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Concept

Stick Around

Sticking around is Austin Kleon's principle that the people who become known in a field are usually the ones who kept going after others quit, making and sharing work through the slow early years and starting the next project as soon as one ends.

Kleon closes Show Your Work! with this idea because it is where most efforts fail. Sharing your work in public brings little visible return at first: posts with no replies, a newsletter that grows by a handful of readers, months in which nothing seems to happen. Many people read that silence as a verdict and stop, often just before the effort would have begun to compound. Kleon's advice is to treat a career as a long series of projects rather than a single bet. When one ends, start the next, so that there is never a gap in which momentum dies; when you feel stuck, step away for a while and then come back, rather than quit. Mark W. Schaefer makes a similar point in Known, where consistency over years is what turns an audience into an actionable one. Sticking around is not stubbornness about an approach that is failing. You can change the format, the platform or the emphasis as you learn; what stays is your commitment to the space and to showing up in it. The quiet early period is not proof that the work is wrong. It is the normal cost of building something that lasts.

A real-life example

Emre, an agricultural engineer in Adana, started a weekly podcast on irrigation technology for cotton and citrus growers. After eight months he had fewer than a hundred regular listeners and almost stopped. He kept going, switched the format to short interviews with farmers and went on publishing. In the second year a cooperative shared one episode with its members, his audience grew steadily, and a regional development agency invited him to run a series of field workshops.

How to use it

  1. 1Decide in advance how long you will keep going before you judge the results, for example a year of steady sharing.
  2. 2Keep a list of your next three projects or topics, so that finishing one never leaves a gap.
  3. 3When you feel like quitting, change one thing, such as the format or the frequency, instead of stopping.