Table of Contents
“There is nothing new under the sun.” Ecclesiastes 1:9
Copy Who You Love
Find your role model (writer, artist, thinker) and meticulously study them. Then find out who their role models were, and then do the same for those people. Keep climbing that tree and – after you’ve climbed enough of it – you can start to build your own branch. –
Use a document to keep note of all the ideas that you would like to one day edit or make better.
Don’t wait to have a unique voice. You won’t, and no one starts off that way. We all have imperfectly ripped off versions of other people’s styles. Practice being like the people you admire, and once you’ve tried to emulate enough of them, your own style will develop.
“If you copy from one author, it’s plagiarism, but if you copy from many, it’s research.” – Wilson Mizner
But try to go deeper when you emulate, try to understand how your role models perceived the world, find out what’s underneath the style. Don’t just imitate the style itself unless you’re okay sounding like a cheap knockoff.
Write the Book You Want to Read
You’ll find a lot of advice that will tell you to write what you know. Not just in writing, but in business. People will tell you to build something you already have background knowledge in (even if you’re no longer interested in it), and it’s never made sense to me.
I think this is a refreshing piece of advice. Instead of trying to revive old knowledge you’ve lost your love for, focus on building or writing something that you would love to have, or read.
The motivation you’ll get from rapidly learning everything you need to do that rather than recycle old knowledge is much more likely to result in something new and exciting.
Another piece of good advice – timely as well – is to use physical space to your advantage. Don’t just stare at your computer screen. Create a workspace that’s comprised of sticky notes and sketchpads and notebooks, and another workspace that’s for digital work.
Physically interacting with your creations has in it an immense level of satisfaction in that it’s freeing for the brain and is more likely to result in creative insight. It’s also a good idea to flee from your work station altogether and experience the mundane and the boring.
Procrastination Can be Good
I remember reading something similar in Taleb’s Antifragile. And I’ve written on this subject before. People make a big fuss about procrastination like it’s an evil, decadent aspect of human life. That can’t be further away from the truth. The author suggests that you give your side projects their time to flourish. Don’t stand in their way.
You never know which side project will end up developing into your best project. Instead of forcing yourself to work on a single project – like a pre-programmed robot, let your mind and body guide you towards the work you find most interesting.
When you get bored, you can keep switching between projects.
In Flow, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi mentions how the creative people he’s studied are always working on multiple projects at the same time. You never have to make a choice between the things you love to do. If there’s anything you love to do, do it and worry about connecting the dots later.
He also makes the great point that this advice is especially relevant for people just starting out. There’s no pressure on you yet. You have freedom and can afford to experiment. Be audacious and compromise consistency for spontaneity.
It would be a waste not to take advantage of your obscurity. See it as a gift instead of a curse.
Set constraints on yourself to make original work. If you give yourself too much freedom, your work will suffer. Constraints can be the amount of time you give yourself, or what colors you use, or the number of words you use (Dr. Seuss made a career out of that), or how much money you’re willing to invest.
Evaluation
I think the first half of the book offers great advice – not necessarily new – but well-packaged and easy to understand, which is completely in line with what the author is trying to do.
He wrote a book about how to steal like an artist by stealing like an artist. And I think that was a clever, commendable thing to do. But I think the book runs out of steam near the end. Some of the advice starts to look too typical, boring, and not very insightful.
Steal Like an Artist is a concise, entertaining, easy read that contains solid pieces of advice for anyone trying to create something. Austin is humble enough to not waste words, or your attention for very long, and will give you something to ponder when you’re done.
Read Steal Like an Artist