Steal Like an Artist

Brian Johnson’s

PhilosophersNotes

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Steal Like an Artist

THE BIG IDEAS

10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

10 Things

BY AUSTIN KLEON · WORKMAN PUBLISHING COMPANY © 2012 · 160 PAGES

Nobody told you about creativity.

Start Copying

Even the Beatles were a cover band.

Be Boring

“All advice is autobiographical.

So you can be interesting.

Establish a Routine

It’s one of my theories that when people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past.

And stick to it.

Amassing a Body of Work Drop by drop.

This book is me talking to a previous version of myself.

Constraints

These are things I’ve learned over almost a decade of trying to figure out how to make art, but a funny thing happened when I started sharing them with others—I realized that they aren’t just for artists. They’re for everyone.

= Freedom.

Some Advice May be a vice.

These ideas apply to anyone who’s trying to inject some creativity into their life and their work. (That should describe all of us.) In other words: This book is for you. Whoever you are, whatever you make. Let’s get started.” ~ Austin Kleon from Steal Like an Artist This is a great little book. It’s super quick-reading, inspiring, and beautifully designed—guaranteed to fire you up and it’ll look good on your coffee table. You and your guests will enjoy flipping thru the fun little doodles throughout. “Art is theft.” ~ Pablo Picasso

The book is packed with little gems on the creative process that we can apply to both our work AND our lives. It reminds me of Steven Pressfield’s War of Art trilogy (see Notes on that + Do the Work + Turning Pro). (Get a copy of the book here.) The idea to “Steal Like an Artist” is, as per the sub-title, just 1 of “10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative.” Let’s take a quick look at the other 9 things and then a few of my favorites Big Ideas we can apply to our lives TODAY!

10 THINGS NOBODY TOLD YOU ABOUT BEING CREATIVE 1.

“STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST.

2. DON’T WAIT UNTIL YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE TO GET STARTED. 3. WRITE THE BOOK YOU WANT TO READ. 4. USE YOUR HANDS. 5. SIDE PROJECTS AND HOBBIES ARE IMPORTANT. 6. THE SECRET: DO GOOD WORK AND SHARE IT WITH PEOPLE.

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PhilosophersNotes | Steal Like an Artist

7. GEOGRAPHY IS NO LONGER OUR MASTER. “Ask anybody doing truly creative work, and they’ll tell you the truth: They don’t know where the good stuff comes from. They just show up to do their thing. Every day.” ~ Austin Kleon

8. BE NICE. (THE WORLD IS A SMALL TOWN.) 9. BE BORING. (IT’S THE ONLY WAY TO GET WORK DONE.) 10. CREATIVITY IS SUBTRACTION.” Those are the 10 things nobody taught us about how to be creative. They’re also the chapters of the book—each supported by a few Big Ideas and stories and awesome little drawings. Let’s take a peek at a few of my favorites!

START COPYING (EVEN THE BEATLES STARTED AS A COVER BAND!) “Nobody is born with a style or voice. We don’t come out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying. We’re talking about practice here, not plagiarism—plagiarism is trying to pass someone else’s work off as your own. Copying is about reverse-engineering. It’s like a mechanic taking apart a car to see how it works. We learn to write by copying down the alphabet. Musicians learn to play by practicing scales. Painters learn to paint by reproducing masterpieces. Remember: Even the Beatles started as a cover band.” That’s such a great image: The Beatles (!!!) as a cover band. The Beatles?! Yep. Cover band. Here’s how Twyla Tharp addresses the subject of copying in her classic The Creative Habit (see Notes): “If there’s a lesson here it’s: get busy copying. That’s not a popular notion today, not when we are all instructed to find our own way, admonished to be original and find our own voice at all costs! But it’s sound advice. Traveling the paths of greatness, even in someone else’s footprints, is a vital means to acquiring skill.” Kobe Bryant loved to copy all the best moves from the greatest who came before him. Hunter S. Thompson used an old-school typewriter to type out, word-for-word (!), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms just so he could experience the feeling of typing a masterpiece. (Wow.) As I’ve said before, that’s essentially what I’m doing with these Notes. This is PhilosophersNote #296. Current plan: Get to 1,000 in the next 5.5 years. I’ll be putting in another 10,000 hours swimming in the wisdom of some of the world’s best teachers and writers, typing out a handful of their best thoughts and challenging myself to distill their wisdom into the core, most practical components. In the process, I’m developing my own style and getting more and more comfortable with expressing myself my way as I grab cool little aspects of every author’s style and wisdom. Back to you: Who and what do you love? Start copying them. Get in the head of the masters you admire as you cultivate your own style!!!

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PhilosophersNotes | Steal Like an Artist

“If there is a secret formula for becoming known, I would give it to you. But there’s only one not-so-secret formula that I know: Do good work and share it with people.” ~ Austin Kleon

BE BORING IF YOU WANT TO BE INTERESTING “I’m a boring guy with a nine-to-five job who lives in a quiet neighborhood with his wife and his dog. That whole romantic image of the creative genius doing drugs and running around and sleeping with everyone is played out. It’s for the superhuman and the people who want to die young. The thing is: It takes a lot of energy to be creative. You don’t have that energy if you waste it on other stuff.” Want to be brilliant creatively? Consider being otherwise rather boring. Save your best energy for the stuff that matters. The last Note I worked on was The Great Work of Your Life by Stephen Cope (see Notes). He applies the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita (see those Notes as well) to our modern lives. His book is all about dharma—our sacred duty to actualize our potential and do the work we’re here to do. One of his Big Ideas is the fact that the great people we admire created the right conditions for their genius to flourish. He tells us: “Having first named and claimed our dharma, we next begin to systematically organize all of our life’s energies around our calling.” Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, talks about the great comfort he finds in routine. Here’s how he puts it in How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big (see Notes): “Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice, tells us that people become unhappy if they have too many options in life. The problem with options is that choosing any path can leave you plagued with self-doubt. You quite rationally think that one of the paths not chosen might have worked out better. That can eat you. Choosing among attractive alternatives can also be exhausting. You want to feel as if you researched and considered all of your options. That’s why I find great comfort in routine. If you ask me today where I will be at 6:20 A.M. on a Saturday morning in the year 2017, I’ll tell you I will be at my desk finishing the artwork on some comics I drew earlier in the week. That’s what I was doing last Saturday at that time and what I plan to do this Saturday as well. I can’t recall the last time I woke up and looked at my options for what to do first. It’s always the same, at least for the first few hours of my day.” Plus: “I never waste a brain cell in the morning trying to figure out what to do when. Compare that with some people you know who spend two hours planning and deciding for every task that takes one hour to complete. I’m happier than those people.” How about YOU? How can you make your life more boring so it becomes more interesting? :) Seriously. How can you? I shall hereby make my life more boring by removing this: __________________________ _________________________________________________________________. And more interesting by adding this: ________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________. (Awesome.) Here’s a little more on that:

PhilosophersNotes | Steal Like an Artist

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ESTABLISH A ROUTINE!!! “Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.” ~ Gustave Flaubert

“The worst thing a day job does is take time away from you, but it makes up for that by giving you a daily routine in which you can schedule a regular time for your creative pursuits. Establishing and keeping a routine can be even more important than having a lot of time. Inertia is the death of creativity. You have to stay in the groove. When you get out of the groove, you start to dread the work, because you know it’s going to suck for a while—it’s going to suck until you get back into the flow.” Note: Austin had a 9 to 5 full-time day job while he was getting going in his creative career. He published a couple books and did a ton of work while he worked 40-hours a week with a “normal” job.