The 4th book by Austin Kleon, one of my favourite authors and artists. I find this book interesting because unlike all of Austin’s other books that tend to look outward and draw inspiration from the world surround him, this one tends to look inward, into the life of his kids and the learnings that come from simply observing their habits.

The whole idea behind this book is that — Kids don’t need a book to be creative. We need a book so we can be more like them.

When the future comes, all experts become students.

• Treat yourself like someone worth caring for. Pick up a parenting book and read it as a form of self-parenting. Often times we forget to take care of ourselves. While there are books on self-love, I think one of the better ways to approach this subject is through children. The question to be answered is — “If you can do it for them, then why not yourself ?”

• When you actively think about making “art” you start thinking about all kinds of instructions about what is and isn’t art. Kill the internal critic. If you were to meet this figure in reality, you would probably think that there is something wrong with him. He would just be boring and cruel. Something terrible must have happened to him, some catastrophe, and he living in the aftermath, a bitter and unrelenting fault-finder.

• Knowing what you don’t know is considered a virtue of the wise, but it is a vice for the artist. When you don’t know something but you are willing to try it anyway, then you might fail many times but stumble onto brilliance.

• Now, it is inevitable to remain blissfully ignorant as over a period of time, you will know. Once other people notice that you know what you are doing, you would be asked to do more of it.

You are fine without advice or suggestions. And so are your kids.

• The teachers who can tell you what they know and what they are doing can’t exactly tell you what you should do. No matter how good the teacher is, the learning has to be done by you.

One of the reasons for reaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.

• You can survive when things are bad if you have a sense of humour. All of western civilization is built on the model of tragedy. Through great effort and much suffering, we have tried the shape the world in our image. Perhaps, it is better to start improvising our way through our lives.

• All stories become instructions for living: If you believe art is a tragedy then in order to do creative work, you must be a genius or great talent, and you must suffer. In a comedy however, ordinary people fumble about in their lives, not knowing exactly what they are doing or where they are going. They themselves get into extraordinary situations. They fail a lot, but they remain playful and rely on their wits. They improvise and adapt. They make the most of things and have stick around because, the ending to a comedy is always a happy one.

• Our fear of looking foolish holds us back from learning, trying new things, experimenting and doing our most wild, daring and creative work. If you can as though you know everything, you will learn nothing and never discover anything new. It is much better to willingly play the fool.

• Kids are naturally open-minded, innocent and naive. These tend to be the traits that many adults see as their job to help kids grow out of. Paradoxically, these are the very things that most creative people manage to hold on to.

• There is a part of the brain that goes - “wouldn’t it be funny if …“. Do not always reject such ideas, lay them out and even try small proof-of-concepts. You might find something useful. If you ignore it all the time, you will stop having funny ideas. The silly question is the first intimation of some totally novel development.

• It is often the well-meaning people in our lives who are trying to help us who have the most power to really mess us up. It is much easier to ignore the mean people who we know really don’t care about us.

• There is this pattern in creative people: they have this little bit of magic in then, a spark of something that comes naturally to them, and it’s often messy and weird and might come off as something that’s a little bit off, but that’s the reason why they caught our attention in the first place. However, when they decide that people are watching and it is time to get serious, they go off and lose that magic. Don’t be afraid to do what comes naturally. Fight the urge to do things the “right” way.

The elements of time, space and materials make it possible for children to explore, invent and make their ideas visible. It’s the combinations of unhurried and uninterrupted time, inviting spaces and materials that guide mind and hands, that invite creative thinking.

• As human beings, when play is denied over the long term, our mood darkens. The more you deny your playful self, the more chance you have of breaking down, burning out, and just generally being a miserable human being.

• If you feel the need to justify playtime for yourself, consider it part of your research and development budget. Because playtime is all about tinkering, puttering around, and experimenting without worrying about productivity. It’s paradoxically the time you’re most likely to stumble upon something you can really use in your work.

• Creative kids thrive when they have a good hiding spot — a bedroom, a basement, just someplace where they can get away from the world and their parents and safely enter a world of their own.

• There is something about unassuming places that relaxes us. Many creative people have worked in fast-food restaurants.

• Artists come to their material accidentally. Something speaks to us, a sound, a touch, hardness or softness, it catches us and asks us to be formed.

• There is something about mischief — goofing off, getting into trouble, dodging responsibilities that seems to activate the creative spirit. It is important to be free of obligation. Do the most unserious thing you can think of. Do what sounds totally stupid and wrong. Do what sounds fun.

• Perfectionism is something to be battled at every stage of the artist’s life. Perfectionism is the impossible, imaginary standard in our heads that we will never live up to. It’s better to embrace imperfectionism. To make a mess, to court accidents and mistakes, to actively set ourselves up for failure, to fail early, and to fail often.

Quantity is more important than quality.

• Don’t fret over wasting your materials. Don’t hoard art supplies for important projects. Use up everything you have got on whatever you are working on. Wasting materials is part of the process: either learn to be okay with the waste or only give yourself materials you are okay seeing wasted.

• Make a big pile of imperfect things. Eventually, something in the pile will be worth saving.

• Artists are like kids: the line between the imaginary and real world is very thin. The artist crosses back and forth between these worlds. However, the transitions can be bumpy. Ideally, you establish rituals to ease these transitions.

• Put on a mask so that you can tell the truth. Many singers have alter-egos. This is to continue exploring whatever interests them without sabotaging their brands that require consistency of genre. You can do the same. Have different sections to your life that are exposed to different sets of people. Keep what is relevant in the current timeline, throw away everything else. Immerse yourself to be in the moment.

• Artists are simply people with antennas. One who knows to hook up to the currents which are in the atmosphere. Be ready to receive messages from the universe, read its signs, and to take dictation from the unsayable. Good ideas aren’t inside you unable to get out, they are mostly outside you, unable to get in.

• Getting into a creative spirit is a whole-body exercise. An artist is like an octopus with multiple brains in their appendages — their “main brain” is telling them one thing, but their other brains are talking back at them. Often toddlers touch, feel, chew and eat something to get a feel of it. Creativity is a full-body exercise. There is great intelligence in your body if you can learn to use it. Think outside your head.

• Due to so many creative things happening within our body, it is difficult to do much if your body is not at 100% . Most ailments could be cured with a sandwich, a nap or a hot bath.

• Don’t fight your feelings. Feel them. Examine them. Use them. The worst thing you can do is to ignore them.

Problems of output are problems of input.

• Humans need intellectual nourishment at every stage of their development. While we feed our kids seriously, we forget to feed ourselves. When you have problem with your output, there is some problem with your input. Become a sponge and start soaking up what the world has to offer. Be open and alert and on the lookout for what might get you going again.

• By the time to we grow up, we have been told what we are supposed to like for so long that it’s easy to lost track of what it is we really like. For example, often times when you try to follow others recommendations, you tend to wander off the path of your own tastes.

• To discover, you cannot just feed, you need to search. Your search needs to be self-directed. You can’t just have things pushed at you; you have to pull things towards you. If you are going to be online, spend less time in feeds and more time in the search box.

• If you don’t know what you like anymore, go back to the stuff that you liked when you were younger and see if you still like it. Reread, rewatch, and relisten to your old favourites. Sometimes getting in touch with what you use to like can tell you what you really like now.

• Be interested in life. Don’t think it was better when you were young. Kids these days are as much interested in life as you were and are having just as much fun. Remain a curious elder and stay interested in what the young people are up to. Don’t judge, learn. You don’t have to try and act hip, act young, or participate in youth culture, just be open to understanding people younger and try seeing the world from their perspective.

Embrace bewilderment

If you can understand your children, you have screwed up. If the younger folks shake you up, scare you or downright mystify you, revel in it. It means that it is a healthy future.

• In the modern world, to waste time is considered as the greatest of sins, and idleness is looked upon with suspicion. To be though of as productive, one needs to look busy. But you will not always look busy when you are creative. In fact, if you check in on creative people, they will look like they are doing absolutely nothing or doing the kinds of things that kids get yelled at for in the classroom.

  • daydreaming
  • fidgeting
  • doodling
  • staring out of the window

• Leave yourself twice as much time as you think you need for a project, knowing that half of that may not look like ‘making’ anything at all. Give yourself time to waste. Forget your ideas of “efficiency.” Work as slowly or as quickly as you want to. Resist the urge to get back to work just to stop idling.

Boredom is a pitstop on the way to figuring out what fascinates you.

• Boredom is very good for creativity, for it forces you to think up your own entertainment and discover something to do. The trouble is now that we live in an age in which we never give ourselves the chance to be bored. All the entertainment we could ever dream of is at our fingertips, waiting on the phone in our pocket.

• Lastly, there is no winning in creative life. You are not in a race; you are on a journey. You can go as fast or as slow as you want to. There is no stopping when you are running a race, but when you are on a journey, it’s good to stop, take a break, look around, and get your bearings. Stopping for a while is not the same as quitting. You can stop and reserve the right to start again.

• But you also have the right of quitting. We are afraid of quitting because we usually don’t know what can be gained by quitting. When you quit things, you clear space for new things to take their place. Sometimes when we quit things we realize just how much they mean to us. We return to the things we quit with a fresh enthusiasm and perspective.

• Quitting little things train you to quit the big things. To respond to what’s really not working for you, to be flexible, and to correct course.

• Life of an artist is like any other life: It will have its ups and downs. There will be times when you don’t even like yourself, when you will wish to
  get as far away from yourself as possible. All you have to do is go through the motions of care: give yourself grace, clean up your messes, do the thankless maintenance work that must be done.

There will be days when you would want to throw yourself out of the window. That’s okay. The important thing is you don’t.

• We have conventionally thought that the past is behind us and the future is ahead of us, but it might be the opposite. The past is in front of us because we can see it. The future is behind is because we cannot see it. With that in mind, don’t look behind because it’s dark. Learn from the past instead and proceed. Keep your eyes glued to the past, but don’t glue yourself to it!

• Visualization as a method to move forward and achieve goals in life has worked for non-creative professions because the paths are definite and there are sufficient examples of people who have walked upon them. For creative people however, it is the opposite and visualization seldom leads to anything worthwhile.

• Having a vision is good but clinging onto it can create a form of inflexibility within you where you fail to see what is right in front of you. History is full of people with a vision who left a wide path of destruction in their wake.

• The materials at hand are the only materials you ever have. To not start out with a vision in your head means you can really see what’s in front of you and then figure out what to do with it. If you start with no preconceived notion of what things are going to look like, you can remain flexible and open. You can discover things that are beyond what you or anyone else could’ve pictured.

Don’t call it art. Just make stuff.