Austin Kleon (LinkedIn | Twitter) is a unique kind of creative. Not only does he create his own art – but he spends a significant part of his time seeking to inspire other artists. His best-selling books have helped many a right-brainer stay creative.
His latest book, “Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad”, is all about how to live a sustainable artistic life. He was kind enough to walk through his ten tricks of the trade with us at The Mission Daily.
Every day is Groundhog Day. A creative life isn’t known for daily twists and turns. Most of the time, creative work can seem monotonous – small, repetitive tasks that can build to something great. “I thought that Groundhog Day was a perfect example of that because Bill Murray’s character in that movie, Phil Connors, he discovers that each day is kind of a gift. Instead of it being a burden that he has this repetitive life in which things are out of his control, ultimately, he realizes that he’s really in control of how he fills his day. I think that’s true of a lot of us. We really don’t have a lot of control over our wider world or what context we find ourselves in. We really don’t have that much control over our careers or what kind of luck we have. All we really have control over is how we spend our days. I just felt like Groundhog Day was the great parable for that.”
Build a Bliss Station. Make a place that brings you happiness – and keep it safe. “A bliss station is something that the mythologist Joseph Campbell said that everyone needed to have. What he said was you need either a sacred time or a sacred place every day where you’re sort of disconnected from the world so that you can connect with yourself. It’s sort of like the opposite of being on social media or on the internet. That was his big point – that you need disconnection time so that you can connect with what’s within.”
Forget the Noun. Do the Verb. “I think that the way I put it is, you know a lot of people want to be writers, but there aren’t that many people that want to sit down and write. It’s sort of like, if you want the job title, you have to do the work. I think one way as a creative person to sort of discover what that raw verb is about, is to sort of take all the nouns out of your mind. Focus on process and not product so much.”
Make Gifts. “A lot of my thinking on this has come directly from a guy named Lewis Hyde, who wrote a book called The Gift. Hyde’s theory is that art exists in both the gift economy and also exists in the market economy, and that you can make art that exists just in the gift economy and not in the market economy, but art can’t exist just in the market economy. True art needs to have a sort of gift element to it in order to be considered art. Hyde writes a lot about how the artist’s gifts are awoken by the gifts of others. You’re often brought to your work because you’re a huge fan, or you experience the work of another artist or a creative person and it makes you want to do your own work and find your own gifts.”
The Ordinary Life + Extra Attention = Extraordinary. “Attention is really the crucial tool of the artist. What the artist does is the artist pays attention to certain things and then figures out a way for us to pay attention to those things too. Really what the artist does, and I think a terrific example of this, which I use in the book, is Corita Kent. She was a nun who lived in Los Angeles, and she made screen prints where she would take pictures of advertising and packaging and she would pull out the religious messages sort of hidden in this work. She would take the Safeway sign and break it into safe way and add her own quotes and make it a piece about passage and safety and that kind of thing. So what Corita said is that she didn’t really feel like art was a very good term for what she did. She liked the term, “the uncommon.” What she would do is she would take common things and make them uncommon in the act of making her prints. I think this is what really, really great art does; it takes something that’s in front of everyone and it looks at it in a way that changes the way everyone looks at it afterwards.
Slay the Art Monster. What exactly is an art monster? “My definition is an art monster is just someone whose life suffers or the lives around them suffer in the making of the art, and that they become sort of monstrous humans through the making of their art.” Austin doesn’t buy into the idea that you need to suffer to create good art, and he doesn’t think you should, either. “The world doesn’t necessarily need more artists. It needs more decent human beings.”
You are Allowed to Change Your Mind. In a world full of branded identities and constant social exposure, it can be hard to decide to change your mind. But Austin believes that changing your mind is an essential part of not just a creative life – bit an authentic one, as well. In a wider sense, to allow yourself to be changed, to surround yourself with ideas that are uncomfortable, this requires certain spaces that are sort of safe zones, and I think that those zones require you to sort of go off brand. And I think that the place to go off brand is offline…You need to find places in your offline life that you can do that kind of work, and sometimes that’s like a journal, like a paper journal, or sometimes that’s the library, just reading all day – or sometimes that is simply finding what my friend Alan Jacobs calls like hearted versus like-minded people. Those are people who don’t necessarily share all your same beliefs and tastes or whatever, but they’re sort of interested in you, and they care about you, and they care about what you care about in a general sense.”
When in doubt, tidy up. “Tidying I think is an activity can be a calming thing, but it can also be a way to get new ideas.
Demons hate fresh air. “Demons hate fresh air is something that the film director Ingmar Bergman said to his daughter. He said, ‘You should get up in the morning and take a walk first thing, because it lets out all the demons.’ I think that exercise, we all sort of know this, that exercise makes us feel better. It releases our inner demons. There’s a long, long history of creative thinkers taking walks or swimming or doing some sort of physical activity that gets them their ideas. But I think there’s another kind of demon that walking battles, and that is the outer demons. Those are the people who are trying to control us through fear and misinformation, that want to control our vision of the world so that they can sell us things.
Plant your garden. “Creativity has seasons. There’s this myth of progress with creative people, that we’re just going to follow the straight shot and we’re just going to keep getting better and better and better, but I actually think that creative work looks more like a spiral or a loop in which you’re constantly going through all of these phases of generating ideas to working on them really hard to coming up with the finished product, releasing it out in the world, then getting more ideas again. It’s really like a loop. It’s almost like a learning loop.”
To listen to more from Austin, check out the rest of the podcast here.
And don’t forget to read Austin’s books.
