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

“Solvitur ambulando,” said Diogenes the Cynic two millennia ago. “It is solved by walking.”

“Whether it will ever be recognizable by anyone else I don’t know, but I feel that great new things are happening very quietly inside me. And I know these things have a way, like the maple tree, of finally bursting out in some form.”

things can get very, very tricky when you turn the thing you love into the thing that keeps you and your family clothed and fed.

PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO.

The truly prolific artists I know always have that question answered, because they have figured out a daily practice—a repeatable way of working that insulates them from success, failure, and the chaos of the outside world. They have all identified what they want to spend their time on, and they work at it every day, no matter what.

“Any man can fight the battles of just one day,” begins a passage collected in Richmond Walker’s book of meditations for recovering alcoholics, Twenty-Four Hours a Day. “It is only when you and I add the burden of those two awful eternities, yesterday and tomorrow, that we break down. It is not the experience of today that drives men mad. It is rem

Your attention is one of the most valuable things you possess, which is why everyone wants to steal it from you. First you must protect it, and then you must point it in the right direction.

Creativity is about connection—you

In her ongoing project Seat Assignment, artist Nina Katchadourian uses long, disconnected plane rides to make art using only her camera phone,