Austin Kleon on How to Stay Creative

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf m Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Austin Cleon, a writer, artist, and speaker. Austin also speaks about creativity for organizations such as Pixar, Google,

south By Southwest, and many more. He is the author of the well known book Steal Like an Artist and newspaper Blackout, amongst others, including the one we discuss here keep Going Ten Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad. Hi Austin, Welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure to have you on.

I've admired your work for a long time. But your latest book is called Keep Going, Ten Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad And we'll get to that in just a second, but we'll start like we always do, with the parable. In the parable, there is a grandfather talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside out of us that are

always at battle. What is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

You know, it's very dualistic, which I like, and you know, we have b Camra minds, so it's kind of impossible not to think in dualities. But for me, I think the wolves both have their place for me. Well, what I try to do is I don't know that star of the dark wolf so much as I sort of follow where I'm trying to take the metaphor um. I don't know. I don't know any wolves in my life, but you know, I think about the parable. I'm like, where does the wolf go at night? Where does he feed?

Because well, that's kind of a funny parable because you don't really feed wolves. They're wild dogs before all. Yeah, so it's interesting. So if we switch it to dogs, it's like dark dogs. You know, dogs track things and they run around. And one of the things I feel like I try to do is I try to feed my light wolf with things from the dark wolf, or I try to you know, I try to pay a lot of attention to the dark wolf because I think the dark wolf gives me information. So I'll put it

another if you want to use another metaphor. I think a lot about poison and nourishment. So there's a lot of poisonous things that I find in my life, you know, like something like jealousy. Let's just take jealousy jealousy is a very poisoning thing, but jealousy is a fewing is also just information. So if you can kind of like hold your jealousy and kind of like look at it like an object and kind of spin around figure out

where it's coming from. Sometimes jealousy shows you something that you want or something that you're lacking, so then you can kind of think, Okay, well, here's the poison, what's the nourishment. I'm someone who's driven a lot by disgust and anger. I get angry about the world and I get disgusted by things I see. But then I take that information I think, well, what would be the opposite? So what's the antidote to this poison or what's the nourishment? And then that's what I try to put my work.

And so when people say, you know, your books are so helpful or they're so upbeat, or that's what I'm going for. But I don't think people understand how dark the books begin, Like how how all the books come from that dark wolf? Right? How all the books come from the dark wolf? And then the other wolf is the one I send into the world to greet, you

know what I mean. So it's I think that it's about really looking at the wolf, really listening to its growl, seeing where it goes when no one's looking, and then figuring out how to spin it so that that's where Like, uh, you know, it's taken me years to figure this out, But a lot of my really good work has to come from a deep place of agitation. Like I like to think of my work as being fairly positive and nourishing for people, but it usually has its origins in

something very kind of dark or ugly or painful. Yeah, well, you say it early on in this book that you know you wrote this book because you needed to hear it. And my experience is that the people often who have the greatest wisdom to offer are the people who have earned that wisdom the hard way, usually because it's something

that we've had to work through. I was talking with a coaching client about this earlier, and she was like, I just don't feel prepared to teach people about mindfulness because I'm not totally at peace, And I was like, the fact that you are applying it to the situations this difficult is what's going to make you someday a great teacher, because you're really practicing in real life with

this stuff. Yes. And I would also say that the best teachers, and I'm plagiarizing a writer when I say this, you know, some of the best teachers are the ones that need to learn the lesson. All of my books are really the result of me not knowing about something. You know that. That's the other thing about my books that I think of people sort of misunderstand is that, you know, the books come from me trying to figure something out, and then the books are the product of

that process of trying to learn something. And then the books are really just me saying, hey, here's what I've learned. But then the other thing I think is really interesting is what you said. My mom used to be a guidance counselor, and she told me that every counselor she

ever met really needed counseling. And so, you know, we're we're drawn to things in our lives that, you know, what we need, we seek out and then we become the kind of peddlers, or not peddlers, but you know, we dish out what we found or what we've looked for.

You know, the dualism that you're talking about. One of the reasons I love this idea about the one you feed is we're in a time of a culture right now where you have to pick one side where it's like, it's very like we're not really good as a culture right now with ambiguity. We're not very good with people

who have one foot in and one foot out. So, for example, it's very hard for people to process the idea that an artist might able to make beautiful or useful things and not be very beautiful or useful in their everyday life, you know. And so we're having like this cultural moment where if we get information about the artists that contradicts the art, all of a sudden, it's

just it's supposed to destroy the art. Whereas I've always been someone who, you know, the people I really looked up to when I was younger had came from really dark places, and you know, they were not perfect people in their everyday lives, and they did cause a lot of suffering maybe or chaos in their everyday life. The good thing about the culture now is that we don't celebrate that. We were getting away from that narrative that you have to be destructive in your personal life in

order to be creative in your work. But I also think there's a way that that can go too far, where we start dismissing the work of people that aren't perfect in their everyday lives. And so I think it's very tricky and it's a balance right now. And again, the reason I love the one you feed is that if you think about the culture and you think about you know, human civilization throughout time, it's usually just balancing

back and forth between the forces. You know, It's just like things get caught out of whack and things swing back and forth, and it's really just the pendulum that's right. If you want to think of it the other way, it's like the big wheel that turns. Yeah, I love what you said there. I mean I think almost certainly, anytime we correct something, we almost always overcorrect. You know. It's almost inevitable that we swing way over to one side, we swing too far back over to the other, and

then maybe there's a little bit of a balancing over time. Exactly. It's like when you're driving. You know, they tell you when you're driving not to swerve too fast because in the swerve it you get the whip lash and you go too far over, you know. So It's like, I'm not advocating for any kind of like mushy, you know, wishy washy path, but it is interesting to watch these forces come and play. And the nice thing about staying alive, which I know you and I are both interested in

very much. The nice thing about staying live is you get to see those swings, and that's where the wisdom comes from. You know, you start seeing all the swings and you even in your lifetime, and you can see a way through it. It's one of the reasons that I most wish I could live to be, like, you know, ten thousand years old, is just to see how it

all goes. You know. When people ask that question of like, if you could sit down with anybody in history, who would it be, I'm always like, can I flip that and sit down with somebody ten thousand years from now to tell me what has happened the last ten thousand years, because I really want to know. I'm curious. I mean, like I always loved I think it's Seneca, one of those old, you know, thousand year old writers who said, you know, when you read old books, you get to

annex their lifetimes. So that to me is always the value of reading is that if you can go back far enough or read enough people, you sort of accumulate the ten thousand years. It's just on the other side of history. As much progress as we make, you know, I'm always shocked at how much life stays the same, you know, especially when you're reading about you know, people a couple of thousand years ago. It's always amazing to

me how it's still a lot of the same stuff. Yeah, underline all of it, there is still the very basic human tendency to want to be happy and want to avoid what makes us unhappy, and to want to care for the things that we love and avoid the things that we don't love. And in some ways that core never really changes. Love and death, it stayed true, you know.

And I think that's why whenever I look into the future, I think a lot about the pandemic, and how the pandemic, rather than changing life, has felt to me a lot like it's turned everything up to eleven, you know, like they say, and spiraled out. It's just like everything gets turned up, you know, everything's just cranked up and amplified. And so some of the really good things are even better now, and then the bad or annoying things are even worse. I feel like the future to me looks

a lot like the past. Just you know, I think that maybe just amplified. I don't I don't know. I'm a long term pessimist, short term optimist. I really feel like, you know, in the end, we're all doomed. But I'm very optimistic about the day. I'm very very optimistic about what you can give with the time that's in front of you, that you can sort of manipulate. I might be a medium term something, but I don't know what. Anyway,

let's move on to the book. There's a part early in it that you say everything got better for me when I made peace with the fact that it might not ever get easier. You were talking about creating art in that sense, but I think we can apply it to living. Why is it helpful? Why is it good when we make peace with that, when we stop waiting

for things to get easier? You know. I think a lot of this came from being a parent, because when my kids were younger, I thought, God, if I could just get him out of diapers, you know, or then if I could just get him walking what, you know, whatever, And suddenly I realized like, oh, it doesn't get better,

it just changes. Everything changes, you know. And the minute I stopped worrying about when it was gonna get better, I just like sort of enjoyed the now most of the great philosophical texts or of the you know, spiritual text tell that be here now, you know. But I think for art and creativity in particular, it just you just harness whatever skills you have, whatever materials. And it's

very punk rock for me. It's very much like what's in front of you, what abilities you have, what techniques you have, what tools you have, use them right now, in here and now. And I will say that I've been extremely influenced recently by this book that I read that's not very well known and it's out of print, by this guy named Joseph Meeker, and you Wade this book called The Comedy of Survival. And Meeker studied two things.

He studied literature and he studied ecology. And what Meeker sort of did is he talked about how much ecology mimics comedy, that if you think about animals and the natural world and plants and stuff, they're so much adaptation going on. There's so much improvisation that's going on that you know, nature almost resembles a comedy more than your tragedy.

And what Meeker said is that Western civilization runs on tragedy, this idea that there's a great person, you know, like our dominant narratives are the person, and they have a vision, and they mold the world into their vision, you know, and they change things. And of course, in a tragedy, it all ends in blood, you know. I mean, it's always there's always some tragic flaw, something that brings the

person down in the end. And you know, in a comedy, it's usually about normal people that sort of they struggle, but they adapt and they stay flexible in their improvisational and at the end there's a wedding or there's a celebration. You know, there's strength. And Meeker's point was just that if we're to survive as a culture, it's going to take a comedic perspective. It's going to take a kind of flexible, improvisational approach to life. It's funny because I

read that book after I finished Keep Going. We'll Keep Going, of course, starts with another modern parable, which is Groundhog Day, the movie Bill Murray's in where he wakes up every day and relives the same day. And I thought it was really funny, how here's this book that's super influential on me, like two years after I read this other book, or a year or whenever. But I was already influenced by comedy. I just didn't have somebody, you know, kind

of showing it to me. And so I think, you know, for me, it's just more about seeing myself as a comic character, as more of a not a Buster Keaton, but Charlie Chaplin, but you know, more just like a guy who's doing what he can with what's in front of him, you know, and and being flexible and not having too lofty you know, just being flexible and adaptive and learning um. To me, that's just been like ter efectly powerful. And that's when you don't expect things to change.

And that was Meeker's great point. It's like, if you don't expect the world to change, then you work with what's there. And it doesn't mean that you're complacent. It just means that you work with what's in front of you and you try to make something out of that. You don't wait for the right conditions. This is what

you've got. And I think that what I just said has really been I think the real message of my work I hope for readers is that, you know, we all love the perfect conditions, but if you wait for them, you will wait and wait and wait, and pretty soon it will be over. There are no perfect conditions. And you know, my son just last year graduated college, so I've been through on the whole other side. Yeah, but but I related with everything you said, and I got

better like you. It's going like, let me just try and enjoy this scenario and try not to worry too much about the next milestone. And looking back now, I'm like, well, the worry never totally goes away, or the care maybe that's the better word. You know, the care is obviously always there. I'm not I'm not too much of a warrior in general. We had Rain Wilson on the show The Guy from Office, and he talked about something that, um, I don't think he created this, but I love it.

It's this if then thinking if this then, but in the negative sense, if I just had this, then I would do this. And you kind of talk about this at one point in the book. You know, we think if we had the perfect art studio and we ran around with the right crowd of people and we had all these things, then we'd be able to be creative. Yeah, that's like a a computer programmer type logic on steroids

type thing, if than statements. Yeah, that's literally how computers are on It's like if this condition should do this, and life just doesn't really like that, you know, it's not that linear. It's not programmed that way. You know. My wife says something beautiful that I love, and there's several pieces of fiction that kind of play with this idea, But she said, you know, just once in a while,

I'd like to live my life out of order. You know, I'd like to live a day where they were babies, and then I'd like to live a day when they were in their thirties. You know. Of course, you know, the whole meaning of life would deteriorate if you got to do that, you know, I mean, it's really the fact that you have to live it in order that provides. There's a great book about this. Actually, there's a book called Some by David Eagleman, and its Tales of the Afterlife.

He imagines all these different afterlife and one of them is that you have to live your life in a different order. But it's like, Okay, here's nine years of you brushing your teeth. There's two years and you're brushing your teeth, and then here's thirty days of you're making love. You know. It's just like, what's beautiful about the story is it shows you. And this is the thing about parables, as you know, as it chose you the meaning in your everyday life. You're right, if I did live it

that way, it wouldn't have the same meaning. There's such a common genre of writing, which is, you know, sort of letters to your younger self what I wish I could tell my younger self, because that's exactly it. It's the sense of like, well, I just sure wish at that age I could have the wisdom that I had then,

but it simply doesn't work that way. You know. I do think there are ways to help people as we're younger, to be wiser, but a certain amount of it is you've got to figure out your own and it's gonna have its own twists and turns, and that's part of the game. Yeah. So I went through this weird thing recently where my book Steal Like an Artist came out in two thousand and twelve, so it has its tenth anniversary next year, and so we've been working on the

tenth anniversary edition. It's gonna be like a hardcover, and I wrote a new afterward for it, and you know, I had to really reflect on, you know, the thing I wrote and afterward is more time has passed in between the me now and the me who wrote that book than the me who wrote that book and the person he was writing it for, because I was writing it for my nineteen year old self, Like, Oh, what I wish I had known when I was the young age of nineteen, when I was like twenty seven or

whatever it was when I wrote that book. But then there was this really interesting thing that happened. When I was rereading the book. I thought I couldn't write this now. And this is another thing people have a hard time believing if you're a writer, is that if you say that, you say I couldn't write this now, They said, what do you mean? You were you when you wrote this? And I'm like, but not that guy anymore. You know, I'm not this person, and I love his energy. I

don't know where he's getting it from he didn't have kids. Yeah, I like his certainty. You know. I read the book and I'm like, yeah, this sounds great. You let me do this, but it's not me, like I couldn't do it again. You Know, something I always try to tell the young writers in particular, is, you know, they want wisdom, and I'm always like, you know, sometimes it's really the idiot or the fool, or the amateur or the beginner

that really makes the leaps. You know, when you're younger, you should use your raw, nascent, gooey state to really play and figure things out, because you know, the amateur has just so many advantages over the professional really and the expert. You know, a lot of my work as a creative person is trying to get back to that fool state eat you know, especially in the self help genre, everyone's like, oh, mastery, you have to achieve mastery, like

that's what you need to go after and everything. And as a creative person, you know, of course I'm trying to attempt mastery and like I'm trying to put a sentence together, I'm trying to get really good at the craft and things like that, but it's really being able to go back to that full state, that beginner's mind where I don't know anything. That's where the really good ideas come from. And again this is very influenced by

being a parent. I have this idea of the curious elder because I'm approaching forty and I'm starting to think about, you know, middle age and and how I'm going to do this and the relationship I'm gonna have with my kids. And instead of thinking myself as like the wise elder, I think of myself as the curious elder. I'm very much like you show me what you're into. You know, you're gonna get the model of how I live from

just seeing me and what I do and everything. But I'm going to be more interested in you then the beautiful you know, I'm going to be the curious elder and you're going to show me things you're gonna teach me. And that's sort of been my m O, you know, for a few years now with my kids, and I'm trying to like continue, I'm like what you just said. But what I love is that you know, you can read all the books in the world you can. I

love you know reading. That's what I've like staked my life on, you know, like books and reading and wisdom and stuff. At the end of the day, you've got to live your life. The experience is really what's gonna drill it into I love it, but for me it's like professionally, the thing to do in my position is to be like, I know these things. I'm the expert, and today I'm going to teach you about creativity or

you know, I'm gonna sell you my whatever. And I really try to be honest with my audience that you know, I can. I can tell you what I know, which is I feel like a decent amount. But I would tell you that the things that are the most valuable to me of the things you have available to you right now, you know, like the things that are the most raw, impure and available you could get tomorrow, you know. And so that's part of the wisdom too, I suppose, yeah, totally.

I mean, so much of what you were saying and there reminded me of why I have been so drawn to Zen practice for big parts of my life. You know, that idea of beginner's mind and the sense that not knowing, you know, as a phrase from Zen, not knowing is is most intimate. It's the best state to have. And that same thing that you said there at the end two, which is that every bit of our life is the path. There's a thing I repeat. I don't know what it is.

Whether it's the four body stop for vows, it doesn't matter, but I say it, and it's Darma gates are countless. I've out awake to them. It basically means everything is a Darma gate, meaning a path to freedom, a path to insight, a path to awakening, every little thing, you know. One translation of it says I've owed to experience them, which is a beautiful idea that you know, like you're saying, whether it's creativity or growing wise or whatever it is,

we do have what we need here. That I say in the book, it's like ordinary life plus extra attention, and that's how you get the extraordinary. Yeah, everything that feels ordinary, if you can just pay the right attention to it, it becomes extraordinary. And that's what all the great texts teach us, is that there's a different level of attention. Yeah, there are different vibrations or different visions that we can have just kind of have to poke

beyond the surface of what's presented to you. Yeah, I loved that chapter of the book very much. It's called the ordinary plus extra attention equals the extraordinary, and I just think that's so great and it's so in line with in the Spiritual Habits program I do. We have a module it's called no ordinary Moments. That's the basic idea, Like, you know, the way you make a moment non ordinary

is you pay closer and closer attention to it. And you and I both quote John I don't know if you say it Arrant, I think it is you say attention is the most basic form of love that he wrote. And I've got another quote of his that I use, which is to learn to attend is a beginning. To learn to attend more and more deeply is the path itself.

I love that, you know, attention is one of those things that they're greats kind of get around to read a really great biography of William James, who of course said the famous you know, my experience is what I

choose to attend to. I just feel like, you know, the reason to read old books too is that, you know, people think that there's some sort of like truth or progress that's like set in stone, and I'm always like fascinated when I realized just how much deep wisdom there is in ancient stuff, like for example, you know, in the old days, people thought that your eyes actually shot beams out, that the way that you saw things was that your eyes actually projected. It wasn't that light came

and hit your eyes. Is that your eyes actually shone out into the universe and like a spotlight. And you know, you think, oh ha ha, how funny. But I'm very interested in useful fictions, very interested in things that, like, I guess this is kind of a pragmatic thing, but it's like, okay, what would be the behavioral result of that belief? And the result would be, well, you would feel that you had control over where you put your eyeballs, your I beams, where you shoot your eye beams is

in your control, right. You know. If you think about light just hitting your eyes and that's how you see, that's a very passive idea, it's scientifically true. But if you think about your eyeballs is something that shoot out beams and you know, you look around, then all of a sudden makes you active, you know. So I'm very interested and when it comes to ideas. And this is

why metaphor is so beautiful and history so beautiful. Gives us these examples of images can keep in our mind or stories we can keep in our minds that influence our behavior and how we're supposed to act. Yeah, I love that. What are some of your favorite ways for deepening attention like that? You know, I'm a writer and an artist and a musician, so a lot of the ways that I pay deeper attention are about just practicing my craft. So, for example, drawing. There's nothing easier in

an artist tool belt than drawing. It's cheap, it's something you can practice with almost anything, and it's something you can do your whole life. And the minute you sort of really look at something to draw it, then you really see it because you know, you think you know what a lamp looks like, but then really, when you're trying to trace it with your eyeballs, you know those eye beams again, You're like, wait a minute, this is much ranger and even more beautiful than I thought it was.

You know, my friend Wendy McNaughton just gave a really good TED talk about drawing, and specifically she practices a kind of drawing. That's um blind contour portraits where you draw without looking down at your paper, and she practices that a lot, and that's something that I do a lot to. It really becomes a looking activity. So there's that, and then like it depends on what I want to

pay deeper attention to. If there's a piece of writing that I really want to pick apart, I will copy it by hand or I'll type it out and then I'll go line by line and circle it and look upwards. You know, poems, I was gonna mention before. The poets are the people who are really good at taking ordinary life and making extraordinaries. Like so if you don't read a lot of poetry, I recommend it, you know, just start like reading. Go to like poets dot org or

some online poetry website. They all have like daily poems or like daily poem newsletters and stuff. People who don't read poetry, just you know, start reading poetry every day. Just take five minutes. And that's a different kind of attention that if you're just you know, if you're just going to work or doing your community, so you're not paying that kind of attention that the poets do. So that's something close reading copying. I do that a lot.

And if you think about drawing as a form of trying to copy, you know what's in front of you that's copying too. Most recently, I've been putting my piano back here. I have been blown away lately by how I can take a song I've heard for twenty years that I've listened to over and over again, and if I sit down and learn to play it on the piano, all of a sudden, it's a new song, Like I know how it works in a way that I never

knew before. Some more practical things, taking a walk, taking a daily walk, there's a way of paying attention to your neighborhood. Like if you drive somewhere all the time and then you walk it on foot, that is a revelation. If you walk away that you normally drive, and if you drive away you normally walk, you realize how much you're missing or not missing. And so I love taking a daily walk. Yeah, I'd say walking, drawing, writing, that's

pretty much my ways of paying attention. I practiced meditation for a little bit, and I like the way I feel, but drawing and walking are very meditative for me. As is copying. I think the most important part of my practice is every morning, I keep a diary that's sort of like half sketch book half writing notebook, and I just feel like three pages, you know, like the Julia Cameron morning pages. I just do three pages in the morning.

And I find that keeping a daily diary, if I do it right, And what I mean by right is if you just hold a pen and kind of start moving it and let things come out. You aren't just like, oh what I do yesterday, Oh I did this. One of my biggest teachers is a woman named Linda Berry, and she believes really powerfully and this idea that you just kind of start making letters and things come. And she's taught me a lot about, you know, just kind of channel what you're trying to do with those morning

pages or with your diaries. You're not trying to recount life as much as you're trying to like figure out what's actually going on, you know, not what went on, but what's actually going on, you know. And I find that that morning practice helps me pay attention to my own life. It helps me pay attention to what I've paid attention to too, which is I think it's really important.

I'm an abysmal drawer. I mean it's hard to like really look too closely at life when you're like, well, like I've got to stick figure, But no, I sometimes try and look like an artist would look like where are the shadows? Where the lines? Where are the shapes? Because it all of a sudden gets your mind to go from as you said earlier, sort of passively taking in to sort of shine in your light beams, you know,

on something all of a sudden. I'm like, oh, because I think that's what artists are so good at doing, is saying, all right, off autopilot, study this thing. Another that is good is taking pictures. There's a great book out there called Zen Camera by this guy, and it's all about you know, photography is a contemplative practice, and it's the same thing. And when I'm sort of doing the practices in that book, it's like, as I'm out and about, my brain is engaging in a different way.

I am paying closer attention. So I think art is so good for that. Well, you mentioned like how you try to look at the world like an artist might, like seeing the shadows, and and that's such a great point. Is that. You know, my friend Rob Walker has a book called the Art of Noticing, and one of the exercises Rob suggests people practices take a photo walk without

a camera. So like, you walk around and you look for good shots without actually having the camera there, and then what happens, Well, of course you see a million things that you'd love to take a picture of that only you had your camera. You know, it's funny when I carry a pocket notebook, I have more ideas. And I don't think it's because I have more ideas than I do when I'm not carrying the pocket notebook. It's

just that, well, now that's not true. I think actually having this in my pocket sort of rubbing against my leg all day, the same way your phone you get that phantom weird thing from your phone being in your pocket. I think having this in my pocket all day just to invites things. You know. Thurreaux said that you know, your diary was like a nest egg, and we think of nest eggs now it's like like saving up for

the future. No, there's like a thing called a nest egg, which is it is a fake egg that you put in a nest to get a bird to lay another egg next to him, so he thought thoughts were nest eggs. If you write one thought down in a notebook, it'll invite other thoughts to come down. It's interesting how much when you read, because I love reading old books so much, you have to really understand what they're talking about, you know, because nest eggs, like who has a farmer a chicken coop?

I mean, more people than they're used to some ways, but like what's a nest egg? You know? You know, So it's like stuff like that, And it's funny like some of my friends because I have a lot of artist friends and people who are drawers, and they talk all the time about how drawing is a different kind of attention than taking pictures. And I think it is a different kind of attention, but I don't think it's

a better kind. I mean it might be a slower or or whatever, but I think there's something about taking pictures because I love to take a lot of pictures too. I think what's fun is to just have like an arsenal, just a tool belt, just all these different ways of paying attention. And if you can ask yourself, what am I not getting? You know, Like what am I deficient in right now or like it's kind of like when you're hungry, if you think about what sounds really good,

it's usually that's what you need in your diet. You know. If you really kind of think about you're like, oh, salad, I should really like you know, like if you ask yourself, like spiritually or mentally, like what am I kind of missing here? And then you can kind of look at your tool belt and say, well, maybe I should do you know, maybe I should take a walk or something. What's all that said is like so much of this

stuff is subconscious. You know, You've got to kind of train yourself and then you do a lot of it on autopilot. It's not like I sit around in my office like, oh I think I think it's walk time. It's like that doesn't really happen. Somewhere in the book And remember which chapter, but you quote Kurt Vonna Gut saying, you know, just write a poem and tear it up, you know, as something in what you just said reminded me of that line. Yeah, And Vonna Guet's daughter was

really funny. She was kind of like, yeah, you first, dad, you go first, you know, because she was kind of goofing on his ideas, and I use it because I do think it's true. If you could write a poem knowing that you were going to tear it up, that'd be great, except Vonnegut would have torn up his poem, and that was what his daughter was joking about, which I love. But I do feel like if you can do things for the doing, it's so hard now because

it's so easy to share things. And I think, you know, one of the problems that young writers and artists and creative people in general have is that they haven't really known. I mean, if you're under a certain age, you don't really know a world in which making and sharing were separate, you know, because now it's like if you make something, you take a picture of it on your Instagram immediately, and so you know, there's a kind of merging of making and sharing where it can get very heavy. If

you're trying to make while thinking about sharing. You know, there's something about you need to be in the making state and not thinking about the sharing state. Well, we've all been under surveillance so much and self impost surveillance. I mean, we all have, like so many people have Instagram accounts and I wrote a book show called Show Your Work, So it's not like I'm you know, I've contributed to this, this idea that if you want people to know about your work, you have to show it

to them. You have to share with them and in a regular frequency and in a certain way. But you can't really do a lot of really good, raw, new, scary, interesting creative work if you feel like you're under surveillance. And I think part of the problem with having an Instagram or a Twitter, blog or newsletter, all these things that we have, there're such wonderful tools to build audience and connect with audience and get our stuff out there

and run our lives. You know, you kind of have to forget all that stuff or be able to tune that out in order to get to that raw kind of creative state. You know. I am a completely amateur piano player. I have tried to do Instagram lives before as like just fun, just like I jump on Instagram Live and play some debuc just just this is like

a fun thing. And every time I do it, I can't believe how much worse I am because I'm so like, you know, even though there's like forty people on there, all of a sudden, I'm like, oh my got you know, because I'm not a performer, and performance is a whole different thing than like writing in the studio or composing. You know, performance is a whole different thing, and so

I think about that all the time. How it's like, you know, if you think all the time about if I'm drawing, I'm like, what's this gonna look like on Stagram? You know, that's very eliminating. But it's so easy to to have happened to you, you know, so to try to like get away from the surveillance mindset, to try to get away, to disconnect from the world so you

can connect with your work. That's something that every creative person, and I would argue any human living today really needs to figure out, you know, how can you disconnect so you can connect with yourself? Agreed? I think that is so true. And I feel really fortunate that I don't know how long it's been now a decade maybe maybe not quite that long ago that I sort of with music went, you know what, like, nothing's going to happen

with this. This isn't going anywhere, and I'm just not going to care about it going anywhere, And it's easy to say that sounds like I just did it and it was over right. I'm talking about a process here, But when I re emerged on the other side of it, and I just played the guitar, and you know, I don't even anymore, very often even record like a good ide Dia I have. You've got a chapter called forget to now do the verb right. It's forgetting about being

a guitar player and just playing the guitar. But it's turned that into a true source of solace and joy in my life because I really have no agenda on it except that, like, it's very satisfying. Now in our show, we do all the music break, so the music shows up in there. But I mean, that is like the lowest form of like who cares? No one cares, you know, I mean, and uh, most of what I playing guitar never does. But it's just nice to have something like that in life. And I loved something you said in

your book. I've been talking a minute here, I'm gonna shut up and let you talk in a second. But you talked about making gifts. You know, you said, we're now trained to heat praise on our loved ones by using market terminology. The minute anybody shows any talent for anything, we suggest they turned into a profession. And boy, that really hit me as so true because when I let go of the guitar as something that might get me something, it became a solace. But that's not the way we

are oriented in today's world at all. We are all taught if you're good at something, do more of it and sell it. Anything worth doing is worth doing well or you know, or professionally or or on stage. Yeah, I mean, you know, this is something I learned too late. I think, you know, like I was lucky in that I sort of knew that the musician's life wasn't going

to be for me. Like it's funny because I used to say, like I don't know, getting up in front of an audience every night and trying to bear you know, that sounds too hard. And now, of course, you know, like a big part of my job is like getting up on stage and talking to people. But for me, it was like I got lucky because I kind of like knew music wasn't gonna be a thinking So it happened to me like that's suddenly became the hobby, and hobby has become such a pejorative term. Now, Oh, it's

just a hobby. He's just a hobbyist, you know. And at different points in time and in different cultures, I mean, hobbies are what make life kind of worth, you know. I mean the English have a much different approach to hobbies. For example, there's a really wonderful essay by George Orwell that he wrote during the war, and he said that one of the reasons he felt that the English had resisted fascism was that they were very fond of personal hobbies,

things like gardening or puttering around or tinkering. Or Well really thought that one of the reasons that the English people were good at resisting fascism was because they practiced hobbies. If you think about America right now, I mean everyone's trying to professionalize everything is a side hustle or you know whatever. And I particularly with creative people, it's like most of us have tried to turn our hobbies into professions. And so then it becomes very very very important that

you find another hobby. Yeah, that you find something outside, whether it's gardening or you know, like whittling, I don't know, whatever, it is, the thing that you can do for no reason. You said something so beautiful. It's like, once I stopped looking at my guitar, is something that could get me something? You know, get me something. Oh, that's it, really, you know, like that, that's it. Once you stop looking at the thing, is something that will get you something, then something can happen.

Like then you can really make something happen. And I do, though, I think the way out of that market mentality is to make gifts. You know, like if you're a painter and you're really feeling I think like painting something for your mother or something, or you make something for a hero of yours who's been dead for two hundred years, you know, just getting into that idea them, and it makes something for someone else, and I don't expect any

thing in return. I'm gonna take the gifts that have been giving me and I'm gonna, you know, pass them on, because that's really what the gift is about. And there's a great book about that called The Gift by Lewis Hyde, where he talks about like all really great art has a gift element, and that someone's brought to their gifts from the gifts of others and then they pass on

that gift through their work. So if you come kind of like just pull yourself out of that market thing for a while long enough to get in touch with that gift again and to kind of grow it, then you can kind of like get back in the game, or you can just pull it out completely. You know, you can just say I'm not doing this for work anymore.

I mean, if you have that luxury, you know, and there have been multiple artists throughout history who have said, no, I'm gonna work at the post office and right at night, or I'm gonna you know, I'm gonna become an insurance vice president of this insurance company and I'm going to write these wild poems and you know, poets. It was very helpful to me as a young man to look up to so many poets because they all had day jobs.

That's right, poets. Yeah, there's never been any market and poetry, so they've been able to kind of stay pure in the sense. Yeah. Well I really related to that. Not that creating a podcast is exactly a deep art, but it was my love and you know, when it became something that went from something I just did because I loved to do in it to something that pays the bills.

There is a real change there, and I consistently have to sort of do what you're talking about, which is like how do I get back to what started this? What was the fire that was here? You know, like it takes work to get back to that place, you know. I mean I've been thinking a lot. My kids went back to school, and I've been thinking a lot about

teachers and just how many teachers. I talked to a lot of teachers and they all, you know, you have to be passionate to do that because you are not going to get rewarded in a way that is commensurate with what you do. Especially in this economy. There are so many professions that that happens. You know, you're brought to it because you love something and then it becomes your bread winning and like how do you get through that?

That's a big part of the job in some ways, and very few of our jobs train us in that, you know, how to recover some of that joy, how to recover some of that early energy, some of that rawness. You know, you're obviously a musician. I'm a musician, So it's it's fun to think about how musicians do it make Jagger jumping on stage at a bar. You know, it's like a musician, you know, jamming. Prince used to when he was on tour. You know, he'd just show

up somewhere and play. You know, he'd do his big show at the arena, but then he'd show up somewhere, you know, do a set, and then leave immediately, you know, because he just wanted to play. Can you imagine sitting in a bar and Prince walk in and climb up on stage and just blow the roof off the place. I mean, it would be unbeloved. The guy was so talented. I just think about, like, it would be mind melting to see that. My friend's name is Att Thomas and

he was a Prince fan long before I was. And Matt saw him on his piano and a microphone tour, and I just think like, oh man, that's that's a that's a big regret of my life, not the Prince when he was when he was here on the planet. So yeah, but I mean, you know, it's finding those things in your life. How can you just practice? You know, it would be like if Lebron did a pickup game and print or something, you know, whatever it was that you know, you to try to go back to that

and to recapture that. I just think a lot about energy these days. Like one of the things I love about art and books is that I feel like the good stuff it's embodied energy. There's some sort of energy that's been like locked in the piece the reader. Like with books, really good books have a kind of energy to them that is activated once the reader comes and

opens it up. It's like the reader has to breathe life into it and then all of a sudden it like works, and all that energy that the writer put into it, it will be there forever, Like when you pick up Moby Dick, whatever weird, dark, crazy energy Melville channeled into that. Whoever picks up Moby Dick and opens the pace like it's there for them, And that I think is part of the magic of art, and it's

what really sustains me in my rougher days. It's trying to find you know, I've got books around here where it's like, Okay, I need some of that. I need some of that Linda energy, you know, I need some of that the Row energy. I need some of the Hackney energy. You know. It's like, go to it and it's there for you. Well, I think that's a great place to wrap up with thinking about the energy that's embodied in great works of art. Austin, thank you so

much for coming on the show. You and I are going to continue in the post show conversation, and what I really want to talk about is a chapter title called Demons Hate Fresh Air, which is such a such a great idea. We'll talk about that in the post show conversation. Listeners, if you'd like access to that, as well as a special episode I do each week called Teaching Song and a Poem and all the other benefits of being a member, go to one you Feed dot

net slash join. Austin, thanks so much for being here. We'll have links to all your work in our show notes. And I've really enjoyed this. Thank you, it was really fun. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now.

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