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

by Austin Kleon

“The world needs you at the party starting real conversations, saying, ‘I don’t know,’ and being kind.” —Charlie Kaufman

Creativity is about connections, and connections are not made by siloing everything off into its own space. New ideas are formed by interesting juxtapositions, and interesting juxtapositions happen when things are out of place.

The greatest form of magical tidying that you can do is outside your studio or workspace: the tidying up of your wider world.

Art is also made out of what is ugly or repulsive to us. Part of the artist’s job is to help tidy up the place, to make order out of chaos, to turn trash into treasure, to show us beauty where we can’t see it.

we take a three-mile walk around our neighborhood. It’s often painful, sometimes sublime, but it’s absolutely essential to our day. We talk. We make plans. We rant about politics. We stop to chat with neighbors or admire the suburban wildlife.

“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom. . . stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

“Solvitur ambulando,” said Diogenes the Cynic two millennia ago. “It is solved by walking.”

get outside every day. Take long walks by yourself. Take walks with a friend or a loved one or a dog. Walk with a coworker on your lunch break. Grab a plastic bag and a stick and take a litter-picking walk like David Sedaris. Always keep a notebook or camera in your pocket for when you want to stop to capture a thought or an image. Explore the world on foot. See your neighborhood. Meet your neighbors. Talk to strangers. The demons hate fresh air.

look to for inspiration. The people who found the thing that made them feel alive and who kept themselves alive by doing it. The people who planted their seeds, tended to themselves, and grew into something lasting.

“It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: ‘And this, too, shall pass away.’ How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! —how consoling in the depths of affliction! ‘And this, too, shall pass away.’” —Abraham Lincoln