📚The Book in 3 Bullets

• Share your work and thoughts online for free.

• Share things that you’re genuinely interested in, and you will attract like-minded people to your work.

• You can make a living by sharing your work. If you put out good work that is of value to other human beings, you can free up time to spend working on things that are important and interesting to you.

🌎 How the Book Changed Me

• This book gave me the courage and inspiration to create a website and start a weekly newsletter. I’ve been engrossed in consuming content and information and haven’t thought of sharing the insights I’ve learned from them until coming across this book. I now have a blueprint of what to share, how to share it, and with whom to share it.

✍️ My Top Quotes

• The most important thing is to share our work, whatever it is, and not be ashamed.

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

• One little blog post is nothing on its own, but publish a thousand blog posts over a decade, and it turns into your life’s work.

• Being open and honest about what you like is the best way to connect with people who like those things, too.

• When people realize they're being listened to, they tell you things.

• Whatever excites you, go do it. Whatever drains you, stop doing it.

• If you just focus on getting really good, people will come to you. You don’t find an audience for your work; they find you.

📖 Summary & Notes

1. You don't have to be a genius. You just have to be yourself.

• Creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds.

• Blogs, social media sites, email groups, discussion boards—they’re all the same thing: virtual scenes where people go to hang out and talk about the things they care about.

• Be an amateur. Amateurs have little to lose and are willing to try anything and share the results. They take chances, experiment, and follow their whims.

  • In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind, there are few.

• The fellow-pupil can help more than the master because he knows less. The difficulty we want him to explain is one he has recently met. The expert met it so long ago he has forgotten.

• The best way to get started on the path to sharing your work is to think about what you want to learn and make a commitment to learning it in front of others.

• Talk about the things you love. Your voice will follow.

• In this day and age, if your work isn’t online, it doesn’t exist. We all have the opportunity to use our voices, but so many of us are wasting it. If you want people to know about what you do and the things you care about, you have to share.

2. Think process, not product.

• Take people behind the scenes. Show them not only the final product but the process that led you to the product.

• Humans are interested in other humans and what other humans do.

• By putting things on the internet consistently, you can form a relationship with your customers.

• 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, which helps us move more of our product.

• Write your thoughts down in a notebook, or speak them into an audio recorder.

• Shoot video of you working. This isn’t about making art, it’s about simply keeping track of what’s going on around you.

  • Whether you share it or not, documenting and recording your process as you go along has its own rewards. And when you’re ready to share, you’ll have a surplus of material to choose from.

3. Share something small every day.

• 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. Building a substantial body of work takes a long time.

• Once a day, after you’ve done your day’s work, go back to your documentation and find one little piece of your process you can share.

• Social media sites are the perfect place to share daily updates. Don’t worry about being on every platform; pick and choose based on what you do and the people you’re trying to reach.

• Don’t show your lunch or your latte; show your work. Don’t worry about everything you post being perfect.

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

• Be open, and share imperfect and unfinished work that you want feedback on, but don’t share absolutely everything. There’s a big difference between sharing and oversharing.

• Don’t think of your website as a self-promotion machine, think of it as a self-invention machine. Fill your website with your work and your ideas and the stuff you care about.

• Don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work…and if you can build a good name, eventually that name will be its own currency.

4. Open up your cabinet of curiosities.

• Before we’re ready to take the leap of sharing our own work with the world, we can share our tastes in the work of others. Where do you get your inspiration? What sorts of things do you fill your head with? What do you read? What music do you listen to? What movies do you see? What do you collect? Who’s work do you admire?

  • Your influences are worth sharing because they clue people in to who you are and what you do.

• The most ordinary things, the most common and familiar, if we could see them in their true light, would turn out to be the grandest miracles.

• When you find things you genuinely enjoy, don’t let anyone else make you feel bad about it. Don’t feel guilty about the pleasure you take in the things you enjoy.

• If you share the work of others, it’s your duty to make sure that the creators of that work get the proper credit.

  • Attribution is about putting little museum labels next to the stuff you share. Online, this can be done by putting a hyperlink to the website of the creator of the work.

5. Tell good stories.

• Stories are such a powerful driver of emotional value that their effect on any given object’s subjective value can actually be measured objectively.

• Stories can even matter more than the product itself.

• Human beings want to know where things came from, how they were made, and who made them.

• If you want to be more effective when sharing yourself and your work, you need to become a better storyteller. You need to know what a good story is and how to tell one.

• Everybody loves a good story, but good storytelling doesn’t come easy to everybody. It’s a skill that takes a lifetime to master. So study the great stories and then go find some of your own. Your stories will get better the more you tell them.

• In your bio, keep it short and sweet. Don’t get cute. Don’t brag. Just state the facts.

6. Teach what you know.

• The minute you learn something, turn around and teach it to others. Share your reading list. Point to helpful reference materials. Create some tutorials and post them online. Use pictures, words, and video.

7. Don’t turn into human spam.

• If you want fans, you have to be a fan first. If you’re only pointing to your own stuff online, you’re doing it wrong. You have to be a connector.

• Don’t worry about how many people follow you online and start worrying about the quality of people who follow you.

• Don’t talk to people you don’t want to talk to and don’t talk about stuff you don’t want to talk about.

• If you want followers, be someone worth following.

• If you want to be interesting, you have to be interested.

• Being good at things is the only thing that earns you clout or connections.

• Make stuff you love and talk about stuff you love and you’ll attract people who love that kind of stuff. It’s that simple.

• Meeting people online is awesome, but turning them into IRL friends is even better.

8. Learn to take a punch.

• When you put your work out into the world, you have to be ready for the good, the bad, and the ugly. The more people come across your work, the more criticism you’ll face. Here’s how to take punches:

  • Relax and breathe: Fear is often just the imagination taking a wrong turn. Bad criticism is not the end of the world.

  • Strengthen your neck: The more criticism you take, the more you realize it can’t hurt you.

  • Roll with the punches: You can’t control what sort of criticism you receive, but you can control how you react to it.

  • Keep your balance: You have to remember that your work is something you do, not who you are.

• The first step in evaluating feedback is sizing up who it came from. You want feedback from people who care about you and what you do. Be extra wary of feedback from anybody who falls outside of that circle.

• The worst troll is the one that lives in your head. It’s the voice that tells you you’re not good enough, that you suck, and that you’ll never amount to anything.

9. Sell out.

• Put a little virtual tip jar or a “donate now” button on your website. These links do well with a little bit of human copy, such as “Like this? Buy me a coffee.”

• Whether you ask for donations, crowdfund, or sell your products or services, asking for money in return for your work is a leap you want to take only when you feel confident that you’re putting work out into the world that you think is truly worth something.

• You’ll notice a pattern with technology—often the most boring and utilitarian technologies are the ones that stick around the longest. Email is decades and decades old, but it’s nowhere close to being dead. Keep a mailing list.

• You can run a multimillion-dollar business off a mailing list. The model is very simple: Give away great stuff on your site, collect emails, and then when you have something remarkable to share or sell, send an email.

• Put a little sign-up widget on every page of your website for your newsletter.

• Build your email list and treat it with respect. It will come in handy.

• Try new things. If an opportunity comes along that will allow you to do more of the kind of work you want to do, say Yes.

10. Stick around.

• Your last book isn’t going to write your next one for you. Whether you’ve just won big or lost big, you still have to face the question “What’s next?”

• Author Ernest Hemingway would stop in the middle of a sentence at the end of his day’s work so he knew where to start in the morning.

• Instead of taking a break in between projects, waiting for feedback, and worrying about what’s next, use the end of one project to light up the next one.