Austin Kleon - Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

Its one of my theories that when people give you advice, theyre really just talking to themselves in the past.

This book is me talking to a previous version of myself.

These are things Ive learned over almost a decade of trying to figure out how to make art, but a funny thing happened when I started sharing them with othersI realized that they arent just for artists. Theyre for everyone.

These ideas apply to anyone whos trying to inject some creativity into their life and their work. (That should describe all of us.)

In other words: This book is for you.
Whoever you are, whatever you make.

Lets get started.

Every artist gets asked the question,

Where do you get your ideas?

The honest artist answers,

I steal them.

How does an artist look at the world?

First, you figure out whats worth stealing, then you move on to the next thing.

Thats about all there is to it.

When you look at the world this way, you stop worrying about whats good and whats badtheres only stuff worth stealing, and stuff thats not worth stealing.

Everything is up for grabs. If you dont find something worth stealing today, you might find it worth stealing tomorrow or a month or a year from now.

The only art Ill ever study is stuff that I can steal from.

David Bowie

The writer Jonathan Lethem has said that when people call something original, nine out of ten times they just dont know the references or the original sources involved.

What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original.

Its right there in the Bible: There is nothing new under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:9)

Some people find this idea depressing, but it fills me with hope. As the French writer Andr Gide put it, Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.

If were free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running away from it.

What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.

William Ralph Inge

Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas.

Heres a trick they teach you in art school. Draw two parallel lines on a piece of paper:

How many lines are there?

Theres the first line, the second line, but then theres a line of negative space that runs between them.

See it? 1 + 1 = 3.

A good example is genetics. You have a mother and you have a father. You possess features from both of them, but the sum of you is bigger than their parts. Youre a remix of your mom and dad and all of your ancestors.

Just as you have a familial genealogy, you also have a genealogy of ideas. You dont get to pick your family, but you can pick your teachers and you can pick your friends and you can pick the music you listen to and you can pick the books you read and you can pick the movies you see.

You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences. The German writer Goethe said, We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.

We were kids without fathers... so we found our fathers on wax and on the streets and in history. We got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to make for ourselves.

Jay-Z

The artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, theres a difference: Hoarders collect indiscriminately, artists collect selectively. They only collect things that they really love.

Theres 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.

I think the same thing is true of our idea incomes. Youre only going to be as good as the stuff you surround yourself with. My mom used to say to me, Garbage in, garbage out. It used to drive me nuts. But now I know what she meant.

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.