Austin Kleon

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On solitude, and being who you are

Jeff Tweedy mentioned this Dolly Parton philosophy in his memoir, Let’s Go (So We Can Come Back):

Dolly Parton once said that her advice to anyone wanting to be an artist was to “Find out who you are and then be that on purpose.” Or something like that. As I’ve gotten older, those are the people I find myself drawn to work with and stay close to. People who have figured out who they are and are good at being that on purpose.”

Collage, the way I do it in my notebook, is the art of making connections between two seemingly unrelated things lying around. It’s a physical manifestation of the way I think. I made this one while listening to an interview with Cal Newport, who’s out there promoting his new one, Digital Minimalism.

Newport was talking about a definition of solitude he borrowed from the book Lead Yourself First: Solitude is “freedom from inputs from other minds.” (That’s not exactly how they put it in the book, but I like the word “freedom.”) According to the authors, Kethledge and Erwin, solitude is a “state of mind,” a spiritual condition, not necessarily a physical one. Here’s how Newport explains it in Digital Minimalism:

Many people mistakenly associate [solitude] with physical separation—requiring, perhaps, that you hike to a remote cabin miles from another human being. This flawed definition introduces a standard of isolation that can be impractical for most to satisfy on any sort of regular basis. As Kethledge and Erwin explain, however, solitude is about what’s happening in your brain, not the environment around you. Accordingly, they define it to be a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.

So, under this definition, you can find solitude in a busy train car or a coffee shop, or wherever. I am slightly nervous about this re-definition (it seems to me that being truly alone has a ton of value), but I am also attracted to this idea that you don’t necessarily have to be alone to be with your thoughts, you just have to be free from input.

Pete Shotton, a long-time friend of John Lennon, once talked about how Lennon couldn’t bear to be left completely alone — he always wanted someone around, even while he was writing. He’d always have the TV on or a friend around. But they didn’t need to be interacting, really. Lennon just wanted to feel another body in the room.

I’m like this. I like to have somebody else around when I’m working. I especially like it when my six-year-old comes around and we “parallel play” — we work on our own things, across the studio from one another. (I also like to have other people in the room in the form of a book. When I’m stumped when writing, I pick up one of them and start reading.)

On the other hand, I’ve been experimenting with very ways of courting old-fashioned all-by-my-lonesome solitude in my own life. Meditating by the lake. Going for long walks without headphones. I’m not sure they’re valuable to me as productivity measures. How they’re valuable can’t necessarily be measured with any kind of output or progress. These practices don’t help me be with my thoughts, they help me get rid of them. They help me empty out, drain the anxiety and rage out of my head. (Demons hate fresh air.) They let me be in my body. Without thought.

If I want to have some thoughts or do something with them, I’ll head over to my bliss station.

Thinking, after all, is not just about pushing ideas around in your head. Writing and collage are ways of thinking by pushing ideas around on the page.

Sometimes I don’t even think I can think without seeing it on the page.

And sometimes I don’t know who I am until I’m down on the page.

Oh, there I am.

Like-minded vs. like-hearted


A reader sent me a note a few days ago remarking that while he didn’t share my politics, he felt he was able to really listen to what I have to say, rather than tuning out what he didn’t want to hear. He suspected it had to do with the creative spirit, the connection you feel with another person you know is trying their best to bring new, beautiful things into the world.

I immediately thought of my friend Alan Jacobs, who writes in his book, How To Think, that if you really want to explore ideas in an environment conducive to good thinking, you should consider hanging out with “people who are not so much like-minded as like-hearted,” people who are “temperamentally disposed to openness and have habits of listening.”

I loved this idea so much it was one of the first things I asked Alan about when I interviewed him last year at Bookpeople. Here is his full response:

You know what it’s like to be around people who share your core convictions… and yet you can’t stand to be around them. In one sense, they’re your “in” group, in another sense, it’s like, “When can I leave this party?” It can be stultifying. And it closes you off to spend all your time around people who may be like-minded, but whose spirit is unhealthy. They’re just not fun people to be around.

I started thinking about the fact that back when Twitter was more or less inhabitable by human beings (some years ago), I met a number of people on Twitter, including [you], and then at one point I decided it was just getting too poisonous, but I didn’t want to lose all those friends, so I made a private Twitter account.

There’s about 100 people there. When I was deciding who do I want to be talking with on social media, I realized it wasn’t necessarily the people who agreed with me about all of my religious beliefs or political beliefs. What I wanted was people who were generous. And kind. And caring. And thoughtful. So that when I said something, they would think about it, rather than just simply react.

That’s how I chose my company on social media. I chose to be around people whose disposition and whose character I found trustworthy. So that when I’m with them, I feel good about being in their presence. And I don’t always feel good about being in the presence of people who might, you know, if you made a list of 100 core beliefs, they might line up more, but they’re just not people I want to spend much time with.

I really think that matters. If you trust in the character and the generosity of people, one of the things you can do is you can take risks in your thinking a little bit. You can say, “Hey, I’m not sure about this, let me try this idea out on you.” You can count on them giving you an honest but also charitable response. If you can find a body of people like that… you’re incredibly blessed. It’s a fantastic thing to have. Not everybody has that. When you do have it, it not only makes you a happier person, I think it makes you a better thinker, as well.

More in How To Think.

You are allowed to change your mind

Not to say that there won’t be consequences. As Alan Jacobs writes in How To Think, “I can’t promise that if you change your mind you won’t lose at least some of your friends—and that matters, because if you learn to think, genuinely to think, you will sometimes change your mind.” The key thing, Jacobs says, is to “avoid displaying the zeal that’s all too commonly characteristic of the convert.” If you can present your changed mind “as something that you have come to with some reluctance and without delight, then you should be able to convince them of your continued goodwill.” (No guarantees, of course…)

Intelligence in your fingers


Reading some of composer Robert Schumann’s Advice to Young Musicians, I came across this piece of advice for composing, which I thought was spectacularly bad: “If you are starting out on a composition, begin by working everything out in your head. Do not try out a piece on your instrument until you have fully conceived it in your mind.”


This might be good advice for a musical genius, like Beethoven, Mozart, or Robert Schumann, but it runs counter to my own personal experience with art. Very few of my decent pieces have come from me thinking in my head, as in, thinking through a piece and then sitting down and executing it. In fact, I don’t know if that’s ever happened. Most of my good ideas have come from an exploration of specific materials, a kind of back and forth between eye and hand and head. These collages are good examples: I did not set out with any kind of purpose or ideas before I made them, merely some time, space, and materials.


I know some writers who claim to work out all their writing in their heads before hitting the paper, but 1) I suspect they’re liars 2) even if they do have it worked out, it’s in getting the words on paper and then editing those words that the ideas take on any kind of real form. As a young artist, I thought the ideas had to come first before you wrote, and now I think the opposite: You start working with your hands and the ideas come.

Better advice than Schumann’s might be from a newspaper clipping I saved called “How To Draw Blood” (you could cross out the last word), in which a worker at a free clinic started out by saying, “Develop intelligence in your fingers.” Her point was that every vein in every arm is different, and you not only have to think, you have to feel your way through a lot of medical procedures. The feeling is as important as the thinking.

Best not to overestimate the intelligence in your head: your fingers have a lot to teach it.

See also: Don’t Ask.

Learning how to learn again

I continue to be fascinated by how slow, seemingly inefficient methods make my self-education more helpful and more meaningful.

Example: This week I was reading Jan Swafford’s introduction to classical music, Language of the Spirit, and I wanted to see the lives of all the composers on a timeline. Instead of googling for one, I decided to just make one for myself with a pencil in my notebook. It was kind of a pain, but I had a feeling I’d learn something. Pretty much immediately I was able to see connections that Swafford wrote about that just hadn’t sunken in yet, like how Haydn’s life overlapped both Bach’s and Beethoven’s while covering Mozart’s completely. Had I googled a pre-made timeline, I’m not completely sure I would’ve studied it closely enough to get as much out of it as the one I drew.

Another example: I copy passages of text that I like longhand in my notebook, and it not only helps me remember the texts, it makes me slow down enough so that I can actually read them and think about them, even internalize them. Something happens when I copy texts into my notebook that does not happen when I cut and paste them into Evernote or onto my blog.

A lot of this way of studying has been inspired by my son, Owen.

Even before I had kids, I wrote, “We learn by copying… Copying is about reverse-engineering. It’s like a mechanic taking apart a car to see how it works.” Funny now that I have a four-year-old budding mechanic, who actually spends a great deal of his time copying photos and drawings of cars, taking them apart in his mind and putting them back together on the page to figure out how they work.

What I love about my son’s drawings is that he does not really care about them once he’s finished them. To him, they are dead artifacts, a scrap of by-product from his learning process. (For me, they’re tiny masterpieces to hang on the fridge.) Milton Glaser says that “drawing is thinking.” I think that drawing is learning, too, and one thing Owen has taught me is that it is more valuable as a verb than it is as a noun.

I felt sure that my children would teach me more than I taught them. I was not anticipating that they would actually teach me how to learn again…

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