A phrase I discovered from Andy Matuschak: “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, after Michael Nielsen.
This does not come naturally to me — my instinct is to hide things until they are good enough to put on a CV/Resumé. Some (most?) of my work never reaches that point.
I need to remind myself that sharing something that is a work-in-progress or non-functional has utility in itself:
- Others can learn from it or advise on it
- A collaboration opportunity could arise.