Summary

A wonderful, motivating short read along the lines of Anything You Want.

I love short books like this. This one is also put together beautifully, with illustrations and fonts that make it fun to read.

Highly recommend for anyone who pursues any type of creative endeavour, or who creates things.

Notes

1: Steal Like an Artist.

"What is originality? Undetected plagiarism." —William Ralph Inge
Instead, chew on one thinker—writer, artist, activist, role model—you really love. Study everything there is to know about that thinker. Then find three people that thinker loved, and find out everything about them. Repeat this as many times as you can. Climb up the tree as far as you can go. Once you build your tree, it’s time to start your own branch.
Go deeper than anybody else—that’s how you’ll get ahead.
Carry a notebook and a pen with you wherever you go. Get used to pulling it out and jotting down your thoughts and observations.

2: Don’t Wait Until You Know Who You Are to Get Started

Fake it ’til you make it.
Salvador Dalí said, "Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing."
First, you have to figure out who to copy. Second, you have to figure out what to copy.
Who to copy is easy. You copy your heroes—the people you love, the people you’re inspired by, the people you want to be.
The songwriter Nick Lowe says, "You start out by rewriting your hero’s catalog."
So: Copy your heroes. Examine where you fall short. What’s in there that makes you different? That’s what you should amplify and transform into your own work.

3: Write the Book You Want to Read

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?'
The manifesto is this: Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use—do the work you want to see done.

4: Use Your Hands

5: Side Projects and Hobbies Are Important

If you’re out of ideas, wash the dishes. Take a really long walk. Stare at a spot on the wall for as long as you can. As the artist Maira Kalman says, "Avoiding work is the way to focus my mind."
Take time to mess around. Get lost. Wander. You never know where it’s going to lead you.
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.
Don’t worry about unity—what unifies your work is the fact that you made it.

6: The Secret: Do Good Work and Share It With People.

There’s no pressure when you’re unknown. You can do what you want. Experiment.
If there was a secret formula for becoming known, I would give it to you. But there’s only one not-so-secret formula that I know: Do good work and share it with people.
Step 1: Wonder at something.
Step 2: Invite others to wonder with you. You should wonder at the things nobody else is wondering about.

7: Geography is No Longer Our Master

At some point, when you can do it, you have to leave home. You can always come back, but you have to leave at least once.
Your brain gets too comfortable in your everyday surroundings.

8: Be Nice. (The World is a Small Town)

"There’s only one rule I know of: You’ve got to be kind." —Kurt Vonnegut
You’re only going to be as good as the people you surround yourself with
If you ever find that you’re the most talented person in the room, you need to find another room
So, I recommend public fan letters. The Internet is really good for this. Write a blog post about someone’s work that you admire and link to their site. Make something and dedicate it to your hero. Answer a question they’ve asked, solve a problem for them, or improve on their work and share it online
"Modern art = I could do that + Yeah, but you didn’t.” —Craig Damrauer
Try it: Instead of keeping a rejection file, keep a praise file. Use it sparingly—don’t get lost in past glory—but keep it around for when you need the lift.

9: Be Boring. (It’s the Only Way to Get Work Done)

As photographer Bill Cunningham says, "If you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do."
A day job puts you in the path of other human beings. Learn from them, steal from them. I’ve tried to take jobs where I can learn things that I can use in my work later—my library job taught me how to do research, my Web design job taught me how to build websites, and my copywriting job taught me how to sell things with words.
The worst thing a day job does is take time away from you, but it makes up for that by giving you a daily routine in which you can schedule a regular time for your creative pursuits. Establishing and keeping a routine can be even more important than having a lot of time. Inertia is the death of creativity. You have to stay in the groove. When you get out of the groove, you start to dread the work, because you know it’s going to suck for a while—it’s going to suck until you get back into the flow.
The solution is really simple: Figure out what time you can carve out, what time you can steal, and stick to your routine. Do the work every day, no matter what.
Get a calendar. Fill the boxes. Don’t break the chain.
Just as you need a chart of future events, you also need a chart of past events. A logbook isn’t necessarily a diary or a journal, it’s just a little book in which you list the things you do every day. What project you worked on, where you went to lunch, what movie you saw.
Who you marry is the most important decision you’ll ever make. And "marry well" doesn’t just mean your life partner—it also means who you do business with, who you befriend, who you choose to be around.

10: Creativity is Subtraction

In this age of information abundance and overload, those who get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out, so they can concentrate on what’s really important to them
The way to get over creative block is to simply place some constraints on yourself. It seems contradictory, but when it comes to creative work, limitations mean freedom. Write a song on your lunch break. Paint a painting with only one color. Start a business without any start-up capital. Shoot a movie with your iPhone and a few of your friends. Build a machine out of spare parts. Don’t make excuses for not working—make things with the time, space, and materials you have, right now.
In the end, creativity isn’t just the things we choose to put in, it’s the things we choose to leave out

What Now?

Talk a walk
Start your swipe file
Go to the library
Buy a notebook and use it
Get yourself a calendar
Start your logbook
Give a copy of this book away
Start a blog
Take a nap

Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon: Summary & Notes