The benefits of showing your work
I always thought that sharing knowledge was a good idea, but I've always been scared of how people would react when I started to show them what I was working on. But recently I've read a book called "Show your work", and ever since, I've been feeling inspired, and I have decided to share some of my thoughts and what I have learned from it.
The book's main idea is to convince readers that by showing their work to other people, it will bring them many benefits. I'll try to summarize some of those while explaining how to achieve them with the book's suggestions.
Connections
Once you start to put yourself out there people will notice you, and eventually reach out to you. Suddenly you are introduced to a whole new network of individuals that share the same passion as you do. And these new connections can become amazing things such as work opportunities, new hobbies, friends and even knowledge itself.
Document your progress
And to create real connection with people, they must relate to you and also understand your work and interests. And although there are different ways to achieve that, a good strategy to show a personal interest while relating to someone is to choose a topic that you would like to learn and then commit yourself into sharing your progress while doing it.
You can choose the method you prefer, meaning that you can record videos, start journals or just jotting down thoughts on a notebook. Just document your process of learning bearing in mind that it could help someone else going through a similar journey.
It is good to acknowledge that you don't need to be an expert as long as you contribute to others. By acting like an amateur, and not caring about looking like a specialist, you are more likely to truly share your passion, exposing not only your success which people can mirror but also your struggle and failure which they can avoid. So act like an amateur, follow your passion, and keep contributing to your area of expertise.
The "lone genius" myth
When someone share an amazing work, we can think of them as this brilliant super talented individual who no one can ever compare themselves to. But the problem is that nobody is free of influence. No matter what type of work you perform, you will always have someone to learn from. It can either be in your own family or maybe a co-worker, but we are all influenced by other's work (we all mirror ourselves on other people's achievements).
And as you can already expect, with more people sharing their work, higher the chances of somebody coming up with the next big idea. As Isaac Newton once wrote in a letter, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants". Remember that by conveying knowledge you can be considered as one of those giants.
Résume
Let's say you start a blog just like this one, you keep documenting your learning process and decide to comment on this new method of work you've just learned. Now imagine that someone from your dream company start to search in Google for the same method and due to the magic of today's search engines, they end up in your blog post.
Congratulations you've just opened a door. I am not necessarily saying that you will get the job from a single blog post, but you have to agree that if you already know somebody else's work, the whole interviewing process gets easier.
Learning by teaching
By looking from a certain perspective, you are teaching others while sharing your work. There are a number of studies showing that just by pretending that you are teaching someone, you can in fact better retain what you've learned. So you are not only helping others to achieve their goals, but also improving yourself while doing it.
As we can see, there are some good benefits from sharing your work. I hope you find these tips on how to do it useful. Feel free to share your thoughts with me on my LinkedIn profile, and let me know if this article inspired you into starting a new journey.