Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad (Austin Kleon)

Ann Friedman (especially for her piece, “Not Every Hobby Is a Side Hustle”),

want to make octogenarian painter David Hockney’s words my personal motto: “I’ll go on until I fall over.”

“There is no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as th

You have to pay attention to the rhythms and cycles of your creative output and learn to be patient in the off-seasons. You have to give yourself time to change and observe your own patterns. “Live in each season as it passes,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, “and resign yourself to the influences of each.”

Great artists help people look at their lives with fresh eyes and a sense of possibility.

Try to get a feel for nonmechanical time,

If you want to change your life, change what you pay attention to.

you need a good place to have some bad ideas.

The people who want to control us through fear and misinformation—the corporations, marketers, politicians—want us to be plugged into our phones or watching TV, because then they can sell us their vision of the world. If we do not get outside, if we do not take a walk out in the fresh air, we do not see our everyday world for what it really is, and