Keep Going by Austin Kleon

Keep Going by Austin Kleon is noted as having been done because he needed to read it, a great reason to be sure, and the book subtitled 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad, with some ideas from it below:

1. Every day is Groundhog Day - You just have to control what you can, in the day that you're in. If you can establish a daily routine, all the better.

2. Build a bliss station - Disconnect yourself from the world for your own good. Airplane mode can be a way of life. Learn how to say no.

3. Forget the noun, do the verb - "Creative" is not a verb. Be willing to play in your creative work, it's ok to practice for practice's sake.

4. Make gifts - Let your work be your hobby, one of the easiest ways to hate something is to turn it into a job. If you put your work into the world, don't obsess on consumption numbers. Make stuff to give to people.

5. The ordinary + extra attention = the extraordinary - There's great things in the everyday world around us and great things we can do with them. Slow down and draw things out. Pay attention to what you pay attention to.

6. Slay the art monsters - Art is supposed to make our lives betters. This applies both to art we create and art we consume. If it's not beneficial, walk away.

7. You are allowed to change your mind - To change is to be alive. It's good to say "I don't know," and be kind. Think more of being like-hearted with others and less of being like-minded. Read old books, visit the past.

8. When in doubt, tidy up - Keep your tools tidy and your materials messy. Leave things better than you found them and do no harm. The writer David Sedaris picks up trash by the road, he estimates for 3-8 hours a day.

9. Demons hate fresh air - Get out and walk, be part of the world. Walking is good for physical, spiritual, and mental health. See the world rather than a screen.

10. Plant your garden - Think of the permanence of nature, and how like it, creativity has seasons. Live for the long haul and in hard times, remember that this too shall pass. Keep doing your verbs, whatever they may be.

"Show Your Work" by Austin Kleon

Show Your Work by Austin Kleon was a good book that followed up on and provided much more detail than Kleon's prior excellent book, Steal Like An Artist (which I reviewed two years ago).

The subtitle of Show Your Work is "10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered" and some of what Kleon writes is noted below...

1. You don't have to be a genius. Be part of a group contributing something and remember to be an amateur; amateurs know that contributing something is better than contributing nothing. Think about what you want to learn and make a commitment to learning it in front of others. You can't find your voice if you do to use it; talk about the things you love and your voice will follow. Read obituaries and keep in mind that they're not about death, they're about life, and second acts.

 2. Think process, not product. Take people behind the scenes of your creative work and show the idea and then all the steps to the idea. Kleon quotes journalist David Carr as saying "you have to make stuff, nobody is going to give a damn about your resume; they want to see what you made with your own little fingers."

3. Share something small every day. Don't worry too much about the big picture, just focus on what you do in a given day, do that and then give a daily update, whether that update be a blog post, tweet, LinkedIn update or whatever gets your message out. Also keep in mind that most of your work isn't great, but you have to get it out there to let people decide.

4. Open up your cabinet of possibilities. Don't be a hoarder, share your tastes, you may not have great output yet, but you do have tastes.

5. Tell good stories. Work doesn't speak for itself, people really do want to hear the story behind work. Structure is everything, a good pitch is three acts, where you've been, where you are now, where you want to go and this same principle can be applied to storytelling about others. Talk about yourself at parties, figure out how to describe who you are and what you do and don't describe yourself as aspiring if you really are doing something, it's ok to wear it.

6. Teach what you know. Share your trade secrets.

7. Don't turn into human spam. You want hearts, not eyeballs and practice the vampire test and be done hanging with people that suck the life out of you. At the same time, find the people similar to yourself... "identify your fellow knuckleballers."

8. Learn to take a punch. Let people take their best shot at you and don't feed the trolls.

9. Sell out. Kleon on the topic of selling out quotes from a great interview with Dave Eggers I linked to and wrote about a few years ago.

10. Stick around. The phrase "don't quit your show" is used along with "you can't plan on anything; you can only go about your work. You can't count on success; you can only leave open the possibility for it, and be ready to jump on and take the ride when it comes for you."

It was really solid stuff in the book and at the end Kleon both notes the blog on his website and book twitter hashtag #showyourwork.

"Steal Like An Artist" by Austin Kleon

Started and finished (about an hour cover to cover) yesterday the tremendously interesting book Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon.



Kleon appears to traffic somewhere in between being a writer and artist... with his website (which also links to Kleon's Tumblr page) containing the descriptions below:

"I’m a writer who draws." & "I’m a writer, artist, author, and speaker obsessed with the art of communicating with pictures and words on the web."

In terms of the book itself, Steal Like An Artist contains great ideas written down along with visuals to emphasize the points. Kleon in the beginning writes his view that all advice is autobiographical (usually intended for a younger self) and then gives 10 pieces of wisdom that are expanded upon throughout...



Kleon's 10 points are ones I've thought of, but which are fully formed within the book... and I particularly liked and have kicked around in my head the first two: "Don't wait until you know who you are to get started." & "Write the book you want to read."

Very cool stuff in the book that makes me interested in Kleon's other book Newspaper Blackout and learning more about him... like for instance through the article "Steal Like an Artist, A Night with Austin Kleon" on the blog The Contextual Life by Gabrielle Gantz.