Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

Austin Kleon encourages people to stop thinking about ideas as “good” or “bad,” but “worth stealing” and “not worth stealing” (6). He proposes that no art is truly original but builds creatively on something that came before. For Kleon, this paradigm is freeing, as it takes away the pressure of needing to be fully original.

Kleon uses genetics as a metaphor. Everyone is a “remix” of their ancestors’ DNA. As we live our lives, we choose which influences we let into our lives, making ourselves a mashup of all these things. He emphasizes this with a quote from Goethe: “We are shaped and fashioned by what we love” (11). Through our lives, we selectively collect “good” ideas from our environment, filtering out less useful ones.

Kleon suggests artists position themselves in a “creative lineage,” where they find someone whose ideas they like, then find three people who influenced that person, and so on. This is one part of staying “curious about the world in which you live” (19). The search for new knowledge is an important part of the creative process.

Similarly, he encourages people to always have a notebook around to write ideas in, and a “swipe file” for storing ideas to steal.