A summary of a book describing the necessity to show everything you know, your knowldege, your art with others, since you are alive it's worthy, your identity should not be gone without any proof.
, A new way of operating:
- “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” If you just focus on getting really good,
Martin says, people will come to you.
- they’re consistently posting bits and pieces of their work, their ideas, and
what they’re learning online. Instead of wasting their time “networking,”
they’re taking advantage of the network.
- If Steal Like an Artist was a book about stealing influence from other
people, this book is about how to influence others by letting them steal
from you.
Find a Scenius:
- If you believe in the lone genius myth, creativity is an antisocial act,
performed by only a few great figures— mostly dead men with names like
Mozart, Einstein, or Picasso. The rest of us are left to stand around and
gawk in awe at their achievements.
- Scenius doesn’t take away from the achievements of those great
individuals; it just acknowledges that good work isn’t created in a vacuum,
and that creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a
mind connected to other minds.
- Being a valuable part of a scenius is not necessarily about how smart or
talented you are, but about what you have to contribute—the ideas you
share, the quality of the connections you make, and the conversations you
start.
- We can stop asking what others can do for us, and start asking what we can
do for others.
- Online, everyone—the artist and the curator, the master and the
apprentice, the expert and the amateur—has the ability to contribute
something.
, Be an Amateur:
“That’s all any of us are: amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything
else.” —Charlie Chaplin
- “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities,” said Zen monk
Shunryu Suzuki. “In the expert’s mind, there are few.”
Amateurs are not afraid to make mistakes or look ridiculous in public. They’re in love,
so they don’t hesitate to do work that others think of as silly or just plain stupid.
- When Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke was asked what he thought his
@ownow
greatest strength was, he answered, “That I don’t know what I’m doing.
- Find a scenius, pay attention to what others are sharing, and then start
taking note of what they’re not sharing. Be on the lookout for voids that
you can fill with your own efforts, no matter how bad they are at first.
Don’t worry, for now, about how you’ll make money or a career off it.
Forget about being an expert or a professional, and wear your amateurism
(your heart, your love) on your sleeve. Share what you love, and the people
who love the same things will find you.
You can’t find your Voice if you don’t use it:
- Talk about the things you love. Your voice will follow.
- Blogging became his primary way of communicating with the world. “On
the web, my real voice finds expression,” he wrote.
- Ebert was blogging because he had to blog—because it was a matter of
being heard, or not being heard. A matter of existing or not existing. It
sounds a little extreme, but in this day and age, if your work isn’t online, it
doesn’t exist. We all have the opportunity to use our voices, to have our
say, 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.
, @ownow
Read obituaries:
- When George Lucas was a teenager, he almost died in a car accident. He
decided “every day now is an extra day,
- The writer George Saunders: “I realized I was going to die,” he says. “And
when that gets into your mind . . . it utterly changed me . . . I thought, I’m
not going to sit here and wait for things to happen, I’m going to make them
happen, and if people think I’m an idiot I don’t care.”
- if you could walk around like that all the time, to really have that
awareness that it’s actually going to end. That’s the trick.”
- It’s for this reason that I read the obituaries every morning. Obituaries are
like near-death experiences for cowards. Reading them is a way for me to
think about death while also keeping it at arm’s length.
Obituaries aren’t really about death; they’re about life. “The sum of every
obituary is how heroic people are, and how noble,” writes artist Maira
Kalman.
- Try it: Start reading the obituaries every morning. Take inspiration from the
people who muddled through life before you—they all started out as
amateurs, and they got where they were going by making do with what
they were given, and having the guts to put themselves out there. Follow
their example.
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