Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative (Austin Kleon)

never take my shirts to the cleaners. I love ironing my shirts—it’s so boring, I almost always get good ideas.

“We want you to take from us. We want you, at first, to steal from us, because you can’t steal. You will take what we give you and you will put it in your own voice and that’s how you will find your voice. And that’s how you begin. And then one day someone will steal from you.” —Francis Ford Coppola

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Goethe said, “We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.”

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?”

Not everybody will get it. People will misinterpret you and what you do. They might even call you names. So get comfortable with being misunderstood, disparaged, or ignored—the trick is to be too busy doing your work to care.

write the story you want to read.

if you love different things, you just keep spending time with them. “Let them talk to each other. Something will begin to happen.”

When you get sick of one project, move over to another, and when you’re sick of that one, move back to the project you left. Practice productive procrastination.

Don’t just steal the style, steal the thinking behind the style. You don’t want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes.