How I approached Showing Your Work — Luke Swithenbank

All posts<br>Posted · 16 May 2026 · Sydney<br>How I approached Showing Your Work<br>How I used AI to actually apply a book to my life, and the public posture that fell out of it.<br>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/<br>Show Your Work - Index.md<br>01 - You Don’t Have to Be a Genius.md<br>02 - Think Process, Not Product.md<br>03 - Share Something Small Every Day.md<br>04 - Open Up Your Cabinet of Curiosities.md<br>05 - Tell Good Stories.md<br>06 - Teach What You Know.md<br>07 - Don’t Turn Into Human Spam.md<br>08 - Learn to Take a Punch.md<br>09 - Sell Out.md<br>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.<br>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”.<br>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...