How I approached Showing Your Work

How I used AI to actually apply a book to my life, and the public posture that fell out of it.

I read Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work! on a recommendation from the Instagram user lostandlucky. The whole book is one idea: if you want your work to be findable, you have to put it out there. Document what you’re doing daily. Post things on social media and your own blog.

Reading the book is half the battle. Actually actioning it is the harder part.

For context, a while back I had run an AI prompt on Naval Ravikant’s ideas about how to build wealth. It helped me realise that I knew how to code, but since I didn’t have any startup ideas worth pursuing yet, I should go after “media” wealth. Show Your Work! is a way to start to do this. You build wealth slowly by putting your work out there. By focusing on your work, and building sharing into your routine, you can waste less time on “networking”, and gain an audience while doing so. Sharing builds attention, which leads to reputation and trust which allows for distribution. Having good distribution makes everything else more valuable. You’re code is more visible, you find it easier to fundraise as a founder, it’s easier to gain customers, and you also find it easier to recruit people to your cause. Maybe all of this will lead to me building something in the future?

This made it clear that I should go after it. Now I just needed to action it.

Using AI to turn the book into action

Step one: go over the books ideas and think about how I could apply them.

I downloaded the epub and pointed Claude at it.

I read the book “Show Your Work” by Austin Kleon. I’d like to implement some of it in my life. I’d like to capture the main ideas of the book here so I can go through each one and just think on it a little and how I could apply it to myself. The book is here: …

Claude suggested an index note plus one note per chapter. Each chapter note got the core idea, key points, quotes, and a “Reflect & apply” section for me to fill in.

Step two: fill the Reflect & apply sections in myself. This is where the real gold gets delivered. By using AI to prompt me, I’m giving it so much more context on me than it had previously.

Step three was the interesting one. I used Claude to help me pull the patterns out of those reflections:

I’ve been working through Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work! I made notes on each of the 10 chapters in my Obsidian vault, and under each chapter there’s a “Reflect & apply” section where I wrote my own answers about how the ideas might apply to my life.

The files live here:

../Projects/Show Your Work/ Show Your Work - Index.md 01 - You Don’t Have to Be a Genius.md 02 - Think Process, Not Product.md 03 - Share Something Small Every Day.md 04 - Open Up Your Cabinet of Curiosities.md 05 - Tell Good Stories.md 06 - Teach What You Know.md 07 - Don’t Turn Into Human Spam.md 08 - Learn to Take a Punch.md 09 - Sell Out.md 10 - Stick Around.md

What I want from you: help me build a concrete plan for how to start showing my work, based on the reflections I’ve written across all 10 chapters.

Before proposing anything:

Read all 10 chapter notes end-to-end. Pay particular attention to the “Reflect & apply” section of each — those answers are mine. Everything above that section is summarised from the book.

Look for patterns and themes that recur across multiple chapters’ reflections. Cross-chapter signals are stronger than any single answer.

Ask me clarifying questions where my reflections are vague, contradictory, or where the right action depends on context you don’t have. Don’t fill gaps with guesses.

What I’m NOT looking for:

A summary of the book (I have that already).

Per-chapter action lists. If multiple chapters point at the same thing, collapse them into one action.

A 6-month roadmap with 30 items. I want a small number of concrete near-term moves I could actually start this month.

Output I want:

A short synthesis (3–5 themes) of what my reflections collectively point at.

Inside each theme, 1–3 concrete actions — specific enough that I know what to do this week or this month.

Anything in my reflections that contradicts itself or seems to be avoiding something — call it out, don’t paper over it.

I wanted Claude to help me figure out some concrete actions to take based on my reflections. If there were any patterns I wasn’t seeing, I was using AI to help me find them.

What Claude told me

The six patterns claude came back with were:

My public identity is unresolved — the single most recurring signal. Claude mentioned that I’m not scared to share, but I also worried I’ll share the wrong thing and lose clients
I have a mountain of latent material I’m calling “obvious”. I have 20+ possible post ideas sitting in my obsidian vault and I’m not doing anything with it
Writing is the natural medium and I already have the engine. I mentioned that words are the most mineable by AI and even video creators start with writing before creating a video
I own the infrastructure but it’s idle. I have a website but it was a 1 pager and I also have a company website
Knuckleballers exist offline; online relationships barely exist. For context here, Knuckleballers are a type of pitcher that don’t keep trade secrets. They trade between each other to keep the pitch going. Your knuckleballers are people like that in your life
The privacy line is half-drawn. I don’t know what I should be keeping private and what should be shared. I’m still figuring that out.

Claude then started asking who I was writing for. I said: “I just want to write what I’m interested in, but please be skeptical.”

Claude pushed back. It said I didn’t need a target audience. But “audience avoidant” plus “zero intentionality” equals “zero compounding”. What I needed was a posture.

A niche is something like “I write about Kubernetes operators.” It’s constraining and premature. A posture is the stance and vantage point you write from. It’s wide enough to write interesting things while still being narrow enough that a reader knows what they’re subscribing to. For reference, this is something Claude came up with:

“Posture” was a body-language metaphor that captured what I meant: where you stand, how you hold yourself, stable orientation. It worked in the moment, so I kept using it. The 5 components (vantage, tone, spine, foil, promise) are also my synthesis — not a published framework. Each piece draws on things writers/coaches commonly discuss; the bundle is something I assembled for the conversation.

Posture

A posture is five things: vantage, tone, spine, foil, promise.

I didn’t get it at first, so I asked Claude to describe the postures of some writers I already like reading. Here’s Austin Kleon’s:

Posture in one line: A working writer/artist sharing what he steals from other creative people — generously, in plain language, on a long timescale.

Vantage point: a working creative who reads voraciously and pays attention. Not an expert, not a guru — a student and curator. The whole “Steal Like an Artist” frame is “I’m just remixing what worked for others.” That stance gives him permission to write about anyone and anything without claiming authority.

Tone: warm, plainspoken, anti-business-speak, never preachy. Often illustrated. Often short.

Spine: creative process, attention, reading, daily practice, the dignity of small consistent work. Wide enough to include his kids, his desk, his garden, his books — narrow enough that everything obviously belongs.

Foil (mild): the lone-genius myth, the self-promotion industry, hustle culture. He’s against something even though it doesn’t dominate his voice. Implicit promise to the reader: “Every Friday I’ll send you 10 things worth paying attention to, distilled. Forever.” The newsletter has run weekly for ~15 years. That cadence is the brand.

Channels: blog (austinkleon.com), Friday newsletter, books that read like commonplace books. He owns his turf — same .com forever.

That made it click. Then we went one by one.

Vantage

what life experience earns you the right to write this? (Kleon: working creative who reads.)

An engineer-leader who keeps inheriting situations where the technical direction has collapsed.

Hands-on enough to still build (SRE → platform → Rust on Kubernetes) and people-enough to lead staff engineers and run teams (Eng Manager → Head of Engineering → Fractional CTO). Has twice watched non-technical CEOs grind down technically-strong teams from the inside. Australian tech scene specifically — Freelancer, Expert360, Macquarie, Dovetail, Slate. Writes from the seam between “what’s the right technical call” and “how do you get humans to actually make it” — because in every job since FL0, that’s been the actual job.

Tone

the feel a reader gets in 30 seconds. (Kleon: warm/plain.)

Plainspoken and declarative. Short sentences. Subject-verb-object. No marketing language. No hedging.

Matter-of-fact about painful things. Heavy events land in parentheses or single sentences. No dwelling, no melodrama.

Comfortable swearing naturally. Not stylized — just how I talk (“fuck up”).

Confident self-assessment without bravado. Will state strengths flatly without softening or boasting.

Causal narrator, not emotional one. Explains why things happened more than how they felt.

Not writerly. No metaphors, no scene-setting, no flourishes. Reports.

Dryly understated in places.

Spine

the subject matter range, wide enough for variety, narrow enough to recognize.

I had a raw list of 26 topics I might write about: Platform Engineering, SRE, Software Engineering, Amateur Pottery, Books I Read, Music Production, Using AI, Learning to Cook, Learning to Surf, Creating Habits, Creating Routines, Relationship Advice, Stoicism, Meditation, Productivity, Tech Reviews, Drones, Photography, Being Creative, Personal Accounting, How to Learn, How to Execute, How to Choose Boardgames, How to Teach Boardgames, Living Alcohol Free, Making Coffee, Interior Decorating.

Claude’s observation: “it isn’t 26 topics. It’s one topic with 26 surfaces. Half the list is explicitly framed as learning something. The professional cluster (Platform/SRE/SWE/AI) is the same shape — currently figuring out how to ship well with AI, how to lead under pressure.”

The line I’d written about myself earlier in the process: “I do a lot of stuff. I like trying new things all the time. Momentum is the hardest thing to keep.” That’s not a complication to the spine. It is the spine.

Process. How I’m figuring out how to actually do things well — at work and outside it.

Foil

what you’re standing against. Optional, but powerful when present. Kleon’s is quiet

Productivity isn’t the goal. Being happy is. Productivity doesn’t always lead to happiness.

Promise

what consistent thing the reader gets if they subscribe. This is what makes audience compound.

Notes from an Australian engineering leader. Things I’m building, teams I’m leading, habits I’m creating, and hobbies I enjoy. I’ll try to ship weekly, and when I don’t I’ll let you know.

Action items

With the posture in place, the actions were obvious:

Resurrect lswith.io. Blog and an email newsletter.
Daily 10-minute Obsidian habit. Export my daily shutdown from Sunsama and write down possible posts from the day.
Four articles by the end of the month. One each Friday.
A do-not-publish list, so I know what I’m not going to write about.
Stay in touch with the knuckleballers: the people I respect and share trade secrets with. My community.

I now have started going through those action items and making it become a reality. This is the first post. Hope you enjoyed it.