Steal Like an Artist

Steal Like an Artist

Author: Austin Kieon Created time: March 20, 2021 11:47 PM Page No.: 160 Progress: ✔️

What I am going to to do after reading it?

• Say good thing to people on twitter. Write a blog post about someone you like.
• See other people ideas to copy from online.
• Make a folder and put the when people say valuable thing to you.

Points

• Life in general.
  • Keep good reply, comment & post about you in a "Nice People" folder. And delete the trolls content immediately.
  • Don’t ask a question before you Google it.
  • 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.
• Why being unknown is good thing.
  • There’s no pressure when you’re unknown.
  • You can do what you want.
  • You can experiment.
  • Do things just for the fun of it.
  • There’s nothing to distract you from getting better.
  • You don't have to show anyone you can be yourself.
• How to make people love your idea?
  • The best way to make friends on the Internet? Say nice things about them.
  • Copy the people you want to become and admire.
  • People love it when you give your secrets away, and sometimes, if you’re smart about it, they’ll reward you.
  • Write a blog post about someone’s work that you admire and link to their site.
  • Answer a question they’ve asked, solve a problem for them, or improve on their work and share it online.
  • Show your appreciation without expecting anything in return.
• How to improve the idea?
  • When idea gets better share with people.
  • If don't like the idea move on to next idea.
  • Act like what you want to become in the feature.
  • Write about what you love & like not what you know.
• How to make idea?
  • Every good ideas is the mixer of old ideas. It is like remix.
  • Collect good ideas, mix them one by one.
  • If you copy and mix hundreds of people idea you will become original.
  • Copy the thinking behind the idea.
  • Start with as few things as possible. (example: Paint a painting with only one color. Start a business without any start-up capital. friends. Build a machine out of spare parts.)
• Artist vs Hoarder
  • Hoarder collect anything for money or follies resonans.
  • Artist collect because they know how rich it & they love it by heart.

Meaning

Stories

Dr. Seuss wrote The Cat in the Hat with only 236 different words, so his editor bet him he couldn’t write a book with only 50 different words. Dr. Seuss came back and won the bet with Green Eggs and Ham , one of the bestselling children’s books of all time.

Some mornings, when I can’t wake up, I lie in bed and read email and Twitter until my blood starts boiling and I get fired up enough to spring out of bed. But instead of wasting my anger on complaining or lashing out at people, I try to channel it into my writing and my drawing.

I spent my teenage years obsessed with songwriting and playing in bands, but then I decided I needed to focus on just writing, so I spent half a decade hardly playing any music at all. The phantom limb pain got worse and worse.

About a year ago I started playing in a band again. Now, I’m starting to feel whole. And the crazy thing is, rather than the music taking away from my writing, I find it interacting with my writing and making it better—I can tell that new synapses in my brain are firing, and new connections are being made.

“There isn’t a move that’s a new move.” The basketball star Kobe Bryant has admitted that all of his moves on the court were stolen from watching tapes of his heroes. But initially, when Bryant stole a lot of those moves, he realized he couldn’t completely pull them off because he didn’t have the same body type as the guys he was thieving from. He had to adapt the moves to make them his own.

Resources

• Linda Barry, What It Is
• Hugh MacLeod, Ignore Everybody
• Jason Fried + David Heinemeier Hansson, Rework
• Lewis Hyde, The Gift
• Jonathan Lethem, The Ecstasy of Influence
• David Shields, Reality Hunger
• Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics
• Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow
• Ed Emberley, Make a World
• Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat

Quote

When people call something “original,” nine out of ten times they just don’t know the references or the original sources involved.

— Jonathan Lethem

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”

— André Gide

“What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.”

— William Ralph Inge

“You start out as a phony and become real.”

—Glenn O’Brien

“Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy, you will find yourself.”

—Yohji Yamamoto

Practice productive procrastination.

— Austin Kleon

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards.”

—Steve Jobs

Enjoy your obscurity while it lasts. Use it.

— Austin Kleon

“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”

—Howard Aiken

“There’s only one rule I know of: You’ve got to be kind.”

—Kurt Vonnegut

“The only mofos in my circle are people that I can learn from.”

—Questlove

“Complain about the way other people make software by making software.”

—Andre Torrez

“It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”

— Neil Young

“Telling yourself you have all the time in the world, all the money in the world, all the colors in the palette, anything you want—that just kills creativity.”

— Jack White

“Find the most talented person in the room, and if it’s not you, go stand next to him. Hang out with him. Try to be helpful.”

— Harold Ramis