I was cleaning my office and found the notebook I kept when my wife and I went to birthing classes. It’s one of those notebooks that puts me right back in the room where I filled it. (BTW: You forget 99.9% of this stuff when you’re in the room.)
Keep your overhead low
“The key to eternal happiness is low overhead and no debt.”
—Lynda Barry
Anybody who tells people to “do what you love no matter what” should also have to teach a money management course.
Low overhead + “do what you love” = a good life.
“I deserve nice things” + “do what you love” = a time bomb.
A good life is not about living within your means, it’s about living below your means.
When Instapaper creator Marco Arment was asked about his business model, he said, “I sell an app for money, then I spend less than I make.” Sell something for money, spend less than you make. Is there a better model?
“The trick is,” film executive Tom Rothman says, “from the business side, to try to be fiscally responsible so you can be creatively reckless.”
The 80s underground band The Minutemen used to call this “jamming econo.” They knew the music they wanted to make would probably never be mainstream, so they kept their day jobs, made their records for cheap, learned how to fix their own tour van, and hauled their own equipment.
Live frugally so you can do the work you want to do. Save up some “screw you” money, so you can quit a job you hate to take a job you like better. Turn away venture capital money and bootstrap so you can keep control over your business.
To “jam econo” might not be the flashiest way of life, but it’s the best way to stay free.
[I cut this post from Show Your Work! because it felt too much like the “Keep Your Day Job” section of Steal Like An Artist.]
First draft of Show Your Work finished
I finished the first draft of Show Your Work! today. It’s printed out and sitting on my desk. Nobody has read it other than me. My wife will be the first. Then I’ll take her notes, make some changes, and send it to my editor.
This book has not been easy to write. I’ve been working on it since last summer. The last time I wrote about it was October 2012. I’ve screwed up in more ways than one.
The biggest challenge for me is structure. Once I have a structure, once I have a skeleton, then it’s easy to just pack on the meat. This book started out in three parts, with about two dozen chapters. Now it’s another list of ten, like Steal. Maybe it’ll morph into something else before this is all done.
For now, it’s time to sit back and have a beer and let people read. Then, it’s back to work.
To get updates about the book, join my mailing list or follow me on Twitter: @austinkleon
Show Your Work! My Creative Mornings Talk
It was my pleasure to give the inaugural talk at the first Creative Mornings here in Austin last month. The monthly theme was “The Future,” so I tried to make the talk a sort of rallying cry to encourage future presenters and attendees to open up and share the process of their creative work, not just the products of that process. (That happens to also be the subject of my next book.)
If you don’t want to watch the video, I’ve pasted my notes and a few slides from the talk below. Enjoy.
* * *
It’s weird to try to give a talk about the future, because most of the time, talks like this are actually about THE PAST. A speaker is asked to get up on stage and talk because they’re someone who’s accomplished something, so they must have something to say, some sort of wisdom or experience or advice to impart to the audience.
But I happen to think that most advice is autobiographical — a lot of the time when people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past.
Now, we usually think that the past is behind us, and the future is in front of us. This seems totally natural, right? But years ago I read about this tribe of indigenous people in South America called the Aymara, and they have this very different way of talking about the past and the future.
When they talk about the past, they point to the space in front of them. When they talk about the future, they point behind them. Strange, right?
Well, the reason they point ahead of them when talking about the past is because the past is known to them — the past has happened, therefore it’s in front of them, where they can see it.
The future, on the other hand, is unknown, it hasn’t happened yet, so it’s behind them, where they can’t see it.
This kind of blew my mind when I read about it. The past is right in front of us, but the future is behind us.
The future is hard to talk about because it hasn’t happened yet — it’s behind us, where we can’t see it.
Newspaper Blackout show in Denton, Texas
Last week I hung my very first solo gallery show up at UNT on the Square in Denton, Texas.
All the pieces for the show were done in the five months after my son Owen was born—I made probably 60 or 70 poems, threw out at least half, and kept 30.
Most of the time I post poems to the blog or Instagram right after I make them. This is how I’ve always worked, and the whole reason the project exists—if it weren’t for online feedback and response, I would’ve stopped making these things a long time ago.
But for this show, I thought I’d experiment and work the way I imagine most artists working, toiling in the solitude and secrecy of my office, keeping the work to myself, editing at the very end, and doing the “big reveal” of the work at the show. (My wife, who reads all my stuff before anybody else, didn’t see most of the poems until a week or two before the show.) I was hoping maybe this way of working would teach me something.
What it taught me is that I hate working this way! I completely take for granted what working in the open online does for me — the feedback, the sense of connection, the sense that I’m moving towards something, etc.
Since NewspaperBlackout.com has been such a big part of the project, it was important to me that in addition to my own work this show have a section where people can make their own poems. The gallery has these cool moveable walls that we could play with, so we made the middle and focus point of the show this space with tables piled with newspaper, Sharpies, and binder clips that visitors can use to hang their own poems. Much to my delight, visitors who attended the opening were already taking advantage—it’ll be great to see how those walls fill up over the next couple of weeks.
I also wanted the space to feel really inviting, so we made a sign encouraging people to take photos of their favorite pieces and post them online with the #NewspaperBlackout hashtag:
The third and final section section of the show was a sort of last-minute idea we had — originally, I was going to project a slideshow of images from NewspaperBlackout.com, but I decided instead to project timelapse videos of me working on the show. (Again, the idea was to be inviting, to let visitors in on the process—I wanted the show to make you want to try out the method on your own.)
Here’s a timelapse video of us hanging the show:
Here’s a short video walkthrough of the opening:
And some more photos (see more on Flickr):
This was way, way more fun than I even though it would be, and I’m already thinking about what I’d do if I get the chance to do another show. Thanks so very much to everyone who came to the opening, and many, many thanks to Nicole Newland, Herbert Holl, and Meredith Buie for making it all happen. The show runs until May 6th if you’re up that way.
UPDATE: I made a little catalog of the show that you can view or download below. If you have an iPad, you can download the catalog for iBooks, here.
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