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

by Austin Kleon

When you don’t have much time, a routine helps you make the little time you have count. When you have all the time in the world, a routine helps you make sure you don’t waste it. I’ve written while holding down a day job, written full-time from home, and written while caring for small children. The secret to writing under all those conditions was having a schedule and sticking to it.

A little imprisonment—if it’s of your own making—can set you free. Rather than restricting your freedom, 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.

Leonardo da Vinci made “to-learn” lists. He’d get up in the morning and write down everything he wanted to learn that day.

“The 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.” —Lynda Barry

“I must decline, for secret reasons.” —E. B. White

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

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.

One of the easiest ways to hate something you love is to turn it into your job:

All clicks have meant in the short term is that everything online is now clickbait, optimized for the short attention span. The quick hit.

“Suckcess” is what poet Jean Cocteau was referring to when he said, “There is a kind of success worse than failure.”

It’s impossible to pay proper attention to your life if you are hurtling along at lightning speed. When your job is to see things other people don’t, you have to slow down enough that you can actually look.

“Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.”

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.

“If you’ve never changed your mind about something, pinch yourself; you may be dead.”

Social media has turned us all into politicians. And brands. Everyone’s supposed to be a brand now, and the worst thing in the world is to be off-brand.

if you really want to explore ideas, you should consider hanging out with people who aren’t so much like-minded as like-hearted.

The Roman statesman and philosopher Seneca said that if you read old books, you get to add all the years the author lived onto your own life. “We are excluded from no age, but we have access to them all,” he said. “Why not turn from this brief and transient spell of time and give ourselves wholeheartedly to the past, which is limitless and eternal and can be shared with better men than we?”