This website exists because I picked up a good book — well, three good books, actually — by Austin Kleon, three short books I strongly suggest you buy, devour, come to embody, enact, and share with everyone you care about: Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work, and Keep Going. Each book has ten straightforward suggestions to help readers be more creative, find an audience for their work, and to stay focused, respectively.
I stumbled across the first one — Steal Like an Artist — as it lay on my daughter’s bookcase in mid-July. I was ten minutes into reading it when I was pulled up short. Chapter Two is titled “Don’t Wait Until You Know Who You Are to Get Started,” and it begins as follows: “If I’d waited to know who I was or what I was about before I started ‘being creative,’ well, I’d still be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things.”
Well, shit! Kleon was clearly peering straight into my soul and talking directly to *me*. It was uncanny and tad frightening, actually. I had just finished writing and recording the demo for “Baby Bird” (which is now up in the Music section), a song about the difficulties of songwriting (I know, In know, very meta). In that song, in trying to figure out why I was reluctant to write my own material, I had written something surprisingly honest: “Am I just waiting for someone I’d rather be?” And I was about a month away from my 58th birthday, for crying out loud, a bit late in the game for such faint-hearted foot-dragging!
Simply put, I was hooked, instantaneously, all in. Here was a guy had it figured out — and had me figured out — and had a plan: “It’s in the act of making things and doing our work that we figure out who we are.” And that is what I am doing here.
You will be hearing a lot about Austin Kleon’s inspirational wisdom, I suspect, as my work and this website evolves. But seriously, buy the books. All three of them together cost less than $30. You can see their covers below. But be careful: they might change your life. They have certainly changed mine.
