Who Am I Trying to Impress?

The fundamental value add of social media.

Page 96 of “Keep Going” by Austin Kleon.

I discovered the great

Austin Kleon

via the great Ali Abdaal. In one of his videos, Ali highlights Austin’s book “Show Your Work,” and talks about how it helped him get over his distaste for self-promotion and his hesitance to publish on the Internet. At that time, I was starting a YouTube channel, but I was full of the kind of self-consciousness that grips everyone who decides to make things in public. I was happy enough to make videos but when it came time to release them, I folded laundry, swept under my bed, and watered my plants — I did everything except hit Publish.

So I went out and bought “Show Your Work,” and read it in a few hours. It’s only a few hundred pages and the text is concise. When I started reading, I underlined and dogeared what I found insightful, useful, or inspiring. By the tenth page, I knew I would have to dogear the whole thing, so I gave up and settled in for the ride.

The next week I did more than hit Publish. I promoted my YouTube channel on my Instagram story and on my Facebook page. I invited people — people I knew! — to see what I had made.

Terrifying.

The Fundamental Value Add of Social Media

I grew up with social media. And like most people who grew up with social media, I have a love-hate relationship with it.

Platform founders like Mark Zuckerberg love to describe the central mission of social media as connecting the world. And the way they describe it makes it sound like a beautiful dream. But that dream rings false to me. Maybe I take connectedness for granted because I grew up in a world that was already connected. But what I see on social media feels like exposure, not connection.

At its worst, it feels like a frantic throng packed shoulder-to-shoulder in a giant mall, with everyone elbowing past each other and shouting into an indistinguishable roar. The people who thrive on social media do so by shouting the loudest. Being creative on social media became an economy — and in economies, businesspeople, not artists, do best.

Delivering On the Promise

I love “Show Your Work.” I’ve read it at least three times. I love it because it taught me how to market and sell and promote my work like a businessperson, as social media demands, without hating myself. It showed me how to make social media deliver on its promise to offer genuine connection.

I also love it because it makes me feel stupid for being precious with the things I make. It takes all of the caution and perfectionism that feels rational to me and flips it on its head. The only rational thing to do, this book tells me, is to make great things and share them.

Austin Kleon didn’t just write “Show Your Work.” He also wrote “Steal Like an Artist,” perhaps his most famous book, and “Keep Going” — both of which I read this weekend.

The title of this piece and the image at the top come from “Keep Going.” They come from an insight I loved in the book, and this is my attempt to follow through on that insight: to find the handful of people I’m trying to impress. To figure out…

Who Am I Writing For?

There are many ways to figure this out. Whose work are you most in awe of? Whose work are you most jealous of? Whose work did you not know was possible before you saw it? Who would be in your dream workshop?

For me, there are four such people. Actually, there are many more, but I had to stop at four before things spiralled out of control.

The four are:

1. Patti Smith, who wrote “Just Kids,” “M Train,” and “Year of the Monkey”

2. Joan Didion, who wrote “Blue Nights,” “The Year of Magical Thinking,” “The White Album,” “Play It As It Lays,” “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” and “A Book of Common Prayer”

3. Patrick Radden Keefe, the brilliant journalist who wrote “Say Nothing” and “Empire of Pain”

4. Van Neistat, the writer and filmmaker behind “The Spirited Man” series on YouTube

Patti, Joan, and Patrick all feature heavily in the books I lugged from Berkeley to New York City when I moved. Van inspired me to make videos like this one about said move:

Building a Shrine

Kleon suggests finding a place in your workspace to put photos of these people so that you remember who you’re writing for. I did so in three simple steps.

1. Get analog — even if you work digitally, you need to be able to stumble upon these reminders when you’re not looking for them. That way they can bring you clarity when you’re least expecting it and most in need of it. I achieved this with a Polaroid camera, after taping cardboard over the flash so I could take photos of my laptop screen.

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2. Make tributes — in my case, a Polaroid print of my favorite photo of each person.

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3. Put them up — somewhere you will see them whenever you’re working. I tucked them in this space beneath my bookshelves and above my desktop monitor. When I’m typing at my desk, they’re always just a glance away.

For You

Everything I make is a tribute to the artists I love — mostly writers and filmmakers. This little shrine is just more honest about its intentions.

“Show Your Work” really lit a fire in me. To

Austin Kleon

, I can't thank you enough. Never, before reading it, would I have written a piece like this and put it out — I would have said it's too simple. I would have edited it until I decided it really was as bad as I thought, before banishing it to some forgotten hard drive. “Show Your Work” taught me that all my rationalization was just three or four fears stacked on top of each other wearing a trenchcoat. It taught me that hitting Publish is not an act of self-importance or self-promotion but an act of bravery.

And it taught me that, just as the Internet connected me to Austin Kleon and Ali Abdaal, there’s some tiny chance it could connect Van, and Patti, and Patrick, to me.

If you, reading this, have sketchbooks or notebooks or songs or photos that you keep squirreled away, that you refuse to show to your friends and family because they’re never yet good enough — read the book. Then do what it says. Don’t overthink. Don’t “save up” your best work for some vague tomorrow. Don’t “wait until you’re ready” because there is no getting ready except by doing. Just do.

Do even the things that make you feel a little stupid, like building a shrine to four people you’ve never met, all as an excuse to recommend a book.