Austin Kleon

Real wealth

“Real wealth is never having to spend time with assholes.”

I think about that John Waters line all the time.

Only trouble is, he never said those exact words. He said this (from Make Trouble):

I’m rich! I don’t mean money-wise. I mean that I have figured out how to never be around assholes at any time in my personal and professional life. That’s rich. And not being around assholes should be the goal of every graduate here today.

The late Anthony Bourdain also had a “No Asshole” rule:

It is truly a privilege to live by what I call the ‘no asshole’ rule. I don’t do business with assholes. I don’t care how much money they are offering me, or what project. Life is too short. Quality of life is important. I’m fortunate to collaborate with a lot of people who I respect and like, and I’d like to keep it that way.

In an earlier interview, he said it even more succinctly:

I want to keep the assholes in my life to an absolute minimum, if not zero.” That’s worth real, real money — to not have assholes in your life.

Real wealth = no assholes.

Shell games

Shed Your Skin Like the Golden Cicada
When you are in danger of being defeated, and your only chance is to escape and regroup, then create an illusion.
—The 36 Strategies

Summer afternoons in Texas with a 5 and 3-year-old have me at my wits’ end. Yesterday, their mom was off on errands, so I suggested the grossest activity I could think of: Let’s go around and collect the cicada shells stuck all over our porch, fence, and trees. We wound up collecting over 50 of them, and then we were trying to decide what on earth to do with them.

Twitter alerted me to a Japanese high school student who made a cicada monster:

A few summers ago, we put them on the kids’ chalkboard and tried to make comics with them:

Then we put them in one of the boys’ cars and made a timelapse video out of them (which I lost, sadly):

After all this, I was reminded of Ladislav Starevich, who made stop-motion animations using dead bugs, like The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912):

Boredom has its creative benefits.

The season of lies

Back home after two weeks on the road with the kids. No new epiphanies, only fortified beliefs:

1. Traveling with young children is not a “vacation” it is a “trip.”

The sooner you understand and accept this the sooner you can lower your expectations accordingly. My kids are, I think, wonderful travelers, and even so, traveling with them is beyond exhausting.

2. Photos can say whatever we want them to say.

Instagram lies. If you follow me on Instagram, it probably looked like I was having the time of my life. Nope! There was a lot of eye candy to be had, but a large majority of the trip was pretty miserable.

I found myself thinking a lot about Errol Morris’s book, Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography, and how he summarized it in these handy 8 points:

  1. All photographs are posed.
  2. The intentions of the photographer are not recorded in a photographic image. (You can imagine what they are, but it’s pure speculation.)
  3. Photographs are neither true nor false. (They have no truth-value.)
  4. False beliefs adhere to photographs like flies to flypaper.
  5. There is a causal connection between a photograph and what it is a photograph of. (Even photoshopped images.)
  6. Uncovering the relationship between a photograph and reality is no easy matter.
  7. Most people don’t care about this and prefer to speculate about what they beleive about a photograph.
  8. The more famous a photograph is, the more likely it is that people will claim it has been posed or faked.

If you’re sitting around this summer scrolling Instagram seething with jealousy over vacation photos, remember what Mary Karr says: “Don’t make the mistake of comparing your twisted-up insides to people’s blow-dried outsides.” You have no idea what kind of time anybody’s having. Images are nothing without context.

If you love summer and summer vacation, I’m happy for you. For me, it’s the season of lies. Best to pour some iced tea, crack a book, and wait for it to pass.

(Happy to be back, BTW. Will write a more upbeat post tomorrow!)

Taking a break


I’ve been blogging every day since October 1st of last year. (About 41 weeks. If pregnant, I’d be overdue.) When I began, I honestly wasn’t sure if I’d ever write another book again, but I wanted to, and I had this feeling that maybe, if I posted here every day, I’d get work up my chops enough that I could do it.

And I did it! A few days ago, I finished approving the copyedits for my next book. I’m rewarding myself with a few weeks off. Time to clear my head and hang out with my family. (And give a few talks.)

No blogging. No tweeting. (I will be sending out the newsletter, so if you want to hear from me, subscribe.)

Thanks, as always, for reading. See you in August.

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