Steal Like An Artist

Steal Like An Artist - Austin Kelon

Memory Palace

The idea is to capture 2-3 concepts from each chapter, and put it on memory palace.

The sliding glass

The Iron Door

Iron Hanger

Bicycle Seat

Bicycle Handle

Bicycle Front Wheel

Bicycle Water Holder

Rowing Machine

The sliding glass view

The Iron Gutter - Sliding Window

Push Up Board

Weight Holder

Weight Plastic

Weight Iron

Weight Zig Zag

Weight Bar

Punching Bag

Punching Bag Chain Support

Punching Bag L Support

Iron Hanger

The Shed

Helmet

Boxing Gloves

Plastic Table

Wooden Table

My Home Gym

  • The sliding glass

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn.

  • The Iron Door
  1. Tie - Your inspirations wearing boe tie, and hands tied with tie.
  2. Noah - Lot of Books Noah is Taking with him.
  3. C
  • Iron Hanger
  • Bicycle Seat
  • Bicycle Handle
  • Bicycle Front Wheel
  • Bicycle Water Holder
  • Rowing Machine
  • The sliding glass view
  • The Iron Gutter - Sliding Window
  • Push Up Board
  • Weight Holder
  • Weight Plastic
  • Weight Iron
  • Weight Zig Zag
  • Weight Bar
  • Punching Bag
  • Punching Bag Chain Support
  • Punching Bag L Support
  • Iron Hanger
  • The Shed

Steal Like An Artist

First, you figure out what’s worth stealing, then you move on to the next thing.

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

There’s an economic theory out there that if you take the incomes of your five closest friends and average them, the resulting number will be pretty close to your own income.

You’re only going to be as good as the stuff you surround yourself with.

Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.

“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.”

Instead, chew on 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.

The great thing about dead or remote masters is that they can’t refuse you as an apprentice. You can learn whatever you want from them. They left their lesson plans in their work.

School is one thing. Education is another. The two don’t always overlap. Whether you’re in school or not, 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.

Google everything. I mean everything. Google your dreams, Google your problems. Don’t ask a question before you Google it. You’ll either find the answer or you’ll come up with a better question.

Always be reading. Go to the library. There’s magic in being surrounded by books. Get lost in the stacks. Read bibliographies. It’s not the book you start with, it’s the book that book leads you to.

Collect books, even if you don’t plan on reading them right away. Filmmaker John Waters has said, “Nothing is more important than an unread library.”

“Whether I went to school or not, I would always study.”

Carry a notebook and a pen with you wherever you go. Get used to pulling it out and jotting down your thoughts and observations. Copy your favourite passages out of books. Record overheard conversations. Doodle when you’re on the phone.

“It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around neglected.”

Don’t Wait Until You Know Who You Are to Get Started

If I’d waited to know who I was or what I was about before I started “being creative,” well, I’d still be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things. In my experience, it’s in the act of making things and doing our work that we figure out who we are.

Guess what: None of us do. Ask anybody doing truly creative work, and they’ll tell you the truth: They don’t know where the good stuff comes from. They just show up to do their thing. Every day.

Copying is about reverse-engineering. It’s like a mechanic taking apart a car to see how it works.

“Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”

First, you have to figure out who to copy. Second, you have to figure out what to copy.

If you copy from one author, it’s plagiarism, but if you copy from many, it’s research.

What to copy is a little bit trickier. 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.

“We want you to take from us. We want you, at first, to steal from us, because you can’t steal. You will take what we give you and you will put it in your own voice and that’s how you will find your voice. And that’s how you begin. And then one day someone will steal from you.”

“It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique.”

So: 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.

Write the Book You Want to Read

“My interest in making music has been to create something that does not exist that I would like to listen to. I wanted to hear music that had not yet happened, by putting together things that suggested a new thing which did not yet exist.”

The best advice is not to write what you know, it’s to write what you like.

When we love a piece of work, we’re desperate for more. We crave sequels. Why not channel that desire into something productive?

The manifesto is this: 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.

Use Your Hands

“We don’t know where we get our ideas from. What we do know is that we do not get them from our laptops.” - John Cleese

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.”

Try it: If you have the space, set up two workstations, one analog and one digital. For your analog station, keep out anything electronic. Take $10, go to the school supply aisle of your local store, and pick up some paper, pens, and sticky notes. When you get back to your analog station, pretend it’s craft time. Scribble on paper, cut it up, and tape the pieces back together. Stand up while you’re working. Pin things on the walls and look for patterns. Spread things around your space and sort through them.

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.

Side Projects and Hobbies are Important

Take time to be bored. One time I heard a co-worker say, “When I get busy, I get stupid.” Ain’t that the truth. Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing. I get some of my best ideas when I’m bored, which is why I never take my shirts to the cleaners. I love ironing my shirts—it’s so boring, I almost always get good ideas. If you’re out of ideas, wash the dishes. Take a really long walk. Stare at a spot on the wall for as long as you can. As the artist Maira Kalman says, “Avoiding work is the way to focus my mind.” Take time to mess around. Get lost. Wander. You never know where it’s going to lead you.

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

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.”

Music feeds into their work.

A hobby is something that gives but doesn’t take. While my art is for the world to see, music is only for me and my friends. We get together every Sunday and make noise for a couple of hours. No pressure, no plans. It’s regenerative. It’s like church.

Don’t throw any of yourself away. Don’t worry about a grand scheme or unified vision for your work. Don’t worry about unity—what unifies your work is the fact that you made it. One day, you’ll look back and it will all make sense.

The Secret: Do Good work and Share it with People

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 pay check 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.

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.

Geography is no longer out master

Surround yourself with books and objects that you love. Tape things up on the wall. Create your own world.

Always carry a book, a pen, and a notepad, and I always enjoy my solitude and temporary captivity.

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.

It helps to live around interesting people, and not necessarily people who do what you do. I feel a little incestuous when I hang out with only writers and artists, so I enjoy the many filmmakers, musicians, and tech geeks who live in Austin. Oh, and food. The food should be good. You have to find a place that feeds you—creatively, socially, spiritually, and literally.

Be Nice

“Find the most talented person in the room, and if it’s not you, go stand next to him. Hang out with him. Try to be helpful.”

If you ever find that you’re the most talented person in the room, you need to find another room.

So go on, get angry. But keep your mouth shut and go do your work. “Complain about the way other people make software by making software.”

So, I recommend 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.

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. Once you put your work into the world, you have no control over the way people will react to it.

Not everybody will get it. People will misinterpret you and what you do. They might even call you names. So get comfortable with being misunderstood, disparaged, or ignored—the trick is to be too busy doing your work to care.

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.

Instead of keeping a rejection file, keep a praise file. Use it sparingly—don’t get lost in past glory—but keep it around for when you need the lift.

Be Boring

“It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”

The truth is that even if you’re lucky enough to make a living off doing what you truly love, it will probably take you a while to get to that point. Until then, you’ll need a day job. A day job gives you money, a connection to the world, and a routine. Freedom from financial stress also means freedom in your art.

The trick is to find a day job that pays decently, doesn’t make you want to vomit, and leaves you with enough energy to make things in your spare time. Good day jobs aren’t necessarily easy to find, but they’re out there.

The artist Saul Steinberg said, “What we respond to in any work of art is the artist’s struggle against his or her limitations.” It’s often what an artist chooses to leave out that makes the art interesting. What isn’t shown versus what is. It’s the same for people: What makes us interesting isn’t just what we’ve experienced, but also what we haven’t experienced. The same is true when you do your work: 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. Choose wisely. And have fun.