More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Austin Kleon
Started reading
December 31, 2023
In a moment of despair, Phil turns to a couple drunks at a bowling alley bar and asks them, “What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?” It’s the question Phil has to answer to advance the plot of the movie, but it’s also the question we have to answer to advance the plot of our lives. I think how you answer this question is your art.
The truly prolific artists I know always have that question answered, because they have figured out a daily practice—a repeatable way of working that insulates them from success, failure, and the chaos of the outside world. They have all identified what they want to spend their time on, and they work at it every day, no matter what. Whether their latest thing is universally rejected, ignored, or acclaimed, they know they’ll still get up tomorrow and do their work.
“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.”
“One’s daily routine is a highly idiosyncratic collection of compromises, neuroses, and superstitions,”
Leonardo da Vinci made “to-learn” lists. He’d get up in the morning and write down everything he wanted to learn that day.
When I’m stuck in the morning and I don’t know what to write about in my diary, I’ll modify the pros-and-cons list. I’ll draw a line down the middle of the page, and in one column I’ll list what I’m thankful for, and in the other column, I’ll write down what I need help with. It’s a paper prayer.
“A list is a collection with purpose,” writes designer Adam Savage. I like to look back at the end of each year and see where I’ve been, so I’ll make a “Top 100” list of favorite trips, life events, books, records, movies, etc. I stole this practice from cartoonist John Porcellino, who publishes a “Top 40”–style list in his zine, King-Cat. (He, too, is a big list-maker; he’ll keep long lists of stories and drawing ideas for the zine before he actually sits down to draw them.)
“Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
When the sun goes down and you look back on the day, go easy on yourself. A little self-forgiveness goes a long way. Before you go to bed, make a list of anything you did accomplish, and write down a list of what you want to get done tomorrow. Then forget about it. Hit the pillow with a clear mind. Let your subconscious work on stuff while you’re sleeping.
Creativity is about connection—you must be connected to others in order to be inspired and share your own work—but it is also about disconnection. You must retreat from the world long enough to think, practice your art, and bring forth something worth sharing with others. You must play a little hide-and-seek in order to produce something worth being found.
“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
Airplane mode is not just a setting on your phone: It can be a whole way of life.
“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes—including you.” —Anne Lamott
If you pick the wrong noun to aspire to, you’ll be stuck with the wrong verb, too. When people use the word “creative” as a job title, it not only falsely divides the world into “creatives” and “non-creatives,” but also implies that the work of a “creative” is “being creative.” But being creative is never an end; it is a means to something else. Creativity is just a tool. Creativity can be used to organize your living room, paint a masterpiece, or design a weapon of mass destruction. If you only aspire to be a “creative,” you might simply spend your time signaling that you are one: wearing
...more
“Child’s play” is a term we use to denote things that are easy, but if you actually watch children play, it is anything but easy. “Play is the work of the child,” as Maria Montessori put it.
Photographers can take photos and immediately delete them. Nothing makes play more fun than some new toys. Seek out unfamiliar tools and materials. Find something new to fiddle with. Another trick: When nothing’s fun anymore, try to make the worst thing you can. The ugliest drawing. The crummiest poem. The most obnoxious song. Making intentionally bad art is a ton of fun.
One of the easiest ways to hate something you love is to turn it into your job: taking the thing that keeps you alive spiritually and turning it into the thing that keeps you alive literally. You must be mindful of what potential impact monetizing your passions could have on your life. You might find that you’re better off with a day job.
“Do what you love” + low overhead = a good life.
In his book The Gift, Lewis Hyde argues that art exists in both gift and market economies, but “where there is no gift, there is no art.” When our art is taken over by market considerations—what’s getting clicks, what’s selling—it can quickly lose the gift element that makes it art.
In one of her assignments, she had students create what she called a “finder”—a piece of paper with a rectangle cut out of it to simulate a camera viewfinder. She would lead her students on field trips, teaching them to crop the world, to “see for the sake of seeing,” and discover all the things that they’d never bothered to notice. Really great artists are able to find magic in the mundane.
The Dada artist Hannah Höch used the sewing patterns from her day job in her collages.
René Magritte said his goal with his art was “to breathe new life into the way we look at the ordinary things around us.” This is exactly what an artist does: By paying extra attention to their world, they teach us to pay more attention to ours. The first step toward transforming your life into art is to start paying more attention to it.
In an age obsessed with speed, slowing down requires special training. After art critic Peter Clothier discovered meditation, he realized how little he was actually looking at art: “I would often catch myself spending more time with the wall label in a museum than with the painting I was supposed to be looking at!” Inspired by the slow food and slow cooking movements, he started leading “One Hour/One Painting” sessions in galleries and museums, in which he invited participants to gaze at a single artwork for one full hour. Slow looking caught on, and now several museums across the country hold
...more
Slow looking is great, but I always need to be doing something with my hands, so drawing is my favorite tool for forcing myself to slow down and really look at life. Humans have drawn for thousands of years—it’s an ancient practice that can be done with cheap tools available to everyone. You don’t have to be an artist to draw. You just need an eye or two.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, legendary for capturing life on film in what he called “the Decisive Moment,” went back to his first love: drawing. He wrote about the differences between his two loves in his book The Mind’s Eye: “Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.” In 2018, the British Museum started offering pencils and paper to visitors after they noticed an uptick in people interested in sketching the art. One of the curators remarked, “I feel like you dwell on an object a lot more if you have a paper and pencil before you.”
