The 3rd book by Austin Kleon navigates the ideas of
staying creative in turbulent times. It revolves around understanding what creativity truly is and what are the contraceptive behaviors that surround it.

Here are some interesting ideas from the book. Would 100% recommend to read.

• Creativity is a game of hide-and-seek. You need to be connected to the world in order to be inspired and share your work. At the same time, you need to retreat from the world for long enough to think, practice your art and bring forth something worth sharing.

• Having a bliss station is optimal. If u have a special room where art gets created or if you have a special hour when art gets created, then it is good. Although, the delux package is to have both.

• The mobile phone gives us a lot but it takes away three key elements of discovery: loneliness, uncertainty and boredom. Those have always been where creative ideas come from.

Airplane Mode Can Be A Way of Life.

• Job titles, if taken too seriously, will make you feel like you need to work in a way that befits the title, and not the way that fits the actual work. They can also restrict certain kinds of work that you feel like you can do. For example: If you call yourself “creative” then you can simply spend your time wearing designer eyeglasses, typing on your MacBook pro and Instagramming photos of yourself instead of actually “creating”.

Chase the verb, not the noun.

• Job titles are not for you. They are for others to identify you and set their expectations!

• When nothing is fun anymore, try to make the worst thing you can. The ugliest drawing, the most obnoxious song. Making intentionally bad art is a ton of fun.

• Nowadays, the minute anyone shows any talent for anything, we suggest that they turn it into a profession. Our best compliment is telling somebody that they are so good at what they love to do, they could make money at it. We used to have hobbies, now all we are left with is “side hustles”. This is co-related to the fact that the safety net is very thin these days and having multiple income streams is becoming the norm.

• Everyone who’s turned their passion into breadwinning knows that it is a dangerous territory. One of the easiest ways to hate something you live is to turn something that keeps your spiritually alive to something that keeps you alive literally!

• Make sure that there is a tiny part of you that’s off-limits to the marketplace. Some little piece that you keep for yourself.

Do what you love + low overhead living = good life

Do what you love + I deserve nice things = time bomb

• This creates an interesting conundrum that you cannot always chase metrics. Often times, metrics on the internet corrupt your creative practices just as much as money does. The likes don’t tell you whether an image stuck with someone for a month. A stream count doesn’t tell you whether someone would show up to an IRL meetup.

  • Leave money on the table
  • Forget to take things to the next level
  • Let the low-hanging fruit fall off and rot

• Making gifts puts us in touch with our gifts. Not everything has to be transactional, sometimes just do something for someone. It might just keep your art alive.

Let’s slow down, not in pace or wordage but in nerves.

• Art is supposed to make our lives better. It is not a Get Out of Jail Free card. While history is evidenced by the artists who were monstrous failures as human beings, those days are past us. Art monsters are not necessary or glamorous. They are not to be condoned, pardoned or emulated.

• If making your art is adding net misery to the world, walk away and do something else. The world doesn’t necessarily need more great artists. It needs more decent human beings.

• Social media has turned us into politicians. And brand. Everyone’s supposed to be a brand now, and the worst thing in the world is being off-brand. But to be a brand is to be 100 percent certain of who you are and what you do and certainty, in art and in life, is a roadblock to discovery.

• To change your idea, you need a good place to have some bad ideas. The internet is no longer a safe place to do any kind of experimental thinking, particularly for someone with an audience or any kind of “brand”.

• You need to find people who “think about it” rather than simply react to it. Those are the people you truly feel good around. It gets incredibly boring and ultimately stifling to be with like-minded people.

• Everyone alive is very obsessed with what’s new that they all tend to think about the same thing. If you are having trouble finding people to think with, seek out the dead. They have a lot to say and are paradoxically excellent listeners. Reading old books means that you skip the aging process but get access to them all.

• The condition of your workplace / station, along with its state of readiness is an extension of your nervous system. It determines whether you would be getting work done or postponing things off.

Keep your tools organized and your materials messy.

• The idea is to be able to find the right tool at the right moment but materials need to cross-pollinate for good ideas to emerge.

• When in doubt, tidy up! The best thing about tidying is that it busies your hand and loosens up your mind. Tidying up is an act of exploring. One tends to rediscover things through the clutter.

• While scientists and researchers have long wondered about sleep, artists have known all along. Sleep is an excellent tool for tidying up your brain. Today, neuroscientists have explained that during sleep the cerebrospinal fluid flows more rapidly in the brain and it clears out toxins and bad proteins that build up in your brain cells.

• An interesting commentary on slogans used for creative work:

  • Make your Mark.
  • Put a dent in the Universe.
  • Move fast and break Things.

These slogans presume that the work is in need of making or denting and the cosmic purpose of human beings is outright vandalism. Aren’t things already a mess out there ?

• There are better slogans designed around cleanup crews and not vandals:

  • Do no harm
  • Leave things better than you found them

• The people who are scrambling for our attention, who wish to control us through misinformation and fear — want us plugged into our phones or watching TV so that they could sell us their vision of the world. If we do not go outside, we do not see our everyday world for what it really is, and we have no vision of our own to combat misinformation.

• When we are glued to our screens, the world looks terrible. Everyone seems like
  a troll, or a maniac. When you go outside and start walking again, you see the reality and the possibilities.

Walking is a way to find possibility in a life where there doesn’t seem to be any left.

• Like a tree, creative work has seasons. Part of the work is to know which season you are in, and act accordingly. It’s a very American notion that everything has to keep climbing north. NO time to contract before expansion. No time to grow up. No time to learn from your mistakes. It goes against the fundamental laws of nature, which is cyclical.

• Try to get a feel for non-mechanical time and see if it recalibrates you and changes how you feel about your progress.

• Our culture celebrates early successes but not the perennials. Fast-bloomers are often poor teachers than late-bloomers. The 35 under 35 Forbes list is perhaps not as valuable as an 8 over 80 list (if it existed). A human’s perseverance over decades, his ability to stay relevant, those are things worth studying about.

• These are the people worth studying. They are the ones who planted their seeds, tended to themselves and grew into something lasting.

The odds against being born are astronomical. No one knows how many days we’ll have left, so it would be a shame to waste the ones we get.

Back to the beginning…