Why you should show your work!
Back in high-school, we’ve all had that phase of derision in response to frequent reprimands issued by our teachers to scrupulously demonstrate the steps leading to a solution, especially while working out questions in an examination. “It promotes readability and calls attention to your intuition!”, they said. I vividly remember our Mathematics teacher bellowing at a classroom full of iffy students, re-iterating the importance of this so-called ‘step-wise’ approach to presenting our solutions. Having followed that advice to a tee, as a student with a quid-pro-quo attitude towards getting a better grade, I have only come to appreciate the bareboned importance and universality of this piece of advice, rather recently.
The intent of opening with this classroom anecdote in hindsight is to impress upon you, the ubiquity of this ability to demonstrate your work and how it fits so unassumingly, in the larger scheme of things. While the idea of enhancing readability might be subjective, the ability to ‘intuitively’ demonstrate your work can be (or rather should be) cultivated. After all, this kind of self-promotion is a qualified art… But is it really? Let us find out!
Be so good that they cannot ignore you.
While completely agreeing with it, I find this phrase to be quite trite, to the point of being bland rather than motivating. Furthermore, it makes the whole deal about self-promotion, sound elusive like an unattainable, asymptotic goal. However, the banality of this phrase is given an interesting spin by Austin Kleon in his book, ‘Show your work’; Yes, you got me... I need to come up with more original titles.
Climbing onto our agreement bandwagon, Austin elaborates,
“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.”
This quote made me epiphanize: all this while, taking inspiration (or downright copying) from the stack-overflows of this world, I became an audience to someone else who had shown his work, shared his ideas with the world! In taking the time and effort to catalogue their work, some would have wanted to share their achievements, bask in that glory, while others simply felt their work might be beneficial to others. Notwithstanding their motivations, it is important that they felt the need to share, and now in a way, I was collaborating with them. Wait! this sounds familiar… Is it possible that those people I was taking inspiration from (or copying), decided to share their work in a similar moment? Snapping out of the epiphany, I thought, “What if I just (simply) shared what I have done with the piece of work that I borrowed in the first place?” With due credit and an intention to build upon someone else’s work, it definitely makes sense, right?
TL;DR All I have to do is, get the hang of showing my work. Make it into a habit.
If you’ve stayed with me, stay a bit more, I insist!
Having started on this path, believe you me, the importance of self-promotion is multi-faceted. Not only does it allow you to gain a worthwhile audience that shares similar interests and can be leveraged for networking, feedback or patronage but I’ve often realised that being able to succinctly describe your work, tends to drastically improve your own grasp and understanding of the underlying concept. The point at which you are able to cultivate the intuition, is when you’ve completely understood the idea that you are trying to impress upon your audience. (Isn’t it what I am doing right now? You tell me!).
Key takeaway: It doesn’t matter if you’re an elite professional or an enthusiastic amateur, all you need to do is to believe in the story that you wish to tell and rest of the pieces fall into place, naturally.
The thing is, self-promotion means different things to each one of us and introspectively, might evoke a contrasting set of feelings. Exemplifying my own idea of self-promotion as an academic and a soon-to-be-professional in the field of data science, I feel thrilled to think if my next boss doesn’t have to read my resume because he is familiar with my work which I’ve simply been sharing, putting it out as blogs, demos, webpages and the like; basically, consistently showing my work.
Another key takeaway: You need to discover what self-promotion means to you. Have your own moment of epiphany!
Do you know what’s the best part? We are blessed with many great personalities who are in already in the process sharing. You can find a template to work with, in almost any given field. In this day and age, it easier to share your work than ever before. The idea could be as simple as organising your work-space in a way that allows you to share bits and pieces of your work without needing to put in too much of an editing effort. It could be an online blog, an answer to a question on some forum, an addition to your portfolio, basically, any medium that lets you share (pun intended). Remember, You are the content and you deserve to be the Star of the Show.
So get out there and show your work! For motivational purposes, I am paraphrasing Austin Kleon here,
People cannot hear you if you don’t shout loud enough. Find Your Voice by Showing Your Work!
Amongst the people who haven’t (yet) built sharing into their routine, I believe there are two kinds: Many of us haven’t yet come to appreciate the beauty or haven’t reaped the rewards of sharing our content while there are certain others that live on a one-way street and believe in maintaining the utmost secrecy of their work. Considering these stark differences in modus operandi, I say, to each his own! But we must remember that good work is never created in a vacuum and that creative achievements most generally occur in collaboration.
I discovered my motivation to inculcate this habit of showing my work. Inspired and egged on by Austin’s book, I have been working on self-promotion projects of my own over the summer — a side project I took up during this pandemic which has helped me immensely. Have a look at a website I’ve hosted using GitHub pages: https://anweshcr7.github.io/ Suggestions and/or feedback is most welcome.
Or if you like to have a template of what I call, ‘A data scientist’s ‘step-wise’ approach to presenting his solutions’, have a look at my post where I list some steps for self-promotion that I’ve been following myself! (Coming Soon)
