“Steal Like an Artist” is a book by Austin Kleon filled with inspirational quotes, activities, and exercises to tap into your creative life. Creativity isn’t just about writing, or painting, or playing the guitar but instead is useful in everyday life, like in making something to eat, trying to decide how to rearrange your furniture, and planning a vacation. In addition to this book, Austin Kleon has other books you can read about on his website, as well as an active substack.
How Can I Summarize the Book?
Each of the 150 or so pages in 10 chapters contains ideas, aphorisms, tools, and exercises
- Steal like an artist
- Write the book you want to read
- Don’t wait until you know who you are
- Use your hands
- Do good work. Share it
- Geography is no longer our master
- Stay out of debt
- Get a calendar
- Be boring (it’s the only way to get work done)
- Creativity is subtraction
The book wraps up with some suggestions for next steps, further reading, and a couple of pages of short notes that didn’t make it into the main text.
What Are Interactive Book Notes?
Instead of me just listing quotes that I found interesting, what I’ve done in my Common Place book is to follow these quotes with my own thoughts regarding the quote. Ideas such as “is this true?” “is this like something else?” “why would this be so?” and “what does this remind me of?”
I’m inviting you to participate also. You can just think about the quotes, or if you are more inspired grab a piece of paper and a pencil and document your own thoughts. You could even leave some comments in this post!
I’ll provide an example in the first quote
p. 15 “There’s an economic theory out there that says if you take the incomes of your five closest friends and average them, the resulting number will be pretty close to your own income.”
- Question: Is this even true? How is it verified?
- Question: Is this an economic theory, or is it really a psychological or sociological theory?
- This is like the old adage: “Birds of a feather flock together”
p. 14 “Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.”
p. 22 “Keep a swipe file-it’s just what it sounds like-a file to keep track of the stuff you’ve swiped from others.”
p. 47 “Write the story you want to read.”
p. 48 “Think about your work and your creative heroes. What did they miss? What didn’t they make?”
p. 55 “Art that only comes from the head isn’t any good.”
p. 58 “The computer is really good for editing your ideas, and it’s really good for getting your ideas ready for publishing out into the world, but it’s not really good for generating ideas.”
“There’s too many opportunities to hit the delete key.”
p. 64 “The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.”
p. 82 “You don’t put yourself online because you have something to say-you can put yourself online to find something to say.”
p. 124 “Establishing and keeping a routine can be even more important than having a lot of time.”
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