I just finished, Show your Work, by Austin Kleon. It’s his second book on becoming an artist. He opens the book by saying: If Steal Like an Artist was a book about stealing influence from other people, this book is about how to influence others by letting them steal from you. This is the interaction that I’m now focused on. I want to steal from others and I want others to steal from me. Here I’ll steal from him by posting a blog series of my favorite highlights from the book.

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“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.” Austin calls this ecology of talent a scenius.

Although I didn’t know it, my first novel included a scenius. Here’s what I had written in the book: Sometime in the future, human civilization develops a supercomputer that they name Brian. Brian handles every white-collar job. Anything that can be done with rational thinking he handles. Suddenly mankind has all the time in the world to think. And there’s a new idea revolution. From the collective human thought, a second supercomputer manifests which they name the Brain.

What I got wrong in this book was how these new ideas would appear. They don’t appear because mankind has more time to think which causes more strikes of lighting, like I thought and wrote. Instead new ideas appear because mankind has more time to share their thoughts, and in this act of sharing, new ideas form. It’s because of the scenius.

What is brilliant is we already have a “Brain”. It’s called twitter and blogs and online communities. You just need to participate with them.