Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad

by Austin Kleon

“Any man can fight the battles of just one day,” begins a passage collected in Richmond Walker’s book of meditations for recovering alcoholics, Twenty-Four Hours a Day. “It is only when you and I add the burden of those two awful eternities, yesterday and tomorrow, that we break down. It is not the experience of today that drives men mad. It is remorse or bitterness for something which happened yesterday or the dread of what tomorrow may bring. Let us therefore do our best to live but one day at a time.”

a routine gives you freedom by protecting you from the ups and downs of life and helping you take advantage of your limited time, energy, and talent. A routine establishes good habits that can lead to your best work.

“Play is the work of the child,” as Maria Montessori put it.

“Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.” Vonnegut

see what happens but mainly relax and let everything go to hell—you are not responsible for the world—you are only responsible for your work—so DO IT.” —Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse

We used to have hobbies; now we have “side hustles.” As things continue to get worse in America, as the safety net gets torn up, and as steady jobs keep disappearing, the free-time activities that used to soothe us and take our minds off work and add meaning to our lives are now presented to us as potential income streams, or ways out of having a traditional job.

“Do what you love” + low overhead = a good life. “Do what you love” + “I deserve nice things” = a time bomb.

Money is not the only measurement that can corrupt your creative practice. Digitizing your work and sharing it online means that it is subject to the world of online metrics: website visits, likes, favorites, shares, reblogs, retweets, follower counts, and more. It’s easy to become as obsessed with online metrics as money. It can then be tempting to use those metrics to decide what to work on next, without taking into account how shallow those metrics really are. An Amazon rank doesn’t tell you whether someone read your book twice and loved it so much she passed it on to a friend. Instagram likes don’t tell you whether an image you made stuck with someone for a month.

Your attention is one of the most valuable things you possess, which is why everyone wants to steal it from you. First you must protect it, and then you must point it in the right direction.

“We give things meaning by paying attention to them,” Jessa Crispin writes, “and so moving your attention from one thing to another can absolutely change your future.”

“Attention is the most basic form of love,” wrote John Tarrant.

What I’ve learned on our morning walks is that, yes, walking is great for releasing inner demons, but maybe even more important, walking is great for battling our outer demons. The people who want to control us through fear and misinformation—the corporations, marketers, politicians—want us to be plugged into our phones or watching TV, because then they can sell us their vision of the world. If we do not get outside, if we do not take a walk out in the fresh air, we do not see our everyday world for what it really is, and we have no vision of our own with which to combat disinformation.

“There is no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!” —Rainer Maria Rilke

Every day is a potential seed that we can grow into something beautiful. There’s no time for despair. “The thing to rejoice in is the fact that one had the good fortune to be born,” said the poet Mark Strand. “The odds against being born are astronomical.” None of us know how many days we’ll have, so it’d be a shame to waste the ones we get.

Go easy on yourself and take your time. Worry less about getting things done. Worry more about things worth doing.

Worry less about making a mark. Worry more about leaving things better than you found them.