work in public

When you were in school doing maths, it wasn’t enough to just write the answer. You had to show your work.

How did you get where you were going? The answer wasn’t the point. The journey was the destination.

With writing it’s perhaps even more the point. How you get there is often more important than where you get. You definitely learn more in the middle than you do at the end.

The idea of properly working in public makes me simultaneously excited and terrified. I love the thought of opening up my thinking and musings and having them augmented by a hive mind of creative collaborators. Zadie Smith’s Fail Better talks about how a writer needs good readers and I believe her. A great reader will take your work somewhere more interesting than you could.

WIP is something I’m working up to. Here’s a few notes on how it looks from myself and others.

from the newsletter

A couple of years ago, I wandered down to Wapping Wharf in Bristol and dropped into one of their container shops. Inside was a genial young man who was passionate about sustainable clothing. Then yesterday and to my surprise, an Instagram advert showed me something I'd like to see when it served up Yes Friends, a company aiming to provide sustainable fast fashion at low prices, and lo and behold who's behind it but that same young man!

More and more brands are taking the work in public approach, publishing their ethos, costs, supply chain information and whimsical tales of office high jinks. Sure this is partly a ruthless effort to win their customer's trust and prove themselves 'better' than everyone else but if the end result are good products where everyone is properly paid, isn't that ok?

For me, it makes me think about how I could do the same with a book project. If you could follow along from inception, watch recordings or even be present during interviews and writing sessions, pitch in on a communal doc with suggestions and then see behind the scenes of the production process, wouldn't that be cool?

Not too long ago, CNN Business ran a story with a headline from the Executive Director for the UN World Food Programme David Beasley, saying that 2% of Elon Musk's wealth could 'solve world hunger'.

Not one to take things lying down, Musk tweeted that if they could 'describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it' but that 'it must be open source accounting, so the public sees precisely how the money is spent'.

Beasley described the headline as 'not accurate' and slightly danced around the topic, asking for private conversations while Musk reiterated 'please publish your current & proposed spending in detail so people can see exactly where money goes. Sunlight is a wonderful thing.' Beasley has spent 4 days arriving at a point where there is a public facing proposal you can find on the thread.

This is perhaps the ultimate expression of the 'work in public' trend, addressing one of our largest problems. While you might think Musk could stand to give away $6 billion and that he should be paying more in taxes, you only have to look at the extraordinary amount of money wasted in the UK’s test and trace debacle to can understand how the grandest initiatives could benefit from transparency rather than opacity.

I've previously mentioned Twitter founder Jack Dorsey's open book foundation for Covid-19 relief and creating ways for the world's wealthiest to do good in this manner should be a no-brainer. All it requires is a bit of honesty.

from the last of us

In 2015, a YouTuber named Grant Voegtle crafted a roughly five-hour tribute to his favorite video game, 2013’s The Last of Us. He turned off the on-screen statistics, moved the camera to capture scenes from artistic angles, avoided combat to focus on the story and played sequences over and over until he had footage he was happy with.

The result was a ‘cinematic playthrough’ of The Last of Us, aimed at sharing the game’s story with ‘people who have never played The Last of Us before and perhaps even people who aren’t gamers.’

The result for Voegtle was hundreds of thousands of views, praise from the press and from the creative director of the game Neil Druckmann. Voegtle was later hired to work on the sequel and is credited as a video editor.

from the Trapital newsletter

Kanye’s Hawai’i recording sessions for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy weren’t cheap. Hawai’i is expensive AF. But the end product is widely considered the greatest album of the 2010s, and the footage from those Hawai’i sessions likely helped Kanye sell a documentary to Netflix for $30 million.

Music is a loss leader for many superstar artists but Kanye is on another level.

Building in public. Over the weekend, Jermaine Dupri defended Kanye’s delays with a reminder of how listening parties work. “you play the music and [gauge] what you got by the reactions, then prioritize by the best reaction and fix where the response was weak.”

Kanye shared songs he finished hours before the event. He had lyrics referencing Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo, who just won the NBA title last week Tuesday.

This isn’t his first time doing this. Three weeks after The Life of Pablo was released, he continued to tweak the album and add new tracks. He turned his album into a SaaS product. I still think about his tweet “Ima fix wolves” tweet whenever I hear the song.

He builds in public, like a writer who tests out ideas for a future article in a Twitter post, or an indie artist who invites Twitch subscribers to a private livestream. The only difference is that Kanye builds in public at a much larger scale. He rents out the biggest venue possible in hip-hop’s most influential city. That’s the Kanye West experience.

from an interview with Jack Butcher of Visualize Value

I think it's the dream for many creative people to not have to work a nine to five, to have their own job and have their own income. But how practical is it? What percentage of people do you think work for themselves?

I think last year really made me think about this at a much greater level of depth, with people being forced to work online and build up a body of work in public, and leveraging personal relationships and office politics and things of that nature waned. You can rely on that just as much. Such an interesting question.

I think the advantage I had was, I always worked in an environment where you produce things that you could point to as proof of what you can do. So I think people who work in fields like that have much more of a shot at getting traction early. So if you can design something, if you can make things, if you can write things, if you can code and build things, it's very easy for you to put work out into whatever digital environment you operate in. And people can look at that and be like, “I want that, help me build that.”

from Show Your Work by Austin Kleon

2. Think process, not product.

“A lot of people are so used to just seeing the outcome of work. They never see the side of the work you go through to produce the outcome.”—Michael Jackson

Traditionally, we’ve been trained to regard the creative process as something that should be kept to ourselves. We’re supposed to toil in secrecy, keeping our ideas and our work under lock and key, waiting until we have a magnificent product to show before we try to connect with others.

But human beings are interested in other human beings and what other human beings do. By 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.

3. Share something small, every day.

“Put yourself, and your work, out there every day, and you’ll start meeting some amazing people.”—Bobby Solomon

Once a day, after you’ve done your day’s work, find one little piece of your process that you can share. Where you are in your process will determine what that piece is. 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.

Don’t say you don’t have enough time. We’re all busy, but we all get 24 hours a day. People often ask me, “How do you find the time?” And I answer, “I look for it.” You might have to miss an episode of your favorite TV show, you might have to miss an hour of sleep, but you can find the time if you look for it.

4. Open up your cabinet of curiosities.

“Do what you do best and link to the rest.”—Jeff Jarvis

If you’re not ready to take the leap of sharing your own work with the world, you can share your 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? 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? What’s inside your scrapbook? What do you pin to the corkboard above your desk? What do you stick on your refrigerator? Who’s done work that you admire? Who do you steal ideas from? Do you have any heroes? Who do you follow online? Who are the practitioners you look up to in your field?

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