Steal LIke An Artist

is the name of an excellent book by Austin Kleon that I came across a few weeks ago.  I'm now itching to use it in my College Comp 2 class.

The books subtitle is 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative.

I think it bridges well what we've been reading about in Seth Godin's Linchpin and what we'll be reading about in Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From.  In Linchpin students are seeing the importance of being remarkable in your job, whatever field it is in.  That is the only way to make yourself indispensable.  One way to do that is to bring sometime of creativity to your job.  In addition to excellent discussion and examples of remarkable thins, the students will have to come up and devise something that is remarkable and present it to me or the class.  Kleon's book should help get their creative juices flowing.  In Where Good Ideas Come From, I have students get into pairs and then I assign them a chapter and an faculty member / administrator to work with to teach the rest of the class that chapter.  So I'm thinking of dividing Steal Like an Artist up by pairs of students having students present it to the class.  That should help them transition to the work we do with Johnson's text.

Here are Kleon's Ten Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative.

1.  Steal like an artist.

It is Kleon's belief that creatives simply know what to steal or borrow and then add it to their own projects.  He argues this is how all great works are constructed.  No grand ideas are born out of nothing.  This reminds me greatly of the video series "Everything is a Remix."

Part 1 (of four)

Everything is a Remix Part 1 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.


2.  Don't wait until you know who you are to get started

This basically means get off your ass and do something.  Ha ha.  I love that.  I was lucky early in life to discover what I love and am creative at.  But I think many of my friends never found that  - especially in college - because they were waiting for their calling to come to them.  That's not how it works.  You have to go to the calling, and you only do that by getting out their and trying different things.  You never know where your creativity lies until you give it the right context.

Believe it or not, I loathed technology in college.  I recall Doppler, one of my English teachers at NCTC, urging us to get a library card and access the computers there.  There was no way I was going to do that.  Yes, I typed a few papers in high school on the school's Apple IIe, but I did a lot of my own work on the electric typewriter my parents had bought me for Christmas a few years earlier.

So I thought I was set.  Until I had to revise, which meant changing margins and proofing and printing out more than one copy!  Tough to do on a typewriter!

But soon it became apparent that I needed to use technology . . . to at least type my papers.  Then, without me even knowing it, a spark occurred.  Soon I was ushered in to the world of desktop publishing when I became editor of the school newspaper.  That helped me when I had a stint as the yearbook editor.  Then I delved in to creating webpages when I was in graduate school.  When I bought my first iPod and smart phone, other sparks were born too.

Had I waited around for technology to come to me, I'd still be using an overhead to give notes in the classroom.

What would have happened to Cliff Young if he would have waited to try marathon running?





3.  Write the book you want to read.

Again, more of the mantra of get off your ass and just do it.

My favorite big of advice here is not 'write what you know' but 'write what you like.'

I recall my old English teachers telling me to write what I know (and it's not bad advice), but what teenager is interested in farm life?  Instead, I wrote about what I liked (music and horror films) and through that sheer love of writing about what I liked, I developed a voice and style that would later come in handy when I was finally able to write about what I know.

4.  Use your hands.

I'm going to steal one of Kleon's ideas: he has two desks.  One full of his technology stuff (laptop, desktop, music, DVD player . . .) and one that is all analog (journal, sketch book, glue, pens and markers, and so on).

When the initial creative ideas need to be sparked, he goes to the analog desk.  Then when things need to be finalized and published, he goes to this digital desk.

5.  Side projects and hobbies are important.

Here is one of my favorite quotes: "The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life."

The only problem is that there just aren't enough professional video game player jobs out there!

6.  The Secret: do good work and share it with people.

I love this from the author -

I get a lot of emails from young people who ask, "How do I get discovered?"

I sympathize with them.  There is a kind of fallout that happens when you leave college.  The classroom is a wonderful, if artificial, place: Your professor gets paid to pay attention to your ideas, and your classmates are paying to pay attention to your ideas.  Never again in your life will you have such a captive audience.

I love that.

This is great too:

Here is another great piece of advice from this section as well:

And a final thought, one thing we spent quite a bit of time talking about last week was something Godin said at one of his TEDx Talks: We spend too much time collecting dots in school rather than connecting the dots.

Kleon has a different take on that:  Share your dots, but don't connect them.


7.  Geography is no longer our master

This one is pretty simple, given the flat world we now inhabit.  His advice that I like best: build your own world.

8.  Be nice (the world is a small town)

This comes right out of Guy Kawasaki's Enchantment concept in that it costs nothing to be nice.  And it gets you further in life.

A couple good nuggets from this chapter:

Stand next to the talent.  With our hyper connected world, there's no excuse for not surrounding yourself (at least digitally) with the best on Twitter, Youtube, blogs, and podcasts.  They'll only have a profound influence on you.

This reminds me of something Bill Pacrells told his Giants team a long, long time ago: "Find the guy who is the hardest worker, who stays the latest, who does extra drills, who studies the most.  Once you've found him, do what he does."

Kleon finishes this section with a great line: "If you ever find that you're the most talented person in the room, you need to find another room."

9.  Be boring (it's the only way to get work done)

This is one I wish my students would take to heart.  Shut off the phone.  Put the iPod away.  Close all the browsers on your computer.  Open up Word or Pages and just get to work.  Nothing fancy, just work.

Kleon dispels the myth of the superhuman rock star genius.  "That whole romantic image of the creative genius doing drugs and running around and sleeping with everyone is played out.  It's for the superhuman and the people who want to die young.  The thing is:  It takes a lot of energy to be creative.  You don't have that energy if you waste it on other stuff."

10.  Creativity is subtraction

This one is simple: choose what to leave out.  Don't clutter up your life with unnecessary items.  And I bet if we sat down and looked at our lives (just like our closets), we'd find a whole bunch of stuff that we never use or even need.  Just stuff that takes up space and wastes our time.  (Just look at Facebook, for example.  Do you really have 345 friends?  Do you really need to check their status (or update your own for that matter) when it comes to what you're making for dinner or how mad you are at your kids?).  Stop the foolishness and get to work.  Make the work you do as creative as possible.  Good things will happen.

Here is the author at one of the Tedx Talks.