Steal Like An Artist — Book Review & Summary Notes

Have poor creative skills? You can still improve your creative work following 10 simple steps.

Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon is one of the most influential books on the creative industry. In this summary and review, I will go over the BEST 10 IDEAS.

TS Elliot — Quote on Stealing

1) Steal Like An Artist

Chapter Notes

• Advice = People talking about themselves in the past
• Artists get their ideas by stealing other good Ideas — Kleon’s stop overthinking about what’s good or bad instead try what’s worth stealing and what’s not.
• A good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. (No hay nada nuevo Bajo el sol)
• Original= No references found (Jonathan Lethem)
• New Idea = Remix of one or more previous ideas.
• We are the sum of our influences.
• it’s always your job to get yourself an education.
• You have to be curious about the world in which you live. Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else — that’s how you’ll get ahead.

“Don’t ask a question before you Google it. You’ll either find the answer or you’ll come up with a better question.” — Austin Kleon

“It’s not the book you start with, it’s the book that book leads you to.” — Austin Kleon.”

Always save your thefts for later — Carry a notebook and a pen with you wherever you go. Get used to pulling it out and jotting down your thoughts and observations — Austin Kleon

Quotes

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” André Gide

“We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.” Goethe

“Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light, and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.” Jim Jarmusch

“I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists.” — Marcel Duchamp

“The artist is a selective collector. (they only collect why they really love)” — Austin Kleon

“Don’t learn the whole history of your discipline pick one thinker — writer, artist, activist, role model — you really love. & Study everything there is to know about that thinker “Then find three people that thinker loved, and find out everything about them. Repeat this as many times as you can. Climb up the tree as far as you can go. Once you build your tree, it’s time to start your own branch ” — Austin Kleon on Learning

Action

Create a family tree of ideas

2) Don’t Wait till you know who you are to get started

Chapter Notes

• Make Things = Know Thyself
• If you wait to know who you are before you start “being creative,” you’ll spend your time sitting around trying to figure yourself out instead of making things
• Educated people normally suffer from “impostor syndrome” — a psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments. Keep in mind no-one knows where the good stuff comes from. They just show up to do their thing. Every day.
• Solution = Fake it till you make it (Read Just Kids by the musician Patti Smith)
• Nobody is born with a style or a voice — In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying. Practice not plagiarism (Never try to pass someone else’s work off as your own)
• Copying = reverse-engineering

Copying process

1. Identify who to copy — You copy your heroes( people you love or are inspired by or the people you want to be) Steal form all your heroes
2. Identify what to copy — it is harder but Don’t just steal the style, steal the thinking behind the style (“You don’t want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes.” your goal here is to get a simple into your heroes minds — “to internalize their way of looking at the world don’t just mimic somebody’s work without understanding where they are coming from otherwise your work will be just a knockoff

• Imitation = Copying
• Emulation =Copying + Step Further (breaking through into your own thing — adapt the moves to make them your own.

Quotes

“Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy, you will find your self.” Yohji Yamamoto

“We started writing our own songs as a way to avoid other bands being able to play our set.” Paul McCartney

“It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique. Thank goodness.” Conan O’Brien

Action

Copy your heroes. Examine where you fall short.

• What’s in there that makes you different? That’s what you should amplify and transform into your own work. Add something to the world that only you can add.

Remember as humans we’re incapable of making perfect copies.

3) Write the Book you want to read

Chapter Notes

• write what you like
• The best advice is not to write what you know, it’s to write what you like. Write the kind of story you like best — write the story you want to read — Whenever you’re at a loss for what move to make next, just ask yourself, “What would make a better story?
• Bradford Cox had a game he would play: He would sit down and record a “fake” version of what he wanted the new album to sound like. Then, when the album came out, he would compare the songs he’d written with the songs on the real album.
• When we love a piece of work, we’re desperate for more. We crave sequels. Why not channel that desire into something productive?

How to improve a great piece of content

• Find a great piece of work/content from one of your creative and ask yourself
• What did they miss?
• What didn’t they make?
• What could’ve been made better? If they were still alive, what would they be making today?
• If all your favorite makers got together and collaborated, what would they make with you leading the crew?”

Kleon’s Manifesto

Draw the art you want to see

Start the business you want to run

Play the music you want to hear

Write the books you want to read

Build the products you want to use

Do the work you want to see done.

Quotes

The question every young writer at some point asks is: “What should I write?” And the standard answer is, “Write what you know.” This advice always leads to terrible stories in which nothing interesting happens.” — Austin Kleon.

Action

Improve your favorite piece of content (following Kleon’s Framework)

4) Use your hands

Chapter Notes

• Step away from the screen — Computers don’t give us the feeling that we’re actually making things
• As humans, we need to move to feel like we’re making something with our bodies, not just our heads.
• Work that only comes from the head isn’t any good. Watch a great musician play a show. Watch a great leader give a speech. You’ll see what I mean
• Find a way to bring your body into your work — Our bodies can tell our brains as much as our brains tell our bodies (shuffle sticky notes around a conference table, or start kneading clay, the motion kickstarts our brain into thinking)

A Computer’s Good for

• Editing Ideas
• Publishing and share them to the world

A Computer’s bad for

• Generating Ideas — too many opportunities to hit the delete key. It encourages the perfectionist in us.
• Tom Gauld stays away from the computer until he’s done most of the thinking for his strips, because once the computer is involved

Kleon’s Process

• Hands first, then computer, then hands, then computer. A kind of analog-to-digital loop. (When you start to lose steam, head back to the analog station and play)
• Analog Desk — Most of the work should born (keep out anything electronic) and all over the desk are physical traces, scraps, and residue from my process
• Digital Desk: Edit and Publish work — Laptop, Monitor, scanner, and Drawing tablet.

Quotes

“Computers are alienating because they put a sheet of glass between us and whatever is happening. “You never really get to touch anything that you’re doing unless you print it out,” Stanley Donwood

“In A Computer things are on an inevitable path to being finished. Whereas in my sketchbook the possibilities are endless.” Tom Gauld

“It wasn’t until I started bringing analog tools back into my process that making things became fun again and my work started to improve” — Austin Kleon (printed websites reviews )

“The computer is really good for editing your ideas, and it’s really good for getting your ideas ready for publishing out into the world, but it’s not really good for generating ideas”

Action

Create your next piece your hand first (pen and paper)

5) Side Projects & Hobbies are important

Chapter Notes

• Practice Productive Procrastination
• Side projects (Stuff that’s just playing) are good because that’s when the magic happens. & it’s good to have a lot of projects going at once so you can bounce between them
• Try to get bored to get good ideas. Austin loves ironing his shirts because it is so boring he’s always getting good ideas — If you’re out of ideas, wash the dishes. Take a really long walk. or stare at a spot on the wall for as long as you can.
• Don’t throw any of yourself away — If you have two or three real passions, don’t feel like you have to pick and choose between them — Keep all your passions in your life
• Tomlinson suggests that if you love different things, you just keep spending time with them. “Let them talk to each other. Something will begin to happen.”
• The thing is, you can cut off a couple of passions and only focus on one, but after a while, you’ll start to feel phantom limb pain.”- Austin Kleon
• Your passions feed into the work
• Hobby = something creative that’s just for you ( You don’t try to make money or get famous off it, you just do it because it makes you happy) A home gives but doesn’t take

Quotes

“Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing” Austin Kleon.”

“Avoiding work is the way to focus my mind.” Maira Kalman

“Get lost. Wander. You never know where it’s going to lead you.” Austin Kleon

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backward.” Steve Jobs

Action

Practice Productive Procrastination

6)The secret: Do good work & share it with people

Chapter Notes

• To the question “How do I get discovered?”
• In College, everyone pay attention to your ideas your professor gets paid to pay attention to them and your classmates are paying to pay attention to your ideas. Soon after, you learn that most of the world doesn’t necessarily care about what you think.
• Obscurity is good because you want only after you’re doing really good work.
• Unknown = No pressure
• Enjoy your obscurity while it lasts. Use it.

The not so secret formula = Do good work and share it with people.

1. do good work,: It is incredibly hard. There are no shortcuts. Make stuff every day. Know you’re going to suck for a while. Fail. Get better.
2. “share it with people,” was really hard up until about ten years ago or so. Now, it’s very simple: “Put your stuff on the Internet.” (I disagree with this statement)

Kleon’s Content Distribution Exersice

Step 1: Wonder at something

Step 2: Invite others to wonder with you. You should wonder at the things nobody else is wondering about. If everybody’s wondering about apples, go wonder about oranges. The more open you are about sharing your passions, the closer people will feel to your work. (reveal your secrets)

Austin suggests you

“You don’t put yourself online only because you have something to say — you can put yourself online to find something to say. The Internet can be more than just a resting place to publish your finished ideas — it can also be an incubator for ideas that aren’t fully formed, a birthing center for developing work that you haven’t started yet.”

• Use the internet as a two-way street rather than a one-way street, he provides an interesting observation I agree with

“Most websites and blogs are set up to show posts in reverse-chronological order — the latest post is the first post that visitors see, so you’re only as good as your last post. This keeps you on your toes, keeps you thinking about what you can post next.”

Kleon’s Content Distribution Plan— Share your dots but don’t connect them (Distribution Action Plan)

1. Learn

• Learn to code.
• Figure out how to make a website
• Figure out blogging
• Figure out Twitter and social media and all that other stuff.

2. Find people with similar interests

• Find people on the Internet who love the same things as you and connect with them. Share things with them.

3. Share

You don’t have to share everything — in fact, sometimes it’s much better if you don’t. Show just a little bit of what you’re working on.

• Share a sketch or a doodle or a snippet.
• Share a little glimpse of your process. Think about what you have to share that could be of some value to people. Share a handy tip you’ve discovered while working. Or a link to an interesting article.
• Mention a good book you’re reading.

Quotes

“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.” Howard Aiken

Action

Use Kleon’s Content Distribution Plan To Share the piece of content you improved before

7) Geography is no longer our Master

Chapter Notes

• Your mentors can be everywhere. and you can learn from them through the Internet & you don’t have to live anywhere other than the place you are to start connecting with the world you want to be in
• Build your own world around you — Surround yourself with books and objects that you love. Tape things up on the wall. Create your own world.

You need 2 things

1. A space to work
2. Time to do it

• He shares a great idea I resonate to “We are always connected, never alone or captive. So, ride the bus to and from work, even though it’s 20 minutes faster to drive. and go to places without Wi-Fi always carry a book, a pen, and a notepad, Always enjoy your solitude and temporary captivity”
• You need to leave home — Your brain gets too comfortable in your everyday surroundings. You need to make it uncomfortable.
• You need to spend some time in another land, among people that do things differently than you. Travel makes the world look new, and when the world looks new, our brains work harder.
• Interesting Idea I also related to “Personally, I think bad weather leads to better art. You don’t want to go outside, so you stay inside and work. When I lived in Cleveland, I got a lot of work done in the brutal months of winter.”
• It helps to live around interesting people, and not necessarily people who do what you do
• The idea of a good restaurant — A place that feeds you creatively, socially, spiritually, and literally.

Quotes

“It isn’t necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t wait, be still and alone. The whole world will offer itself to you.” Franz Kafka

Action

Try something different (find out what format is unusual for the content you have produced)

8) Be nice the world is a small town

Chapter Notes

• Make Friends and Ignore Enemies
• The best way to vanquish your enemies on the Internet? Ignore them.

The best way to make friends on the Internet

• Say nice things about them. ( Be creative about this one say the nicest in the coolest way always stand out)
• Stand next to the talent — “that means following the best people online — the people who are way smarter and better than you, the people who are doing the really interesting work. Pay attention to what they’re talking about, what they’re doing, what they’re linking to.
• If you ever find that you’re the most talented person in the room, you need to find another room.”

“Quit picking fights on Twitter and go make something!”

Public Fan letters — Appreciation

• Public fan letters. The Internet is really good for this. Write a blog post about someone’s work that you admire and link to their site
• Make something and dedicate it to your hero. Answer a question they’ve asked, solve a problem for them, or improve on their work and share it online.
• Maybe your hero will see your work, maybe he or she won’t. Maybe they’ll respond to you, maybe not. The important thing is that you show your appreciation without expecting anything in return and that you get new work out of the appreciation.
• The trouble with creative work: Sometimes by the time people catch on to what’s valuable about what you do, you’re either a) bored to death with it, or b) dead. You can’t go looking for validation from external sources.”
• Ironically, really good work often appears to be effortless. People will say, Why didn’t I think of that? They won’t see the years of toil and sweat that went into it.”
• To avoid getting annoyed by others the trick is to be too busy doing your work to care.
• Keep around the good things people say about your work s when dark days roll around and I need a boost,

Quotes

“Complain about the way other people make software by making software.” — Andre Torrez”

“Modern art = I could do that + Yeah, but you didn’t.” — Craig Damrauer”

Action

Make Friends and Ignore Enemies — be too busy doing the work you care about.

9) Be Boring

Chapter Notes

• This is probably the most important chapter of the book and the one I feel I need to work harder on

1. Take Care of Yourself: Austin Kleon disagrees with the idea of creative geniuses doing drugs and running around and sleeping with everyone he thinks is It’s for the superhuman and the people who want to die young — Being creative takes a lot of energy and you don’t have that energy if you waste it on other stuff.

2. Stay out of debt: Learn about money as soon as you can is key

3. Keep your day Job: It gives you money, a connection to the world, and a routine ( having a routine and $$$ are the most important aspect — Freedom from financial stress also means freedom in your art)

Try to take jobs where you can learn things that you can use in your work later)

“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.”

Kleon’s approach to Money

Make yourself a budget & Live within your means — The art of holding on to money is all about saying no to consumer culture

• 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

Recommendations

1. Get Yourself A Calendar

• Building a career is a lot about the slow accumulation of little bits of effort over time.
• A calendar helps you plan work, gives you concrete goals, and keeps you on track.” he referenced Jerry Seinflied
• Get a calendar. Fill the boxes. Don’t break the chain.

2. Keep A logbook

• A logbook isn’t necessarily a diary or a journal, it’s just a little book in which you list the things you do every day. What project you worked on, where you went to lunch, what movie you saw
• The small details will help you remember the big details.
• In the old days, a logbook was a place for sailors to keep track of how far they’d traveled, and that’s exactly what you’re doing — keeping track of how far your ship has sailed.

3, Marry Well

• And “marry well” doesn’t just mean your life partner — it also means who you do business with, who you befriend, who you choose to be around.
• A good partner keeps you grounded.

Quotes

“If you ask yourself ‘What’s the best thing that happened today?’ it actually forces a certain kind of cheerful retrospection that pulls up from the recent past things to write about that you wouldn’t otherwise think about. If you ask yourself ‘What happened today?’ it’s very likely that you’re going to remember the worst thing, because you’ve had to deal with it — you’ve had to rush somewhere or somebody said something mean to you — that’s what you’re going to remember. But if you ask what the best thing is, it’s going to be some particular slant of light, or some wonderful expression somebody had, or some particularly delicious salad.” Nicholson Baker

Action

• Figure out what time you can carve out,(what time you can steal),
• Stick to your routine(Do the work every day, no matter what.)

10) Creativity is Subtraction

Chapter Notes

• In this age of information abundance and overload, those who get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out, so they can concentrate on what’s really important to them. Nothing is more paralyzing than the idea of limitless possibilities. The idea that you can do anything is absolutely terrifying.

How to overcome creative block = place some constraints on yourself

• Don’t make excuses for not working — make things with the time, space, and materials you have, right now
• Kleon’s thinks The right constraints can lead to your very best work and pointed out — Dr. Seuss wrote The Cat in the Hat with only 236 different words
• It’s often what an artist chooses to leave out that makes the art interesting.” Very nice observation “It’s the same for people: What makes us interesting isn’t just what we’ve experienced, but also what we haven’t experienced”
• You must embrace your limitations and keep moving.
• In the end, creativity isn’t just the things we choose to put in, it’s the things we choose to leave out.

Quotes

“Telling yourself you have all the time in the world, all the money in the world, all the colors in the palette, anything you want — that just kills creativity.” — Jack White

Action

Place some constraints on your work (time/resources) i.e write a piece of content in 30 mins