Steal Like an Artist
Austin Kleon, 2012
A pocket manifesto for anyone who wants to make things: collect what you love, copy your heroes until you sound like yourself, and start before you feel ready.
Feels like curiosity, hope and defiance. About art, identity and ambition.
A page from the book
What if your next life decision were chosen the way you'd choose a plot?
The best advice is not to write what you know, it’s to write what you like. Write the kind of story you like best— write the story you want to read. The same principle applies to your life and your career. Whenever you’re at a loss for what move to make next, just ask yourself, “What would make a better story?” Austin Kleon.Austin Kleon is known for blackout poems made by marking over newspaper pages; he drew the illustrations for this book himself.
Books that feel like this
Where to get it
Some of these links earn us a small commission, at no cost to you. It keeps BookFeed free.
Questions readers ask
- What is Steal Like an Artist like?
- Feels like curiosity, hope and defiance. About art, identity and ambition.
- What should I read after Steal Like an Artist?
- If you liked Steal Like an Artist, try Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell), Good to Great (Jim Collins) and Atomic Habits (James Clear).
A taste of the feed
Being brilliant is not the same as being in the right room.
The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that’s the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?
Outliers · Malcolm Gladwell
What if the destination matters less than who is sitting beside you?
For no matter what we achieve, if we don’t spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect, we cannot possibly have a great life. But if we spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect – people we really enjoy being on the bus with and who will never disappoint us – then we will almost certainly have a great life, no matter where the bus goes. The people we interviewed from the good-to-great companies clearly loved what they did, largely because they loved who they did it with.
Good to Great · Jim Collins
A few degrees at takeoff, a different city entirely.
The impact created by a change in your habits is similar to the effect of shifting the route of an airplane by just a few degrees. Imagine you are flying from Los Angeles to New York City. If a pilot leaving from LAX adjusts the heading just 3.5 degrees south, you will land in Washington, D.C., instead of New York. Such a small change is barely noticeable at takeoff—the nose of the airplane moves just a few feet—but when magnified across the entire United States, you end up hundreds of miles apart.
Atomic Habits · James Clear
Read pages from books like this, one at a time
Keep reading in the feed