10 things nobody told you about being creative - Autin Kleon
Art is theft - Pablo Picasso
All advice is autobiographical. When people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past.
First, you figure out what’s worth stealing, then you move on to the next thing!!
Steal like an artist
All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original.
original
French writer André Gide: “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again” again
- What’s originality? - Undetected plagiarism. (William Ralph Inge)
The Genealogy of Ideas
Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas.
A good example is genetics:
You are a remix of your dad and mom and all of your ancestors.
○ You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life.
The artist is a collector - they collect selectively
•} Garbage in, Garbage out {•
Your job is to collect good ideas.
-> Select only things to steal from that speaks to your soul. If you do this, your work will be authentic. (Jim Jarmusch)
Good method for studying:
- If you try to learn the history of your discipline all at once, you’ll choke. Instead: chew on one person - thinker, writer, activist, artist, role model - you really love. Study everything there is to know about that person. Then find three people that person loved, and find out everything about them. Repeat this as many times as you can.
- Seeing yourself as a part of a creative lineage will help you feel less alone as you start making your own stuff tree
School yourself:
School is one thing. Education is another.
school
Whether I went to school or not, I would always study - RZA study
Google 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.
ask google
Always be reading. Go to the library
It’s not the book you start with, it’s the book that book leads you to. books reading
Don’t worry about doing research. Just search
Save your thefts for later:
Carry a notebook and a pen with you wherever you go. (Jot down your thoughts and observations)
Copy your passages out of books. Record overheard conversations.
Keep a swipe file - a file to keep track of the stuff you’ve swiped from others.
See something worth stealing? Put it in the swipe file! Swipe file
- It’s better to take what doesn’t belong to you than to let it lie around neglected - Mark Twain
Don’t wait until you know who you are to get started
It’s in the act of making things and doing our work that we figure out who we are
You are ready. Start making stuff!
You might be scared to start. “Imposter syndrome runs rampant in educated people” imposter_syndrome
•} Fake it ‘til you make it {•
- You start out as a phony and become real - Glenn O’Brien
Start copying:
We learn by copying.
Plagiarism is -> trying to pass someone else’s work off as your own. plagiarism
Copying is -> about reverse-engineering. It’s like a mechanic taking apart a car to see how it works. copying
- “Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy you will find your self.” — Yohji Yamamoto
Salvador Dalí said, “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”
• First, you have to figure out who to copy. Second, you have to figure out what to copy.
The writer Wilson Mizner said: “If you copy from one author, it’s plagiarism, but if you copy from many, it’s research.”
Who to copy is easy. You copy your heroes— the people you love, the people you’re inspired by, the people you want to be. who
What to copy is a little bit trickier. Don’t just steal the style, steal the thinking behind the style. You don’t want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes. what steal
That’s what you really want - to internalize their way of looking at the world
•} Imitation is not flattery! {•
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. incapable perfect_copy