Austin Kleon's book, Show Your Work! is a small and short book, but it has had an outsized impact on me. Discovering Austin's book seemed like the literal manifestation of the quote — when the student is ready, the teacher appears — often attributed to Buddhism.
I have always leaned towards the idea that one's work should speak for oneself. I never believed that talking about your work was as important as doing it. Reading Ayn Rand's Fountainhead early in my professional career didn't help. Though I found Howard Roark's character slightly far-fetched, he was the one I (like a million others) identified with. At some point, I came across Steve Martin's biography, and loved his call to action — Be So Good, They Can't Ignore You!
Howard Roark’s stoic defiance and Steve Martin’s call to ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you’ reinforced my belief: focus on the work, and the world will notice. But over time, I realized that wasn’t always true—especially as I stepped into entrepreneurship.
I needed to build my marketing and sales skills if I wanted my venture to succeed. And it brought me to an inherent paradox. All types of early stage success in a venture (traction, funding, team, etc.) seemed to increasingly be a function of one's personal brand. To build a successful venture, it seemed like I had to start with a successful me. I had done the work, but had shied away from talking about it.
Self-promotion made me uncomfortable — a tension I often discussed with friends and mentors, and likely even Googled. Our omnipresent online gods came to the rescue, and pointed me in the direction of Austin's work.
On page 41 of Show Your Work!, he wrote -
So, if you get one thing out of this book make it this: Go register a domain name. Buy www.[insert your name here].com.
I went ahead and registered www.surajsudhakar.com in March, 2022.
Austin, the teacher, shared many other wonderful ideas on how to build out a personal website to reflect your true self. It's taken me another three years to start doing something meaningful with my little corner of the internet. Change of any kind is hard, and when I catch myself regretting the delay, I remind myself of a piece of Chinese wisdom: The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. a