Wisereads Vol. 90 — Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon, the ‘Happiest Country on Earth’, and more
Happy Mother's Day 🌸, everyone! Last week, we featured an excerpt of a personal Readwise favorite: Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection by John E. Sarno. This week, we're sharing a preview of Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon.
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Most highlighted Articles of the week
My Miserable Week in the ‘Happiest Country on Earth’
After the latest World Happiness Report ranked Finland #1 and the U.S. 24th, book critic and new mom Molly Young traveled to Finland—and found something quieter than exuberance: contentment. "The two concepts of happiness, affective and evaluative, can operate independent of each other. A woman in the midst of extruding a baby might suffer from labor pains (low affective happiness) but feel profoundly satisfied or purposeful (high evaluative happiness). The 'happiest country in the world' label seems to imprint on the American mind as a never-ending carousel of delights, but in Finland’s February chill, the reality is more modest."
21 observations from people watching
Live painting at weddings has given artist Shani not just a front-row seat to joy, but the time and space to observe it with an artist’s eye. A couple of her observations: "Polite has a mechanical quality to it, like carrying out all the right movements to replace batteries in a remote. Happy has a boundless quality," and "When I meet someone, I usually get a sense of whether they are generally happy, having a sad day, or generally sad, having a happy day. The emotional history of their life is often etched in the muscle tension in their face and their posture. "
I'd rather read the prompt
When Rice PhD student Clayton Ramsey grades assignments, he can spot a plug-and-chug LLM answer from a mile away—and he’s had enough. "The whole point of making creative work is to share one’s own experience - if there’s no experience to share, why bother? If it’s not worth writing, it’s not worth reading."
Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week
How Stanford Teaches AI-Powered Creativity in Just 13 Minutes
Underperformers treat AI like a tool. Top performers treat it like a teammate. Stanford professor of creativity and AI Jeremy Utley shares this insight and more in a recent EO interview on collaborating with AI: "People who treat AI like a teammate, coach it and give it feedback and importantly, get it to ask them questions. The fundamental orientation a lot of people take towards AI is I'm the question asker. AI is the answer giver. But if you think about AI like a teammate, you say, hey, what are ten questions I should ask about this? Or what do you need to know from me in order to get the best response?"
Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week
I turned ChatGPT into my personal assistant
Sentient co-founder Louis Gleeson cut down his workday by turning ChatGPT into a personal learning coach, with just a few sharp prompts. To accelerate skill-building: "Break down {complex skill or tool, e.g. ‘generative design in Figma’ or ‘prompt engineering’} into a 5-day crash course. Each day should have a goal, practice task, and 1-2 advanced tips for faster learning." To apply what you learn: "I just learned about {topic}. Help me integrate it by outlining: (1) what it changes about my current approach, (2) 3 small actions I can take this week, (3) 1 reflective question to track long-term impact."
Most highlighted PDF of the week
AI In The Enterprise
Indeed, Morgan Stanley, Klarna, and Lowe's are leading the way in enterprise AI adoption—boosting productivity, automating routine tasks, and powering new products. "AI deployment benefits from an open, experimental mindset, backed by rigorous evaluations, and safety guardrails. The companies seeing success aren't rushing to inject AI models into every workflow. They're aligning around high-return, low-effort use cases, learning as they iterate, then taking that learning into new areas."
Hand-picked book of the week
Show Your Work!
Austin Kleon agrees with comedian Steve Martin on one thing: to get noticed, you have to "Be so good they can’t ignore you." But that’s only the beginning. In Show Your Work!, Austin offers a practical guide to sharing your creativity and making yourself discoverable. A follow-up to his illustrated hit Steal Like an Artist, this book flips the script—teaching you how to influence others by letting them steal from you.
Step one: stop aiming for genius. Think like an amateur instead:
"Amateurs might lack formal training, but they’re all lifelong learners, and they make a point of learning in the open, so that others can learn from their failures and successes. Writer David Foster Wallace said that he thought good nonfiction was a chance to 'watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lives.' Amateurs fit the same bill: They’re just regular people who get obsessed by something and spend a ton of time thinking out loud about it."
We’re longtime fans of Austin's work and thrilled to share a preview of Show Your Work!. Through the end of May, grab the full ebook for just $1.99 wherever ebooks are sold in the US and Canada.
Handpicked RSS feed of the week
Techno Sapiens
Jacqueline Nesi wears many hats—mom, psychologist, Brown University professor, and author of the popular parenting Substack Techno Sapiens, where she explores raising kids in the digital age. From Screen time ends. Then comes the meltdown: "Turn off autoplay. Simple, but effective. Sometimes a 'stopping cue' (i.e., a video or episode ending) can signal to kids that screen time is over, and make it a bit easier to transition away."