Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you.
Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon
There’s a healthier way of thinking about creativity that the musician Brian Eno refers to as “scenius.” Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals—artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers—who make up an “ecology of talent.” If you look back closely at history, many of the people who we think of as lone geniuses were actually part of “a whole scene of people who were supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, copying from each other, stealing ideas, and contributing ideas.” Scenius doesn’t take away from the achievements of those great individuals; it just acknowledges that good work isn’t created in a vacuum, and that creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds.
What I love about the idea of scenius is that it makes room in the story of creativity for the rest of us: the people who don’t consider ourselves geniuses. Being a valuable part of a scenius is not necessarily about how smart or talented you are, but about what you have to contribute—the ideas you share, the quality of the connections you make, and the conversations you start. If we forget about genius and think more about how we can nurture and contribute to a scenius, we can adjust our own expectations and the expectations of the worlds we want to accept us. We can stop asking what others can do for us, and start asking what we can do for others.
Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon
Show your work and your process. Showing your work creates serendipity and creates a scene.
created serendipity: the more connected you are, the more ideas seem to find you, not the other way around.
3 Obvious Ways Twitter Promotes Literacy – The Principal of Change
“Put yourself, and your work, out there every day, and you’ll start meeting some amazing people.”
Bobby Solomon
If you want fans, you have to be a fan first. If you want to be accepted by a community, you have to first be a good citizen of that community. If you’re only pointing to your own stuff online, you’re doing it wrong. You have to be a connector. The writer Blake Butler calls this being an open node. If you want to get, you have to give. If you want to be noticed, you have to notice. Shut up and listen once in a while. Be thoughtful. Be considerate. Don’t turn into human spam. Be an open node.
Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon
The best way to get started on the path to sharing your work is to think about what you want to learn, and make a commitment to learning it in front of others.
Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon
StimPunks has a great, up-to-date glossary that reflects the breadth and richness of this global neurodivergent community. It captures a reflection of the autistic, neurodivergent and disabled culture and language used within these communities. It is a beautiful display of acceptance, belonging and connecting (NATP). An example of this is their page Five Neurodivergent Love Locutions (Stimpunks, 2022), where they expanded on Myth’s (@neurowonderful) original Twitter/ X post:
“The five neurodivergent love languages: info-dumping, parallel play, support swapping, Please Crush My Soul Back Into My Body, and “I found this cool rock/button/leaf/etc and thought you would like it” (Myth, 2021).
These examples show the different ways many autistic people create a sense of belonging by sharing stories and developing friendships online, as these spaces are often not available or accessible elsewhere. It is through these online spaces that I have grown to feel more accepted and continue to un-learn and re-learn more authentic ways of being with the support of other neurodivergent people who ‘get it’.
Autistic Community: Connections & Becoming
“Carving out a space for yourself online, somewhere where you can express yourself and share your work, is still one of the best possible investments you can make with your time.”
Andy Baio
Further reading,
