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Name: Keep Going
Rating: 4.6 (188 reviews)
Author: Austin Kleon

Austin Kleon

10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad

4.6 (188 ratings)

24 mins

Topics

Inspiration Creative Flow

Table of Contents

Keep Going
Summary of 8 key ideas

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What’s in it for me? Learn how to rekindle, fuel and protect your creativity.

If you do creative work in your personal or professional life, there are good days and bad days – not to mention weeks, months or even years. Sometimes, you feel full of inspiration, confidence and love for what you do. But other times, you feel completely the opposite way – uninspired, doubtful and disillusioned with your work.

When you’re going through one of these dry spells, the experience can be agonizing. You might find yourself hitting your head against a proverbial wall over and over again. In your darkest moments, you might even feel tempted to give up on your work.

In times like these, you need to find a way to keep going – and that’s what these blinks are all about. By diving into them, you’ll learn a wide variety of tips and techniques for re-sparking your creativity when it flickers or fades, along with ways to keep the flame alive and get your creative fire roaring.

In these blinks, you’ll find out:

what Sylvia Plath, Franz Kafka, John Steinbeck and Goethe all shared in common;
why you should stop waiting to “arrive” as a creative person; and
how to build something called a Bliss Station.

Establish a routine to make sure you show up for your work, regardless of how creative you’re feeling.

Let’s start with a healthy dose of realism. No matter how many tricks you put up your sleeve, you’re always going to experience ups and downs in your creative work. You can promote the ups and mitigate the downs, but your creativity is still going to ebb and flow. You can influence it, but you can’t control it.

What you can control is whether you show up for your work, ready to receive the current of creativity that comes your way, regardless of its strength. It could turn out to be a mighty rush or a pathetic trickle, but either way, you have to be there in order to harness it as best you can. And you have to keep doing that day after day, metaphorical rain or shine. After all, there’s no chance of having a good work day if you’re not having any work days at all!

To make sure you show up for your work, there’s a time-tested solution that’s been the key to many creative people’s success: establishing a daily routine. Yes, that means following a work schedule. But it can also mean having certain habits and rituals that help you get into the mood to do your work.

There’s a wide range of possibilities. Sylvia Plath wrote early in the morning, before her children woke up. Franz Kafka wrote late at night, after his family went to sleep. John Steinbeck sharpened a dozen pencils before sitting down to write. Goethe smelled rotten apples to get his juices flowing. Hey, whatever floats your boat!

Just remember: it’s your boat you need to float. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution here. Your routine needs to be tailored to your specific needs, circumstances and personality. When do you have time to do your work? Are you a night owl or an early bird? What gets you in the mood? In designing your routine, these are the sorts of questions you’ll have to answer for yourself.

Now, if you’re a free-spirited creative-type, the regimentation of a routine might seem rather off-putting at first. But look at it this way: the point of a routine isn’t to take your freedom away. To the contrary, it’s to give you the freedom to pursue your creative passions. A routine secures you a regular period of time for creative work, protected from the busyness of the rest of your life.

Disconnect from intrusions to give yourself the time and space to do your creative work.

If you want to do creative work, you need time and space to focus on it. But in today’s hectic world, it can be hard to find some peace and quiet.

To escape the chaos of modern life, you can follow the lead of writer and literary scholar Joseph Campbell, and build what he called a Bliss Station. In its most tangible form, a Bliss Station is a silent and secluded place where you go to do your work – perhaps a special room or a garage.

To support your creativity, harness the power of making lists, tidying and sleeping.

To protect your creativity from the hecticness of modern life, you’re now armed with a Bliss Station and some healthy habits of disconnection. In this blink, we’ll look at some other simple things you can do to lend some order to the chaos around you – and maybe get some inspiration in the process!

The first is to make lists. There’s the classic to-do list, but there are many other possibilities. The visual artist David Shrigley keeps a list of things he wants to draw; that way, when it’s time to work, he’s never at a loss for ideas of what to draw next. The writer Steven Johnson keeps a list of ideas to come back to someday, and he reviews it for inspiration every couple of months. And the English rock band The Wire defined their artistic vision by writing a list of things they wouldn’t do: solos, “rocking out” and ending songs on choruses, for example.

To protect your creativity, avoid monetizing it entirely or becoming too obsessed with popularity.

“Do what you love.”

Many of us have internalized that often-repeated message, and it’s become one of the main career aspirations of our time. If you haven’t already achieved it, imagine landing a job where you get paid to pursue your creative interests. Or imagine being able to support yourself by selling your work online. To many people, those scenarios sound like dreams come true.

Focus less on being a creative person and more on doing creative things, and let go of the idea of “arriving.”

In the previous blink, we looked at focusing less on measuring what you do and more on simply doing it. Now we’re going to look at the problem with the ultimate measure of them all: whether or not you’ve “arrived” as an “official” writer, painter, filmmaker or whatever you’re aspiring to be.

This is part of an unfortunate tendency to focus on the nouns, rather than the verbs of creative work. For example, “sculptor,” “dancer,” and “singer” – all of those titles are nouns. The corresponding verbs are the actual activities of sculpting, dancing and singing.

To reignite your creativity, reconnect with a sense of playfulness.

Alright, so you need to focus more on the verbs and less on the nouns of your creative work. But how do you actually do that?

Well, if you want to take a master class on the subject, just watch some young children doing art. They’re natural-born experts at valuing verbs over nouns. Not only could they hardly care less about being an official artist, but they often don’t even care about the final product of their work!

You don’t need an extraordinary life to do extraordinary creative work.

Imagine if you could magically make your life ten times cooler than it currently is. Your neighborhood, your home, your workplace, your friends – every element of your day-to-day reality has been instantly upgraded.

If you could live that life, do you think it would take your creativity to the next level? Do you think the ordinariness of your current reality is the main thing holding you back? Many people fall into this trap. They think that if only their circumstances were more extraordinary, their creative work would be more extraordinary too – as if the one depended on the other.

If your creative work is making you or other people miserable, it might be time to step away.

When you notice you’re doing something that’s making you or the people around you miserable, what should you do? In your personal life, the answer is obvious: reevaluate your behavior and try to change it for the better.

That’s just as true of creative work, despite an unfortunately popular myth to the contrary. Call it the myth of the tortured artist. According to this myth, if you produce great art, it somehow compensates, excuses or even necessitates unhappiness. You can fall into addiction or be a total jerk to your family – it doesn’t matter as long as your work is amazing. Indeed, the darkness in your life can even be a good thing for your creativity; it gives you some demons to wrestle with.

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What is Keep Going about?

Full of practical tips, techniques and strategies for fostering creativity, Keep Going (2019) provides readers with a wide variety of ways to persevere in the face of difficulties with their creative work. While the text is written primarily with professional and non-professional artists in mind, the ideas are applicable to anyone whose job or pastime requires creativity.

Who should read Keep Going?

Artists looking for inspiration
Creative professionals and hobbyists feeling stuck in a rut
Teachers, entrepreneurs, activists and anyone else whose work could use a boost of creativity

About the Author

Austin Kleon is the New York Times bestselling author of Steal Like An Artist and Show Your Work! Together with Keep Going, these books form a trilogy that boasts more than a million copies in print and has been translated into more than two dozen languages. He is also a public speaker whose speaking engagements have included top-tier organizations such as Google and Pixar. In both his books and his public speaking, his work centers on promoting creativity in the modern world.

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