Austin Kleon

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Two recent conversations

I had two really nice conversations recently that I thought were worth sharing:

1. I talked to cartoonist Jason Chatfeld about attention, showing up, comedy, and how to keep going.

What started as a conversation about creative routines turned into a masterclass on attention management, the importance of play, and why treating your art like a comedy might be the secret to actually surviving as a creative person.

2. I talked to Marcus Goodyear and Camille Hall-Ortega of The Echoes Podcast about what it means to create something beautiful in the age of AI.

An excerpt that seemed to resonate with people:

You can listen to our entire conversation here.

Nice News profile

A very nice profile of me over at Nice News covers a bunch of the stuff I practice and preach.

“It’s funny. I consider myself a deeply lazy person,” Kleon answered with a laugh when asked how he manages to be so prolific. “And that’s where the discipline comes in.”

He said that many people are intimidated by that word — discipline — but the way he defines it is simple, and comes courtesy of guitarist Robert Fripp: making a commitment in time. “Just showing up over and over again is kind of my way that I get over everything, over my laziness, over my apathy, over my despair at what might be going on in the wider world,” Kleon shared.

And showing up means just that. You just need to be there.

“If I had to boil down my message for everyone, it’s just to find a time and a place every day and go there and see what happens,” he emphasized. “If you could take 15 minutes every day and spend it doing something that you really wanted to spend time on, I think the compound interest of that over time is just amazing.”

(That excerpt led to today’s newsletter, “The subtle art of showing up.”)

Big thanks for Rebekah Brandes for her thoughtful questions and great writing.

You can read the whole piece here.

Tacos with Chase Jarvis

I had tacos with Chase Jarvis earlier this year and he asked if he could record part of our chat on voice memos.

I’ve written more about a lot of the topics we chatted about and wanted to link to them here:

  • “Comfort Work,” like “comfort food” and “comfort viewing,” comfort work is work that I do when I don’t know what else to do. It is actual work, but it is comforting.
  • “Creative tension” — a lot of creative work is the result of being pulled between two poles, and finding energy in the tension of that pull. Think of a guitar string: if it’s too slack, the string buzzes and makes no music; if it’s too tight, it snaps.
  • Friction, or “Resistance is necessary.” Artists need something to push against. Like when you’re riding a bike — too much or too little friction means you won’t go anywhere.
  • Subtraction: This gets a whole chapter in Steal Like an Artist, but basically the idea is that when you subtract certain elements and put some constraints on yourself, it actually activates your creativity rather than squashing it.

You can listen to the whole chat here and check out our typewriter interview.

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