The book that will make you finally get started on pretty much anything—and you can read it in a day
If you have a project you’ve been meaning to start, a hobby you’ve been meaning to learn, or if you simply want to be doing something more with your life, then this is the book that will finally make you get up and do it.
More accurately, it’s three books—the Steal Like an Artist triology by Austin Kleon. These are three short, visual books that you can read all together in a single day. I first heard of these books when I watched Ali Abdaal’s video titled 3 Books That Changed My Life.
If you like listening to your books, you can listen to the entire trilogy as an audiobook in just four and a half hours.
It’s hard to overstate how much this book impacted me. Now, this is not the kind of book that’ll reveal something new to you that you didn’t know before—it’s the kind of book that will phrase things you probably already knew in such a way that completely changes your perspective. It will change your understanding of what it means to be creative.
This is the kind of book I’d recommend to pretty much anyone who wants to make something.
Here are the most important lessons I learned from this book.
1. Look at the world like an artist.
Like Pablo Picasso said, “art is theft.” No idea is completely new or original. Artists create by stealing. New ideas are generated by stealing old ideas and making something new out of them.
The first advice I took away from the book is to look at the world like an artist. Become a collector of ideas. Figure out what’s worth stealing and what isn’t. Ideas can be found in anything and everything, from movies to music to conversations—even in architecture, street signs, random objects.
It’s important to be selective in what you collect. Your job is to collect good ideas, and then let yourself be influenced by them.
It’s also important to have a place to store your ideas. Keep a swipe file: a collection of notes or little ideas that you can revisit later and steal from. Your swipe file can be digital or analog—the important thing is to always have something on you that you can use to take notes to add to your swipe file.
2. Devour information.
As someone who googles everything, this is advice I can support wholeheartedly. Search anything and everything. Find out more about everything that comes your way. It’s surprising what you can learn that ends up informing your worldview, inspiring you, and sometimes even changing the course of your life.
“Whether you’re in school or not, it’s always your job to get yourself an education.”
3. You’re ready. Start making stuff.
This is the single most valuable piece of advice I got from this book.
Don’t wait till you know who you are to start making stuff. You become who you are through making stuff.
Don’t wait until you’ve figured out your style, your niche, your target audience, or the exact shape of the thing you want to create. These are the things you only figure out by creating.
Also, understand that you don’t have to be a genius to create something. There’s a healthier way to think about creativity. Creativity doesn’t come from lone genius. It’s birthed from the interactions within a group of creative individuals.
Forget being a genius. Be an amateur. Embrace that identity. Embrace the fact that you have little to lose. Embrace the fact that no one knows about you yet or cares about what you’re creating. Embrace your obscurity. Obscurity means you’re allowed to experiment, to take chances, to make mistakes, with hardly anyone noticing.
This was something I needed to hear. I need reassurance that I’m allowed to do things without being great at them. I can write without being a good writer. It’s through writing that I can become a good writer.
Just get started. You’re ready.
4. If you don’t know where to start, start by copying.
Study your heroes. Study the creators whose work you admire. If you don’t know where to start, start by copying the work of your heroes, the way children learn the alphabet by copying letters. Like Salvador Dali said, “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”
The key to copying well is to copy several of your heroes at once. It’s in failing to become an exactly replica of any of them that you succeed in becoming something different to all of them—your own kind of creator, with your own unique voice.
5. Do the things you find yourself doing when you’re procrastinating.
The best things you’ll end up creating are likely to come out of your hobbies—the things you do with your time that you aren’t getting paid to do. These are the areas where you’ll probably end up creating something new, interesting, and worth sharing with the world.
Practice “productive procrastination”. Give time and attention to your hobbies—all of them. Don’t feel the need to neglect some of your interests to focus on others. Different hobbies help you stay engaged and interested, and they can also interact with one another and inspire you to create something unique.
“The work that you do while you procrastinate is probably the work that you should be doing for the rest of your life.”
6. Establish a daily routine, and stick to it.
A day is a unit of time that you can wrap your head around. Don’t think too much about your final product, when it will be done, or whether or not it will be a success. Focus on doing good work, each day.
As Kenneth Goldsmith said, “if you do something for a little bit of time each day, you end up with something that’s massive.”
7. Become a documentarian of your own work.
If you think you don’t have anything worth documenting, you’re probably wrong. Whatever you’re doing, however you’re spending your days, there is something about your process that others can learn from. As Kleon puts it, “whatever the nature of your work, there is an art to what you do.”
Scoop up the small bits and pieces of your work and make out of them something other people may find interesting or relevant. Become a storyteller. Learn to tell the story of your work.
8. Share your work with people. Give your secrets away.
Do good work, and put it on the internet. Give your secrets away. Share your learnings. Build sharing into your routine. Register your own domain name, even if you don’t know what you’re going to put on it yet.
Don’t just share when you have something to say, you can share in order to find something to say.
Don’t wait till you have a final product to share—sharing your process is just as valuable as sharing your end product. Share a sketch, a section, an idea, a question. Let people connect the dots, learn from your experiences, and maybe inspire your process.
Don’t feel timid or embarrassed of sharing your work. Your presence on the internet is a way of self-invention, not self-promotion. Sharing isn’t an act of vanity, it’s an act of generosity. As Kleon puts it, “as soon as you learn something new, turn around and teach it to people.”
9. Your day job doesn’t have to be a liability. It can be an opportunity.
This advice completely changed my attitude towards my job. For a long time, I was stuck seeing my day job as something I needed to do until I can make money doing the thing I actually want to do, which is content creation and education. The time I had to spend working felt like time I was being robbed of, time I’m not able to spend on things I love.
I realize now that having a (good) day job can be an opportunity. Your job is not only a source of income allowing you to create whatever you want in your extra time, it’s also an opportunity to interact with the world, and to learn skills that can supplement your creative process. And these are things that you need a lot more than you need time.
In fact, having a limited amount of time left in the day for your own projects can keep you interested and motivated to work on them.
10. Give proper credit.
Don’t rob your audience of the chance to discover the things you’ve discovered. Give credit to the artists you steal from. Treat their work like you would have your own work treated.
11. Pay it forward. Become interesting by being interested.
If you want people to read your writings, then read other people’s writings. If you want them to listen to your music, be interested in other people’s music. Don’t just create—appreciate the creations of others. Contribute to the community that’s making your work a success. The best way to be interesting is to be interested.
