Show-Up-Do-the-Work on Janusworx

Publish! Show Your Work! You Don’t Have Leonardo’s Genius or Luck

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 20:12:18 +0530

Leonardo da Vinci, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The only reason we know that both, an emperor as well as a slave, both practiced the same philosophy that inspires people even now in this day and age, is because the former’s personal notes and the latter’s words compiled by a student, have come down to us through the ages.

The only reason that Leonardo Da Vinci has such a legacy, is that the few pieces of his work that were created and displayed, have somehow, miraculously lasted the ravages of the past half century. But so much of his work was unpublished, stowed away in private journals, never to be seen for centuries. How much more would we have known, or learnt if only? If only.

Decades of stunning art, never released. No one knew the genius of Vivian Maier, when she was alive.

From John Maloof’s, Vivian Maier, Maloof Collection

Like David Kadavy writes,¹

Finishing what you start is overrated.
[…]
Contrast this with many other things Leonardo never finished. The observations that lie hidden in his notes would have advanced humanity by centuries in the fields of medicine, flight, geology, and more. These sketches and notes weren’t finished – but, most tragically, they weren’t published.
You don’t have to finish to have an impact. You do have to publish.

Honoré De Balzac had it right,

“For artists, the great problem to solve is how to get oneself noticed”

On which Austin Kleon expounds²

If you just focus on getting really good, Martin says, people will come to you. I happen to agree: You don’t really find an audience for your work; they find you. But it’s not enough to be good. In order to be found, you have to be findable. I think there’s an easy way of putting your work out there and making it discoverable while you’re focused on getting really good at what you do.

Imagine if your next boss didn’t have to read your résumé because he already reads your blog. Imagine being a student and getting your first gig based on a school project you posted online. Imagine losing your job but having a social network of people familiar with your work and ready to help you find a new one. Imagine turning a side project or a hobby into your profession because you had a following that could support you.

Or imagine something simpler and just as satisfying: spending the majority of your time, energy, and attention practicing a craft, learning a trade, or running a business, while also allowing for the possibility that your work might attract a group of people who share your interests.

All you have to do is, Show Your Work.

From Austin Kleon’s book, Show Your Work

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all emphases mine ↩︎
in his book Show Your Work ↩︎

100 Word Writing Habit

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 11 Feb 2024 18:42:43 +0530

I want to write better.
And the best way to do that, is to write more.
Thinking about which, immediately kills the urge to write, because I take really long to write anything.
And the actual writing, is very arduous to me.

So what to do?

I guess I need to just lower the bar.
Do less.
More consistently.

And then serendipitiously, as they say, when the student is ready, the master appears.
David Kadavy’s conducting a 100 Word Writing Habit Online Course, this month.

He seemed to be in the same rut as I am now.

I’m not a born writer. I hated writing as a kid.

But …

I’ve written three best-selling books, and I write an email newsletter every Monday, a 2,000-word article every other week, and a 5,000-word income report every month.

Well, that sort of consistency is exactly what I need.
David taught me how to setup and use a Zettelkasten. His short book, is the best resource I found on the topic.
And that is something I have been consistently building for a year and a half now.
Here’s hoping he inspires me to become a better writer too!

A few notes from his first lesson, that I am putting down here for me to remember; to not overthink stuff, to … just write!

It doesn’t matter what you write about. Just write 100 words.
It doesn’t matter if they’re any good. Just write 100 words.
It doesn’t matter if you repeat yourself in your writing. Just write 100 words.
If you miss a day, do it the next day. If you miss that day, do it the day after that.
You don’t have to publish the writing. (Feel free to share on Twitter, Instagram, or other social on the hashtag #100wordhabit, so your classmates can see.) What’s more important is you just write 100 words.

I Can’t Do This Yet … Updated

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 17 Apr 2021 14:33:15 +0530

Updated version of the post. I seem to have somehow, mangled the old one.
I’ll just blame it on the gremlins in the cloud.

I’ve been “soft” looking for a job, since the end of last year when I learnt the basics of Python.
(Want me to come work with you as a junior developer? Here’s my resume!)

And I’ve had rejection after rejection after rejection.
I apparently am good.
I have skills.
I could be an asset for companies.
But I am not “quite” what folks are looking for, not quite right for them.
I am not quite what it is, folks are looking for, to take chance on.
I am a square peg …

And while I understand this in my head, my heart does not get it at times.
And that’s when Seth, as usual comes to the rescue.
With a word, that I am increasingly using to mentally toughen myself and give me courage.

Yet …

From A Professional Stumbler …

Leo’s working hard to do something he’s never done before. He’s just turned one, and he doesn’t know how to walk (yet).

There are no really useful books or videos on how to walk. It’s something he has to figure out on his own. But instead of waiting on the couch until the day he’s ready to proudly strut across the room, he’s there, on the floor, every day, trying it out.

He’s already discovered a hundred ways that don’t work, and stumbled countless times.

But he persists.

I don’t know about you, but this is precisely the way I learned how to walk as well.

In fact, it’s the way I learned how to do just about everything important. By doing it.

From A Simple Missing Word …

“Yet”.

You can append it after any sentence related to your journey of achievement and contribution.

“I haven’t finished the project”
“I haven’t learned how to juggle”
“I haven’t made the sale”

YET.

And along the way, “Yet” turns “can’t” into “haven’t.”

Yet isn’t the result of brazen persistence. It’s what we earn with learning, insight and generosity.

From So Far / Not Yet …

What to do in the face of failure? What happens when you’ve done your best and it still doesn’t get the review, close the sale or win the race?

… The growth mindset, is to realize that while you did your best, it’s not your best forever, it’s just what you’ve done so far. And that while you haven’t created what you set out to create, the key word, the one you have to remind yourself of daily, is yet.

From You Have No Credibility (yet)

Your belief, even your proof, is insufficient for you to get the attention, the trust and the action you seek.
Attention is not yours to take whenever you need it. And trust is not something you can insist on.
The bad news is that you are not entitled to attention and trust. It is not allocated on the basis of some sort of clearly defined scale of worthiness.
The good news is that you can earn it. You can invest in the community, you can patiently lead and contribute and demonstrate that the attention you are asking be spent on you is worthwhile.

So yes, I might not be up to par, might not match up to what they look for, might not be skilled enough … yet.
I’ll get there, soon enough!

“You’re not that good”

And of course, Seth has to read my little blog and riff off my post :P
I kid. He doesn’t even know I exist. But talk about happy serendipity!
You’re not that good, spells my journey up above in beautiful detail.

The first is that when we begin, we’re not that good. This is a fact. The breakthrough for anyone on this journey is adding the word **“yet.” **

It doesn’t pay to pretend that we’ve figured it out before we have. It’s counterproductive to adopt a brittle attitude in the face of criticism. In fact, during this stage, “you’re not that good,” is precisely what we need to hear, because it might be followed with insight on how to get better.

The second is that once we start to build skills and offer something of value, some people are going to persist in believing that we’re not that good. Fine. They’ve told us something about themselves and what they want and need. This is a clue to offer our leadership and contribution to someone else, someone who gets what we’re doing and wants it. The smallest viable audience isn’t a compromise, it’s a path forward. Find the folks who are enrolled and open and eager. Serve them instead.
The danger is that when you hear rejection during this stage, you might come to believe that you’ve accomplished nothing, as opposed to realizing that you might simply be talking to the wrong people.

And the third comes full circle. Because it’s possible that in fact, we’re not that good yet, and there aren’t enough people who want what we’ve got. We’re simply not good enough for this part of the market. So we embrace that truth and begin at the beginning. We’re not good enough yet. We haven’t practiced enough, found enough empathy, understood the genre well enough and figured out how to contribute. Yet. At least for this audience.

And then we get better.

How do we protect our work? How do we get paid for it?

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 12 Jan 2019 10:29:40 +0530

How do we protect our work? How do we get paid for it?
(Or is that really the question we should be worried about when seeking to make our mark. And the importance of writing, of showing up, regularly.)

This is what I admire about Seth Godin. His unique ability to get to the heart of the question.

The question lies in the q & a after this really awesome episode at around the 22.45 mark. (The episode is a replay of this awesome talk. If you haven’t seen or heard it yet, do me (and yourself) a favour and do so.)

Hey Seth, it’s Ben from New York.
I was intrigued by the recent episode about copyright.
My question is … maybe more posing a paradox, because with copyright, there is this corporate ability for greed and control … at the same time for an individual producer or artist or maker of things, it does allow you survival.
And I do agree that the best way to change the culture and to share ideas is to make something you’ve made, widely available. At the same time the concept of copyright does allow you to say to somebody, “Hey, I made this! You’re giving it away for free!”
And in this digital age, where people expect to just click on something and have it, which is sort of like your bakery analogy, except people can now, because of the anonymity and the ease of the digital platforms, walk into a bakery, grab a loaf of bread and walk out, is how to allow ideas to spread in a wide and inexpensive or free way and still be able to make a living at it, without saying, here is a physical thing that you’re taking from me.
Please pay me for it.

And this is what I think, copyright allows an individual or an artist or an entrepreneur like myself to use as leverage so that our stuff like … you mentioned your audiobook being illegally uploaded to youtube … keeping that sort of thing from happening.

Anyway thanks so much for the book, the podcast, the blog. It’s been a great inspiration for me trying to find a way in this new age. Thanks.

Seth answers,

You’re getting at something powerful with this question, which is back to Tim O’Reilly’s comment that the enemy is not piracy. It’s obscurity.
That if you are a nascent artist, designer, writer, video producer, musician, does it pay to give your stuff away?
to give it away? give it away? give it away?
Hoping, that one day you’ll get paid for your work.
So the copyright laws are sort of secondary here, in the sense that, it is voluntary on your part, that as someone who is publishing your own work in a digital format, which means it does not cost you anything to give away one more copy, the question is, when does it end?
Does it mean that everything that is digital, will sooner or later be free?
Well, we’ve seen twenty or thirty years of this unfolding, and here’s what I think we found.
One, Ideas that spread, win.
If your idea reaches more people, you do better than if it doesn’t, and it turns out that ideas that are free spread further and faster, than ideas that arent.
So radio, it was so powerful on radio, that the record labels paid money, payola, bribes, to the radio stations to play the songs for free, because they understood, that being a hit, being popular, was the way for an artist to make money going forward.
The thing is, that doesn’t pay the bills.

So how is it that someone who creates digital items is ever going to get paid?
Well, let me give you a couple of ways this could happen.
The first one is, the souvenir edition. The souvenir, concrete, limited edition of the thing you make, so that the true fan, the superfan will happily and eagerly pay for it.
We keep seeing this thing happening. It’s not going away.
People want to pay for something, others can’t have.
They want to pay for something that gives them status.

Number two is the idea that we can sell the specific.
So we can go to people and say, “Yea, if you want the traditional version of this song, or this digital artifact, that’s free. It’s in the world because it’s popular, but, if you want it to be specific to you, if you want us to play it live for you, that, that’s gonna cost money.”
And we certainly see that in the world of consulting.
So that you can give away a 300 page or 200 page or 20 word BIG idea, just give it away constantly, but if someone wants your specific advice, that, that’s going to cost money.

And the third way, that I’m going to propose that we can charge for the work we do, is that it can be now. That if you want it now, if you want it live, if you want it first, that costs money.
People will wait in line, because again they get status, from going first.

So it’s not really the answer to your question. I’m not proposing that copyright go away, but I do think that individual creators have a huge unfair advantage over institutions that need to pay big bills.
And that advantage is that we can give ideas away.
A blog post a day.
A podcast a week.
We can give them away, because the digital environment makes that a powerful way to spread our ideas, but then we can sell the other thing to people who want to pay for it.

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