets a nod. A messy, honest account of how you debugged a production outage for 12 hours gets people leaning in. How this changed me: My best-performing content isn’t the clean, authoritative “how-to” posts. It’s the honest accounts of struggle — the career reflections, the immigration journey, the experiments that didn’t work. Process is more interesting than results because process is where the learning lives. The /avi approach: Every page on this site shows the work. The productivity workflows page doesn’t just show my final system — it shows the iterations. The book notes don’t just summarize — they show how I apply the ideas (imperfectly, evolving). The site itself is a living document, not a finished product.

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3. Share Something Small Every Day

“The day is the only unit of time that I can really feel, and I think that’s why daily writing is such a good habit.”

Kleon’s daily sharing practice isn’t about going viral. It’s about building a body of work over time. One small share per day, compounded over years, creates something substantial. How this changed me: I don’t publish to /avi every day, but I capture and share something daily — a thought on Twitter, a comment on a PR, a message in a community, a note in my second brain. The habit of externalizing thinking keeps the creative pipeline moving. The compound effect is real. When I started /avi, I had maybe 10 pages of content. A year of consistent (not daily — consistent) additions turned it into a substantial knowledge base. No single day felt productive. The aggregate is significant.

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4. Open Up Your Process

Show your drafts. Share your thinking-in-progress. Let people see the messy middle. How this changed me: I started sharing architecture decisions while they’re still being debated, not just after they’re finalized. I share draft blog posts with trusted peers before publishing. I talk about ideas I’m exploring, not just conclusions I’ve reached. The fear was vulnerability — what if people see my half-formed ideas and think I’m incompetent? The reality: people respected the openness. Sharing drafts invites collaboration. Sharing finished products invites critique. I’d rather have the former.

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5. The “So What?” Test

Not everything you create is worth sharing. Kleon suggests running the “So What?” test: Would this be useful, interesting, or entertaining to someone who isn’t me? How I apply this: Before publishing anything on /avi, I ask:

• “Would this be useful to the person I was 3 years ago?”
• “Does this share a specific insight, or is it just noise?”
• “Am I sharing this because it’s genuinely helpful, or because I want attention?”

Some of my best ideas don’t pass the “So What?” test and stay in my notes. That’s fine. The filter keeps the quality bar high enough that people trust what does get published.

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6. Teach What You Know

“Teaching doesn’t mean instant competition. Teaching is the most generous thing you can do.”

When you teach something, three things happen: the student learns, you solidify your own understanding, and you attract people who share your interests. Teaching is the highest-leverage form of sharing. How this changed me: The dev section of /avi is essentially me teaching what I know about engineering. Not because I’m the world’s foremost expert, but because organizing my knowledge into teachable form forced me to understand it better than I did before. Every book summary on this site is an act of teaching. I’m not just noting what I read — I’m translating it into frameworks and applications that others might find useful. The act of translation is where the deepest learning happens.

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7. Don’t Turn Into Human Spam

Kleon’s crucial caveat: sharing should be generous, not extractive. If you’re only broadcasting and never engaging, you’re spam. If you’re only sharing your own stuff and never amplifying others, you’re spam. How I apply this: For every piece of my own content I share, I try to amplify someone else’s work. I comment on other people’s blogs, share articles that helped me, and credit influences explicitly. The goal is to be part of a conversation, not to monopolize one.

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8. Learn to Take a Punch

“The more open you are about sharing your work, the more exposed you are to criticism.”

This was the hardest lesson. When you share work publicly, some people won’t like it. Some will critique it harshly. Some will misunderstand it entirely. How I handle it: I distinguish between constructive feedback (specific, actionable, well-intentioned) and noise (vague negativity, trolling, projection). The former gets gratitude and integration. The latter gets ignored. The filter is: “Does this person have context and credibility on this topic?” For /avi specifically, the vulnerability is higher because it’s personal — it’s not just technical content, it’s my thinking, my journey, my culture. Putting Telugu poetry next to engineering frameworks is unusual, and unusual things attract both appreciation and confusion. I’ve made peace with that.

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9. Become Findable

“Build a good domain name, make a website, fill it with your work and ideas and the stuff you care about.”

This is the most practical chapter and the one that directly led to /avi’s creation. Kleon argues that your online presence should be a home you own, not a rented apartment on someone else’s platform. How this changed me: I stopped relying on LinkedIn posts and Medium articles that live on someone else’s platform. I built /avi as my home on the internet — a domain I control, a design I chose, content I own. Social media is the distribution channel. /avi is the home base. The domain, the structure, the interconnected pages — it’s all designed to be findable. When someone Googles my name, I want them to find this, not a LinkedIn profile with the same template as everyone else.

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10. Stick Around

“The people who get what they’re after are very often the ones who just stick around long enough.”

Longevity beats virality. The person who consistently shares useful things for 5 years will outperform the person who had one viral post and disappeared. How this changed me: I stopped chasing virality and started chasing consistency. /avi isn’t designed to go viral. It’s designed to be useful over time — a growing knowledge base that becomes more valuable the longer I maintain it. The goal is to still be adding to this site in 10 years.

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How This Book Influenced Building in Public

The “build in public” movement owes a lot to Kleon, even if it doesn’t always credit him. The core insight — that sharing your process builds trust, attracts collaborators, and accelerates learning — is the foundation of building in public. My building-in-public philosophy:

1. Share the process, not just the product
2. Be honest about what didn’t work
3. Credit your influences (every book page on /avi links to related resources)
4. Engage with the community, don’t just broadcast
5. Play the long game — consistency over virality

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What Changed After Reading This

1. I launched /avi. Directly, causally. This book removed the “waiting for perfection” barrier.
2. I started sharing work-in-progress instead of only finished outputs.
3. I became more comfortable with vulnerability — sharing personal reflections alongside technical content.
4. I reframed sharing as teaching, which made it feel generous instead of self-promotional.
5. I built a consistent practice of externalizing one insight per day, even if it’s just a note to myself.

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Key Quotes I Revisit

• “You don’t really find an audience for your work; they find you. But it’s not enough to be good. In order to be found, you have to be findable.”
• “Make stuff you love and talk about stuff you love and you’ll attract people who love that kind of stuff.”
• “Don’t think of your website as a self-promotion machine, think of it as a self-invention machine.”

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Who Should Read This

Any engineer who thinks “I should write more but I don’t know where to start.” Any person who has knowledge worth sharing but feels unqualified to share it. Any builder who’s working on something interesting but keeping it to themselves. Read this alongside Steal Like an Artist. Together, they form a complete philosophy: borrow generously, remix creatively, share openly.