Austin Kleon

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DON’T WORRY ABOUT UNITY

don't worry about unity

Don’t worry about unity from piece to piece. What unifies all of your work is the fact that you made it.

I tweeted this a few days ago, and my Twitter friend John T. Unger (@johntunger) replied,

and after a decade or two you'll look back at seemingly disparate pieces and find that there are common threads after all

Keep making things. Don’t worry about how it all fits together right now.

Comments

  2. Love this. Everything is connected (which is actually the tag-line for my blog). I had bunch of random jobs/careers throughout my life, and the connections didn’t make sense until I became a trainer (in my mid-30s) and all the pieces of the puzzle started to come together.

    “A wonderful harmony is created when we join together the seemingly unconnected.” ~Heraclitus

  3. Thanks for that quote, Steve!

    I’m digging this one, via Jen Bekman:

    A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philo­sophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with the shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contra­dict everything you said to-day. –“Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.” –Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Je­sus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
    –Emerson, “Self Reliance“

  5. Nice. (I love any quote with the word “hobgoblin” in it.) So much for “Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.”

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