Austin Kleon – Page 265

School yourself

Thursday, August 23, 2018

Some advice from the 2018 *Steal Like An Artist* Calendar

It’s back-to-school season. This line from a Frank Bruni op-ed caught my eye: “how a student goes to school matters much, much more than where.”

Here’s what I wrote in the “School Yourself” section of Steal Like An Artist:

School is one thing. Education is another. The two don’t always overlap. Whether you’re in school or not, it’s always your job to get yourself an education.

You have to be curious about the world in which you live. Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else – that’s how you’ll get ahead.

Like the RZA said, “Whether I went to school or not, I would always study.”

Whether you’re going back to school or not, learning is the verb of life, and it’s always time to school yourself.

The season of fruit, a harvest of thought

Wednesday, August 22, 2018

Henry David Thoreau wrote of a melancholy he felt in late August for the year which was quickly passing. His diary entry for August 21, 1852:

The sound of crickets gradually prevails more and more. I hear the year falling asleep.

And a year later on August 18, 1853:

What means this sense of lateness that so comes over one now,—as if the rest of the year were down-hill, and if we had not performed anything before, we should not now? The season of flowers or of promise may be said to be over, and now is the season of fruits; but where is our fruit? The night of the year is approaching. What have we done with our talent? All nature prompts and reproves us. How early in the year it begins to be late! It matters not by how little we have fallen behind; it seems irretrievably late. The year is full of warnings of its shortness, as is life.

He was one of our great chroniclers of seasons, and felt, very strongly, that we had seasons within us. Here’s what he wrote the next year, on August 7, 1854:

Do you not feel the fruit of your spring and summer beginning to ripen, to harden its seed within you? Do not your thoughts begin to acquire consistency as well as flavor and ripeness? How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had a seed-time of character?

The 5-year-old has been coming out to the studio with me while I finish up the back matter for the new book. He wrote about it in his diary (above) and then I came back from working the other afternoon and he had drawn an ad for his books. (Including the classic, How To Make Your Life Go On Forever.)

Creative is not a noun

Monday, August 20, 2018

Here’s video of a 40-minute keynote I gave during the Scratch Conference at MIT’s Media Lab last month. It was one of the most enjoyable talks I’ve given — it’s a kind of mashup of my books, and it was received by a great room full of enthusiastic people. (Followed by a Q&A with the wonderful Karen Brennan.) If you’re interested in having me speak at your event, check out my speaking page.

Self-help as oxymoron

Sunday, August 19, 2018

After I wrote a long post about self-help, I listened to an interview with Mohsin Hamid, author of How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. I had completely forgotten the beginning of that book:

LOOK, UNLESS YOU’RE WRITING ONE, A SELF-HELP book is an oxymoron. You read a self-help book so someone who isn’t yourself can help you, that someone being the author. This is true of the whole self-help genre. It’s true of how-to books, for example. And it’s true of personal improvement books too. […] None of the foregoing means self-help books are useless. On the contrary, they can be useful indeed. But it does mean that the idea of self in the land of self-help is a slippery one. And slippery can be good. Slippery can be pleasurable. Slippery can provide access to what would chafe if entered dry.

In the interview, Hamid talks more about what he learned from writing in the self-help format:

…what I liked about the self-help book form was I started to realize that in a way I actually do write novels to help myself. You know, I sit by myself in a room for several years, which isn’t a normal thing to do, and out of it comes a novel. So there is some degree of self-help just in writing a novel. But also when I read a novel, I feel like there is a kind of self-help going on there too, that I’m going beyond myself, transcending myself, I’m encountering another consciousness, I’m leaving the place where I am.

To repeat Josh Shenk, writing is self-help, because “we’re writing to help ourselves.”