Austin Kleon
Write the books you want to read
The art of finding what you didnât know you were looking for
An Article by Austin KleonIn the terrific documentary about his work, The Secret Life of Lance Letscher, the collage artist points out that he doesnât want his file boxes of source material organized too much, that he specifically avoids organizing them, so that he can find unexpected things when he starts searching. âHe depends upon that chaos of stuff, of things lying around.â
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There are several paragraphs in Murchâs book about the importance of fighting against the touted âfeaturesâ of digital tools, such as speed. âThe real issue with speed,â he says, âIs not just how fast can you go, but where are you going so fast? It doesnât help to arrive quickly if you wind up in the wrong place.â
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If I was simply able to execute a full-text search on my notebooks, and pull up exactly what I was looking for, thatâs all Iâd find: exactly what I was looking for. And the real art is in finding what I didnât know I was looking for.
The tools matter and the tools don't matter - Austin Kleon
An Article by Austin KleonThough you might not think it from the comic, Iâm actually sympathetic to questions about tools and process, as I myself am a kind of process junky. I love hearing about how other writers work.
Iâm also not someone who dismisses questions about tools with the line âthe tools donât matter.â In fact, I think tools matter so much that if you donât talk about them correctly you can do some damage.
...What I love about John Gardner and Lynda Barry is that they believe that the tools you use do matter, but the point, for them, is finding the proper tools that get you to a certain way of working in which you can get your conscious, mechanical mind out of the way so that your dreaming can go on, undeterred.
You have to find the right tools to help your voice sing.
Input as collage
An Article by Austin KleonYour output depends on your input, but a lot of your input is random: youâre interested in lots of different things, and those things, occasionally, will talk to each other in your work.
Lately Iâve been thinking about being more intentional with input. Thinking about input as collage. Taking the principle of juxtaposition (1+1=3) and using that to guide your input: what weird, seemingly disparate things can you feed your brain that will come out later in a new mix?
The input collage can be subject or genre based and even better if itâs multi-media.
...Thereâs a balance here between feeding your brain intentionally and then backing off and letting your brain do the subconscious work of mixing your inputs together.
If a book can be summarized, is it worth reading?
An Article by Austin KleonIt is my opinion that if a bookâs contents can be adequately âsummed up,â so that you really donât miss anything by reading the summary, it is not actually a book worth reading. (Of course, thereâs no way to tell whether a summary is adequate or not unless you have also read the book.) Also, I suspect that the harder you find it to summarize a book you have read, the more valuable it might be.
Ignorant, but curious
An Article by Austin KleonThe method is perhaps best summarized by Mike Monteiro: âThe secret to being good at anything is to approach it like a curious idiot, rather than a know-it-all genius.â
The âcurious idiotâ approach can serve you well if you can quiet your ego long enough to perform it.
A curious idiot is unafraid to ask stupid questions. Every stupid question you ask takes a teeny, tiny act of courage. Sometimes you have to muster the will to push the words out of your lips.
The most important thing you do
An Article by Austin KleonFor the writer, your career will be the result of whatever piece youâre working on right now, and the piece youâre working on right now will be the result of whatever sentence youâre working on right now.
Finding nourishment vs. identifying poison
An Article by Austin Kleon & Olivia LaingA useful analogy for what [Sedgwick] calls âreparative readingâ is to be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment than identifying poison. This doesnât mean being naive or undeceived, unaware of crisis or undamaged by oppression. What it does mean is being driven to find or invent something new and sustaining out of inimical environments.
I would like to adopt that line as a mission statement: âTo be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment rather than identify poison.â
Because you can identify all the poison you want, but if you donât find nourishment, youâll starve to death.
- ââPoison sniffersââ
Poison sniffers
An Article by Austin KleonChristopher Johnson says âprescriptivistsâ or âCute Curmudgeonsâ â people who are interested in only policing usage and grammar rules â are âlinguistic poison sniffers.â They turn language into âa source of potential embarrassment rather than pleasure.â
Johnson sees his job as getting people to love and appreciate language by being curious about and paying attention to âwhat makes language delicious.â
This reminded of Olivia Laingâs distinction between identifying poison and finding nourishment.
Everywhere you look these days, there are lots of poison sniffers, but very few cooking a delicious mealâŚ
Almanacs and cyclical time
An Article by Austin KleonI am fascinated by the Farmerâs Almanac, and the âPlanting by the Moonâ guide in particular, which has advice such as: âRoot crops that can be planted now will yield well.â âGood days for killing weeds.â âGood days for transplanting.â âBarren days. Do no planting.â
I think itâd be funny to make up an almanac for writers and artists, one that emphasized the never-ending, repetitive work of the craft.
Don't get me wrong
An Article by Austin KleonNo phrase makes me want to stop reading more. âDonât get me wrongâ is usually a tell â a kind of backpedaling that sets off an internal alarm and suggests Iâm a) reading a hyperbolic argument (which, admittedly, describes the majority of online writing these days) or b) that the writer is just lazy. Either way, when I see âdonât get me wrong,â I start to suspect Iâm reading a piece of writing that might not be worth my time.
If you find yourself using âdonât get me wrong,â I have a suggestion: Delete the phrase and rewrite what came before it so I donât get you wrong.
Pointing at things
An Article by Austin KleonThe story goes that the painter Al Held said, âConceptual art is just pointing at things,â so John Baldessari decided to take him literally, and commissioned a bunch of amateur painters to paint realistic paintings of hands pointing at things.
As I wrote in Steal Like An Artist,
âStep 1: Wonder at something.
Step 2: Invite others to wonder with you.âPoint at things, say, âwhoa,â and elaborate.
Rationality: From AI to Zombies
- ââThe Tao of rationalityââ
- ââEveryone sees themselves as behaving normallyââ
- ââArgue against the bestââ
- ââLet the meaning choose the wordââ
- ââPeople can stand for what is true, for they are already enduring itââ
- ââDo not propose solutionsââ
- ââOne brickââ
- ââYour intention to cutââ
The Tao of rationality
If you would learn to think like reality, then here is the Tao:
Since the beginning
not one unusual thing
has ever happened.Everyone sees themselves as behaving normally
To understand why people act the way they do, we must first realize that everyone sees themselves as behaving normally.
Argue against the best
To argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates.
Itâs all too easy to argue that someone is exhibiting Bias #182 in your repertoire of fully generic accusations, but you canât settle a factual issue without closer evidence. If there are biased reasons to say the sun is shining, that doesnât make it dark out.
Let the meaning choose the word
What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around.
Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get oneâs meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.
People can stand for what is true, for they are already enduring it
Knowing the design
Knowing the design can tell you much about the designer; and knowing the designer can tell you much about the design.
Cutting through to the truth
The essential thing in the art of epistemic rationality is to understand how every rule is cutting through to the truth in the same movement.
Your sword has no blade. It has only your intention. When that goes astray you have no weapon.
Joy in the merely attainable
But the really fundamental problem with desiring the unattainable is that as soon as you actually get it, it stops being unattainable. If we cannot take joy in the merely available, our lives will always be frustrated.
I have failed my art
The novice goes astray and says, âThe art has failed me.â
The master goes astray and says, âI have failed my art."Taboo your words
Albert says that people have âfree will.â Barry says that people donât have âfree will.â Well, that will certainly generate an apparent conflict. Most philosophers would advise Albert and Barry to try to define exactly what they mean by âfree will,â on which topic they will certainly be able to discourse at great length. I would advise Albert and Barry to describe what it is that they think people do, or do not have, without using the phrase âfree willâ at all.
Your map of reality
Reality is very largeâjust the part we can see is billions of lightyears across. But your map of reality is written on a few pounds of neurons, folded up to fit inside your skull. I donât mean to be insulting, but your skull is tiny. Comparatively speaking. Inevitably, then, certain things that are distinct in reality, will be compressed into the same point on your map. But what this feels like from inside is not that you say, âOh, look, Iâm compressing two things into one point on my map.â What it feels like from inside is that there is just one thing, and you are seeing it.
What you're trying to swim
There is an art to using words; even when definitions are not literally true or false, they are often wiser or more foolish. Dictionaries are mere histories of past usage; if you treat them as supreme arbiters of meaning, it binds you to the wisdom of the past, forbidding you to do better. Though do take care to ensure (if you must depart from the wisdom of the past) that people can figure out what youâre trying to swim.
Applause lights
Most applause lights are much more blatant, and can be detected by a simple reversal test.
For example, suppose someone says: We need to balance the risks and opportunities of AI.
If you reverse this statement, you get: We shouldnât balance the risks and opportunities of AI.Since the reversal sounds abnormal, the unreversed statement is probably normal, implying it does not convey new information. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for uttering a sentence that would be uninformative in isolation. âWe need to balance the risks and opportunities of AIâ can introduce a discussion topic; it can emphasize the importance of a specific proposal for balancing; it can criticize an unbalanced proposal. Linking to a normal assertion can convey new information to a bounded rationalistâthe link itself may not be obvious. But if no specifics follow, the sentence is probably an applause light.
Reality just seems to go on crunching
I once met a fellow who thought that if you used General Relativity to compute a low-velocity problem, like an artillery shell, General Relativity would give you the wrong answerânot just a slow answer, but an experimentally wrong answerâbecause at low velocities, artillery shells are governed by Newtonian mechanics, not General Relativity. This is exactly how physics does not work. Reality just seems to go on crunching through General Relativity, even when it only makes a difference at the fourteenth decimal place, which a human would regard as a huge waste of computing power. Physics does it with brute force. No one has ever caught physics simplifying its calculationsâor if someone did catch it, the Matrix Lords erased the memory afterward.
Mystery exists in the mind
Mystery exists in the mind, not in reality. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. All the more so if it seems like no possible answer can exist: Confusion exists in the map, not in the territory. Unanswerable questions do not mark places where magic enters the universe. They mark places where your mind runs skew to reality.
Lost purposes
Thereâs chocolate at the supermarket, and you can get to the supermarket by driving, and driving requires that you be in the car, which means opening your car door, which needs keys. If you find thereâs no chocolate at the supermarket, you wonât stand around opening and slamming your car door because the car door still needs opening. I rarely notice people losing track of plans they devised themselves.
Itâs another matter when incentives must flow through large organizationsâor worse, many different organizations and interest groups, some of them governmental. Then you see behaviors that would mark literal insanity, if they were born from a single mind. Someone gets paid every time they open a car door, because thatâs whatâs measurable; and this person doesnât care whether the driver ever gets paid for arriving at the supermarket, let alone whether the buyer purchases the chocolate, or whether the eater is happy or starving.