Work with the garage door up

One of my favorite ways that creative people communicate is by “working with their garage door up,” to riff on a passage from Robin Sloan (below). This is the opposite of the Twitter account which mostly posts announcements of finished work: it’s Screenshot Saturday; it’s giving a lecture about the problems you’re pondering in the shower; it’s thinking out loud about the ways in which your project doesn’t work at all. It’s so much of Twitch. I want to see the process. I want to see you trim the artichoke. I want to see you choose the color palette. Anti-marketing.

I love this kind of communication personally, but I suspect it also creates more invested, interesting followings over the long term. That effect’s probably related to Working on niche, personally-meaningful projects brings weirder, more serendipitous inbounds. It’s also a way to avoid the problems described in Pitching out corrupts within.

Retrieved from: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes?stackedNotes=z21cgR9K3UcQ5a7yPsj2RUim3oM2TzdBByZu

This is an interesting way to learn & educate, kinda like Learning in public

On [2023-03-31]] I open sourced a bunch of my [Obsidian knowledge base into a GH repo. Guess we’re really working with the garage door up now, lol