BookYol

Concept

Open Node

An open node is Austin Kleon's image for a person in a network who both receives and passes things on: someone who listens, answers, shares other people's work and gives more than they ask, rather than broadcasting only their own announcements.

In Show Your Work! Kleon contrasts the open node with what he calls human spam: people who join a scene only to promote themselves, post their links everywhere, never comment on anyone else's work and treat followers as an audience to be harvested. A network is made of connections, and a node that only sends and never receives is soon tuned out. The open node does the opposite. It pays attention, answers questions, introduces people to one another, shares good work by others with credit, and treats the people who follow it as peers rather than fans. Kleon's advice comes down to this: if you want people to pay attention to your work, become someone worth paying attention to. Mark W. Schaefer adds a practical consequence in Known: relationships formed in public, through comments, answers and small acts of help, are often where private opportunities come from, such as a referral, an invitation to speak or a job offer. Being an open node does not mean answering everyone or giving away all your time. It means that, over a month, what you give your network clearly outweighs what you ask of it.

A real-life example

Deniz, a product manager at a logistics start-up in Samsun, used social media only to announce her own talks. She changed her routine to fifteen minutes each morning: answering two questions from junior product managers, sharing one good article by someone else with a line on why it was useful, and introducing two people who should meet. Over a year, three of the people she had helped recommended her for roles, and one of those recommendations led to her next job.

How to use it

  1. 1Before your next post about yourself, answer one question and share one piece of someone else's work with credit.
  2. 2Introduce two people in your network who would benefit from knowing each other, and tell them why.
  3. 3At the end of the month, compare what you gave your network with what you asked of it.