Austin Kleon Quotes

If we forget about genius and think more about how we can nurture and contribute to a scenius, we can adjust our own expectations and the expectations of the worlds we want to accept us. We can stop asking what others can do for us, and start asking what we can do for others.

One thing I’ve learned in my brief career: It’s the side projects that really take off. By side projects I mean the stuff that you thought was just messing around. Stuff that’s just play. That’s actually the good stuff. That’s when the magic happens.

Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.” — John Cleese

That’s what you really want — to internalize their way of looking at the world. If you just mimic the surface of somebody’s work without understanding where they are coming from, your work will never be anything more than a knockoff.

Whatever excites you, go do it. Whatever drains you, stop doing it.

Do you have a troll problem? Use the block button on social media sites. Delete nasty comments. My wife is fond of saying, “If someone took a dump in your living room, you wouldn’t let it sit there, would you?” Nasty comments are the same — they should be scooped up and thrown in the trash.

No one is going to give a damn about your résumé; they want to see what you have made with your own little fingers.

Books are made out of books.

I want to know how Bill Cunningham jumped on his bicycle every day and rode around New York taking photos in his eighties.

Find a scenius, pay attention to what others are sharing, and then start taking note of what they’re not sharing. Be on the lookout for voids that you can fill with your own efforts, no matter how bad they are at first.

The trouble with imaginative people is that we’re good at picturing the worst that could happen to us.

Art forgery is a strange phenomenon. “You might think that the pleasure you get from a painting depends on its color and its shape and its pattern,” says psychology professor Paul Bloom. “And if that’s right, it shouldn’t matter whether it’s an original or a forgery.” But our brains don’t work that way. “When shown an object, or given a food, or shown a face, people’s assessment of it — how much they like it, how valuable it is — is deeply affected by what you tell them about it.

Build a good domain name, keep it clean, and eventually it will be its own currency. Whether people show up or they don’t, you’re out there, doing your thing, ready whenever they are.

La escuela es una cosa. La educación es otra. No siempre tienen que empalmarse. Estés o no en la escuela, siempre será tu trabajo seguir educándote.

We have so little control over our lives. The only thing we can really control is what we spend our days on. What we work on and how hard we work on it.