GoKawiilWork with the garage door up
One of my favorite ways that creative people communicate is by “working with their garage door up,” to riff on a passage from Robin Sloan (below). This is the opposite of the Twitter account which mostly posts announcements of finished work: it’s Screenshot Saturday; it’s giving a lecture about the problems you’re pondering in the shower; it’s thinking out loud about the ways in which your project doesn’t work at all. It’s so much of Twitch. I want to see the process. I want to see you trim the artichoke. I want to see you choose the color palette. Anti-marketing, after Michael Nielsen.
I love this kind of communication personally, but I suspect it also creates more invested, interesting followings over the long term. That effect’s probably related to Working on niche, personally-meaningful projects brings weirder, more serendipitous inbounds.
It’s also a way to avoid the problems described in Pitching out corrupts within. You’re not pitching. You’re just showing your work, day over day.
Maggie Appleton argues:
If you ever needed another reason to learn in public by digital gardening or podcasting or streaming or whathaveyou, add on that people will assume you're more competent than you are. This will get you invites to very cool exclusive events filled with high-achieving, interesting people, even though you have no right to be there. A+ side benefit.
This matches my experience.
References
The inspiration from Robin’s original newsletter:
☄️ Week 43, popular, wide-ranging, functional (link broken as of 2024-12-17)
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