“If you’re in the very early stages, share your influences and what’s inspiring you. If you’re in the middle of executing a project, write about your methods or share works in progress. If you’ve just completed a project, show the final product, share scraps from the cutting-room floor, or write about what you learned. If you have lots of projects out into the world, you can report on how they’re doing. you can tell stories about how people are interacting with your work.”
“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. Take people step-by-step through part of your process. As blogger Kathy Sierra says, “Make people better at something they want to be better at.”
“Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you.”
“When you put your work out into the world, you have to be ready for the good, the bad, and the ugly.”
“You can’t control what sort of criticism you receive, but you can control how you react to it. Sometimes when people hate something about your work, it’s fun to push that element even further. To make something they’d hate even more. Having your work hated by certain people is a badge of honor.”
“The cat sat on a mat’ is not a story. ‘The cat sat on the dog’s mat’ is a story.”
- John le Carré
“The designer Stefan Sagmeister swears by the power of the sabbatical -every seven years, he shuts down his studio and takes a year off. His thinking is that we dedicate the first 25 years or SO of our lives to learning, the next 40 to work, and the last 15 to retirement, so why not take 5 years off retirement and use them to break up the work years?”
“Where do you get your inspiration? What sorts of things do you fill your head with? What do you read? Do you subscribe to anything? What sites do you visit on the Internet? What music do you listen to? What movies do you see? Do you look at art? What do you collect? 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.”
“But human beings are interested in other human beings and what other human beings do. “People really do want to see how the sausage gets made.”
