Austin Kleon Quotes

The trick is not caring what EVERYBODY thinks of you and just caring about what the RIGHT people think of you. - Brian Michael Bendis

In fact, sharing your process might actually be most valuable if the products of your work aren't easily shared,

The best way to get approval is to not need it.

You don't have to live anywhere other than the place you are to start connecting with the world you want to be in.

You'll never get that freedom back again once people start paying you attention, and especially not once they start paying you money.

It's in the act of making things that we figure out who we are.

Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.

Keep your own list, or get an account with an email newsletter company like MailChimp and put a little sign-up widget on every page of your website.

Art that only comes from the head isn't any good.

Marriage is two people in love standing in the same bathroom

Don't show your lunch or your latte; show your work.

The biggest task in the morning is to try to keep my headspace from being invaded by the outside world.

Seeing yourself as part of a creative lineage will help you feel less alone as you start making your own stuff. I hang pictures of my favourite artists in my studio. They're like friendly ghosts. I can almost feel them pushing me forward as I'm hunched over my desk.

Part of the art of creating is in discovering your own kind. They are everywhere. But don't look for them in the wrong places
Henry Miller
As you put yourself and your work out there, you will run into your fellow knuckleballers. These are your real peers-the people who share your obsessions, the people who share a similar mission to your own, the people with whom you share a mutual respect. There will only be a handful or so of them, but they're so, so important. Do what you can to nurture your relationships with these people. Show them work before you show anybody else. Keep them as close as you can.

The trick is to find a day job that pays decently, doesn't make you want to vomit, and leaves you with enough energy to make things in your spare time. Good day jobs aren't necessarily easy to find, but they're out there.

We don't make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies. - Walt Disney

A calendar helps you plan work, gives you concrete goals, and keeps you on track. The comedian Jerry Seinfeld has a calendar method that helps him stick to his daily joke writing. He suggests that you get a wall calendar that shows you the whole year. Then, you break your work into daily chunks. Each day, when you're finished with your work, make a big fat X in the day's box. Every day, instead of just getting work done, your goal is to just fill a box. "After a few days you'll have a chain," Seinfeld says. "Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain." Get a calendar. Fill the boxes. Don't break the chain.

Human beings want to know where things came from, how they were made, and who made them. The stories you tell about the work you do have a huge effect on how people feel and what they understand about your work, and how people feel and what they understand about your work effects how they value it.

The number one rule of the Internet: People are lazy. If you don't include a link, no one can click it. Attribution without a link online borders on useless: 99.9 percent of people are not going to bother Googling someone's name.

The computer brings out the uptight perfectionist in us - we start editing ideas before we have them.

If you ever find that you're the most talented person in the room, you need to find another room.

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

The right constraints can lead to your very best work. My favorite example? Dr. Seuss wrote The Cat in the Hat with only 236 different words, so his editor bet him he couldn't write a book with only 50 different words. Dr. Seuss came back and won the bet with Green Eggs and Ham, one of the bestselling children's books of all time.

Obituaries are like near-death experiences for cowards.

Every artist gets asked the question, "Where do you get your ideas?" The honest artist answers, "I steal them.

If you just mimic the surface of somebody's work without understanding where they are coming from, your work will never be anything more than a knockoff.

The art of holding on to money is all about saying no to consumer culture. Saying no to takeout, $4 lattes, and that shiny new computer when the old one still works fine.

you want attention only after you're doing really good work. There's no pressure when you're unknown. You can do what you want. Experiment. Do things just for the fun of it. When you're unknown, there's nothing to distract you from getting better.

Stock and flow" is an economic concept that writer Robin Sloan has adapted into a metaphor for media: "Flow is the feed. It's the posts and the tweets. It's the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It's the content you produce that's as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today.

The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes. - Annie Dillard

Comments outnumber ideas.

All you need is a little space and a little time - a place to work, and some time to do it; a little self-imposed solitude and temporary captivity.

Don't talk to people you don't want to talk to, and don't talk about stuff you don't want to talk about.

Learn about money as soon as you can.

The thing is, you can cut off a couple passions and only focus on one, but after a while, you'll start to feel phantom limb pain.

Chew on one thinker-writer, activist, role model- you really love. Study everything there is to know about that thinker. Then find three people the thinker loved and find out everything about them. Repeat this as many times as you can. Climb up the tree as far as you can go. Once you built your tree, it's time to start your own branch.

Don't worry about unity from piece to piece - what unifies all of your work is the fact that you made it.

You don't 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.

You can turn your flow into stock.

Google everything. I mean everything. Google your dreams, Google your problems. Don't ask a question before you Google it. You'll either find the answer or you'll come up with a better question.

And Conan O'Brien tried to be David Letterman but ended up Conan O'Brien. In O'Brien's words, It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique.

Show just a little bit of what you're working on.

Genealogy of ideas. You don't 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.

Try it: Instead of keeping a rejection file, keep a praise file. Use it sparingly - don't get lost in past glory - but keep it around for when you need the lift.

People love it when you give your secrets away, and sometimes, if you're smart about it, they'll reward you by buying the things you're selling.

Online, everyone - the artist and the curator, the master and the apprentice, the expert and the amateur - has the ability to contribute something.

Mental scrapbooks form our tastes, and our tastes influence our work.

Inertia is the death of creativity

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

Complain about the way other people make software by making software.

Write the kind of story you like best - write the story you want to read.

It takes a lot of energy to be creative. You don't have that energy if you waste it on other stuff.

Relax and breathe. The trouble with imaginative people is that we're good at picturing the worst that could happen to us. Fear is often just the imagination taking a wrong turn. Bad criticism is not the end of the world. As far as I know, no one has ever died from a bad review. Take a deep breath and accept whatever comes.

The world is changing at such a rapid rate that it's turning us all into amateurs. Even for professionals, the best way to flourish is to retain an amateur's spirit and embrace uncertainty and the unknown.

Inertia is the death of creativity. You have to stay in the groove. When you get out of the groove, you start to dread the work, because you know it's going to suck for a while - it's going to suck until you get back into the flow.

I don't know for sure what kinds of flowers I'm planting with my days on this planet, but I intend to find out, and so should you.

When you get rid of old material, you push yourself further and come up with something better.

You don't put yourself online only because you have something to say - you can put yourself online to find something to say.

If you feel like you have two or three real passions, don't pick and choose between them. Don't discard. Keep all your passions in your life.

Good can be a stifling word, a word that makes you hesitate and stare at a blank page and second-guess yourself and throw stuff in the trash. What's important is to get your hands moving and let the images come. Whether it's good or bad is beside the point. Make art.

The golden rule is even more golden in our hyperconnected world. An important lesson to learn: If you talk about someone on the Internet, they will find out. Everybody has a Google alert on their name.

Social media sites are the perfect place to share daily updates. Don't worry about being on every platform; pick and choose based on what you do and the people you're trying to reach.

Take time to be bored. One time I heard a coworker say, When I get busy, I get stupid.

You're only going to be as good as the people you surround yourself with.

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.

The best advice is not to write what you know, it's to write what you like. Write the kind of story you like best - write the story you want to read. The same principle applies to your life and your career:

If you want to be more effective when sharing yourself and your work, you need to become a better storyteller.

The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act,

Not everybody will get it. People will misinterpret you and what you do. They might even call you names. So get comfortable with being misunderstood, disparaged, or ignored
the trick is to be too busy doing your work to care.

Remember: Even The Beatles started as a cover band.

Think about what you have to share that could be of some value to people. Share a handy tip you've discovered while working. Or a link to an interesting article. Mentition a good book you're reading.

Keep all your passions in your life.

But whatever the nature of your work, there is an art to what you do, and there are people who would be interested in that art, if only you presented it to them in the right way.

Make stuff you love and talk about stuff you love and you'll attract people who love that kind of stuff. It's that simple.

What to copy is a little bit trickier. Don't just steal the style, steal the thinking behind the style.

The minute you stop wanting something you get it. - Andy Warhol Chain-smoking

You and I will be around a lot longer than Twitter, and nothing substitutes face to face. - Rob Delaney It

You don't want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes.

If you look to artists who've managed to achieve lifelong careers, you detect the same pattern: They all have been able to persevere, regardless of success or failure.

The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life. - Jessica Hische

If you have one person you're influenced by, everyone will say you're the next whoever. But if you rip off a hundred people, everyone will say you're so original.

To be on brand is to be 100% certain of who you are and what you do, and certainly, in art and in life, is not only completely overrated, it is also a roadblock to discovery. Uncertainty is the very thing that art thrives on.

Validation is for parking.

If we're 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 from it,

It's so important to have a hobby. A hobby is something creative that's just for you. You don't try to make money or get famous off it, you just do it because it makes you happy. A hobby is something that gives you but doesn't take.

Maira Kalman says, Avoiding work is the way to focus my mind.

Usually, when we talk about creativity, it's about self-expression, which is great, but for work to be art or design, there has to be someone on the other end. The audience makes the work come alive.

Like one of his heroes, Tom Waits, whenever Yorke feels like his songwriting is getting too comfortable or stale, he'll pick up an instrument he doesn't know how to play and try to write with it. This is yet another trait of amateurs - they'll use whatever tools they can get their hands on to try to get their ideas into the world. "I'm an artist, man," said John Lennon. "Give me a tuba, and I'll get you something out of it.

The writer Wilson Mizner said if you copy from one author, it's plagiarism, but if you copy from many, it's research. I

the only way to find your voice is to use it.

Scenius." Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals - artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers - who make up an "ecology of talent.

You're never "keeping it real" with your lack of punctuation and proofreading, you're keeping it unintelligible.

A wonderful flaw about human beings is that we're incapable of making perfect copies. Our failure to copy our heroes is where we discover where our own thing lives. That is how we evolve.

How does an artist look at the world? First, you figure out what's worth stealing, then you move on to the next thing. That's about all there is to it. When you look at the world this way, you stop worrying about what's "good" and what's "bad" - there's only stuff worth stealing, and stuff that's not worth stealing.

What Now? Talk a walk Start your swipe file Go to the library Buy a notebook and use it Get yourself a calendar Start your logbook Give a copy of this book away Start a blog Take a nap

Dress for the job you want, not the job you have, and you have to start doing the work you want to be doing.

Life is a lonely business

Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We don't out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying.

Do good work and share it with people.

The "lone genius" myth: An individual with superhuman talents appears out of nowhere at certain points in history, free of influences or precedent, with a direct connection to God or The Muse.