Steal Like an Artist (2012)
Austin Kleon
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▪ “Art is theft.”
—Pablo Picasso
▪ The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn.”
—T. S. Eliot
▪ “Where do you get your ideas?”
The honest artist answers,
“I steal them.”
▪ First, you figure out what’s worth stealing, then you move on to the next thing.
That’s about all there is to it.
When you look at the world this way, you stop worrying about what’s “good” and what’s “bad”—there’s only stuff worth stealing, and stuff that’s not worth stealing.
▪ “The only art I’ll ever study is stuff that I can steal from.”
—David Bowie
▪ The writer Jonathan Lethem has said that when people call something “original,” nine out of ten times they just don’t know the references or the original sources involved.
▪ All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original.
▪ It’s right there in the Bible: “There is nothing new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9)
▪ As the French writer André Gide put it, “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”
▪ If we’re free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running away from it
▪ “What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.”
—William Ralph Inge
▪ Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas.
▪ There’s the first line, the second line, but then there’s a line of negative space that runs between them.
▪ A good example is genetics. You have a mother and you have a father. You possess features from both of them, but the sum of you is bigger than their parts. You’re a remix of your mom and dad and all of your ancestors.
▪ Just as you have a familial genealogy, you also have a genealogy of ideas. You don’t get to pick your family, but you can pick your teachers and you can pick your friends and you can pick the music you listen to and you can pick the books you read and you can pick the movies you see.
▪ The artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there’s a difference: Hoarders collect indiscriminately, artists collect selectively
▪ Keep a swipe file. It’s just what it sounds like—a file to keep track of the stuff you’ve swiped from others. It can be digital or analog—it doesn’t matter what form it takes, as long as it works
▪ Pretend to be making something until you actually make something
▪ “Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy you will find your self.”
—Yohji Yamamoto
▪ Nobody is born with a style or a 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.
▪ Remember: Even The Beatles started as a cover band
▪ First, you have to figure out who to copy. Second, you have to figure out what to copy
▪ The writer Wilson Mizner said if you copy from one author, it’s plagiarism, but if you copy from many, it’s research.
▪ “There isn’t a move that’s a new move.” The basketball star Kobe Bryant has admitted that all of his moves on the court were stolen from watching tapes of his heroes. But initially, when Bryant stole a lot of those moves, he realized he couldn’t completely pull them off because he didn’t have the same body type as the guys he was thieving from. He had to adapt the moves to make them his own.
▪ A wonderful flaw about human beings is that we’re incapable of making perfect copies. Our failure to copy our heroes is where we discover where our own thing lives. That is how we evolve.
▪ The movie Jurassic Park came out on my tenth birthday. I loved it. The minute I left the theater, I was dying for a sequel, so I sat down the next day at our old PC and typed one out
▪ 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. There are too many opportunities to hit the delete key. The computer brings out the uptight perfectionist in us—we start editing ideas before we have them
▪ The cartoonist Tom Gauld says he stays away from the computer until he’s done most of the thinking for his strips, because once the computer is involved, “things are on an inevitable path to being finished. Whereas in my sketchbook the possibilities are endless.”
▪ Once you start getting your ideas, then you can move over to your digital station and use the computer to help you execute and publish them. When you start to lose steam, head back to the analog station and play.
▪ There is a kind of fallout that happens when you leave college. The classroom is a wonderful, if artificial, place: Your professor gets paid to pay attention to your ideas, and your classmates are paying to pay attention to your ideas. Never again in your life will you have such a captive audience.
▪ Soon after, you learn that most of the world doesn’t necessarily care about what you think. It sounds harsh, but it’s true. As the writer Steven Pressfield says, “It’s not that people are mean or cruel, they’re just busy.”
▪ This is actually a good thing, because you want attention only after you’re doing really good work. There’s no pressure when you’re unknown. You can do what you want. Experiment. Do things just for the fun of it. When you’re unknown, there’s nothing to distract you from getting better. No public image to manage. No huge paycheck on the line. No stockholders. No e-mails from your agent. No hangers-on.
▪ You’ll never get that freedom back again once people start paying you attention, and especially not once they start paying you money.
Enjoy your obscurity while it lasts. Use it.
▪ It’s a two-step process. Step one, “do good work,” is incredibly hard. There are no shortcuts. Make stuff every day. Know you’re going to suck for a while. Fail. Get better.
▪ The more open you are about sharing your passions, the closer people will feel to your work. Artists aren’t magicians. There’s no penalty for revealing your secrets.
▪ When you open up your process and invite people in, you learn.
▪ 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.
▪ “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
▪ There’s only one reason I’m here: I’m here to make friends.
▪ “There’s only one rule I know of: You’ve got to be kind.”
—Kurt Vonnegut
▪ You’re going to see a lot of stupid stuff out there and you’re going to feel like you need to correct it. One time I was up late on my laptop and my wife yelled at me, “Quit picking fights on Twitter and go make something!”
▪ Henry Rollins has said he is both angry and curious, and that’s what keeps him moving.
▪ But instead of wasting my anger on complaining or lashing out at people, I try to channel it into my writing and my drawing.
▪ “Complain about the way other people make software by making software.”
—Andre Torrez
▪ As my friend Hugh MacLeod says, “The best way to get approval is to not need it.”
▪ “Modern art = I could do that + Yeah, but you didn’t.”
—Craig Damrauer
▪ 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.
▪ Life is a lonely business, often filled with discouragement and rejection. Yes, validation is for parking, but it’s still a tremendous boost when people say nice things about our work.
▪ “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
—Gustave Flaubert
▪ 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
▪ 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.
▪ A day job puts you in the path of other human beings. Learn from them, steal from them.
▪ Establishing and keeping a routine can be even more important than having a lot of time. Inertia is the death of creativity.
▪ “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
▪ Nothing is more paralyzing than the idea of limitless possibilities. The idea that you can do anything is absolutely terrifying
▪ “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
▪ In the end, creativity isn’t just the things we choose to put in, it’s the things we choose to leave out.