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Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad (Austin Kleon)

Austin Kleon, a writer of not one but five New York Times bestselling books, talks about the simple rules for how to stay creative, focused, and true to yourself — for life. From celebrating outdoors, paying attention, and worrying less, these principles are timeless yet simple that they condition a more meaningful and productive life.

🌎 Impressions

A great read. I really enjoyed it. The book confirmed my general suspicions like it is OK to not care about metrics (in fact, it is encouraged), it is OK to be a jack of all trades because you can never really tell when they’ll be useful (you can only connect the dots looking backwards), and that there is simply no time to indulge in the bitter past because we must speak, we write, we do art.

🧩 Top 3 Quotes

1. Why not turn from this brief and transient spell of time and give ourselves wholeheartedly to the past, which is limitless and eternal and can be shared with better men than we?
2. If you have two or three real passions, don’t feel like you have to pick and choose between them. Don’t discard. Keep all your passions in your life. This is something I learned from the playwright, Steven Tomlinson.
3. If you only aspire to be a “creative,” you might simply spend your time signaling that you are one: wearing designer eyeglasses, typing on your Macbook Pro, and Instagramming photos of yourself in your sun-drenched studio.

🌳 How the Book Changed Me

• I have the fear of missing out but Kleon proposes a solution to this terrible mental framework: the joy of missing out. Put simply: There can be, and should be, a blissful, serene enjoyment in knowing, and celebrating, that there are folks out there having the time of their life at something that you might have loved to, but are simply skipping.
• Contentment > Materially Wealthy
• The vanities of social media is a dangerous thing to take seriously. Be free, post your work earnestly and expect nothing in return. After all, the best things in life come by a surprise.
• In a world where you’re supposed to stick and defend your ideas with your life, it’s alright to have many passions. Take politics, for example. If a politician changes their mind publicly, it’s a sign of weakness. A sign of defeat. And you don’t want to change your mind too much, heaven forbid, because then you’re wishy-washy.
• Paying attention is important because you’re only going to be as good as the people you surround yourself with. In the digital space, that means following the best people online — the people who are way smarter and better than you, the people who are doing the really interesting work. Pay attention to what they’re talking about, what they’re doing, what they’re linking to.”

📒 Summary + Notes

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• ❤️ The important thing is that you show your appreciation without expecting anything in return, and that you get new work out of the appreciation.
• 🏋🏼‍♂️ Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
• 🗺 Nothing is more paralyzing than the idea of limitless possibilities. The idea that you can do anything is absolutely terrifying.
• 💰 Money is not the only measurement that can corrupt your creative practice. Digitizing your work and sharing it online means that it is subject to the world of online metrics: website visits, likes, favorites, shares, reblogs, retweets, follower counts, and more.
• 💸 It’s easy to become as obsessed with online metrics as money. It can then be tempting to use those metrics to decide what to work on next, without taking into account how shallow those metrics really are.
• 🌳 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. (TL;DR — don’t turn EVERYTHING you do into an economic activity. Leave some to feed you creatively)
• 🌤 Draw the same tree every week for a year. Take up casual astronomy. Watch the sun rise and set for a week. Observe the moon every night for a few cycles. Try to get a feel for nonmechanical time, and see if it recalibrates you and changes how you feel about your progress.
• 🩹 This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art. (Toni Morrison)
• 👵🏼 I ignore every “35 under 35” list published. I’m not interested in annuals. I’m interested in perennials. I only want to read the “8 over 80” lists. I don’t want to know how a thirty-year-old became rich and famous; I want to hear how an eighty-year-old spent her life in obscurity, kept making art, and lived a happy life. I want to know how Bill Cunningham jumped on his bicycle every day and rode around New York taking photos in his eighties. I want to know how Joan Rivers was able to tell jokes up until the very end. I want to know how in his nineties, Pablo Casals still got up every morning and practiced his cello.

Thanks for reading :) If you enjoyed this article, you might like the previous one.

This publication is a collection of my books on my desk lamp (hence, Desklamp Notes) where I compile it to include the summary, notes and highlights.

Thanks to Ali Abdaal — where I took the format of this article.

Download the free PDF/ EPUB version here. Read more here if you want to know how I read millions of books for free.