The Lost Art of Living Creatively with Austin Kleon

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.

What is a good wolf which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the others a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he 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.

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.

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 feeling, 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 it 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 in 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 all the books come from that dark wolf? Right, Yeah, how all the books come from the dark wolf? And then the other wolf is the one I send into the world to greet people. Well, you know what I mean.

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.

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's wrong into things in our lives that you know, what we need we seek out and then we become the kind of pedlars or not pedlars, 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 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.

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 thousand years ago. It's always amazing to me how it's still a lot of the same stuff.

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 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, optimistic about what you can give with the time that's in front of you, that you can sort of manipulate.

texts tell us 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 the here and now. And I will say that I've been extremely influenced recently by this book that

I read. It's not very well known and it's out of print by this guy named Joseph Meeker, and he wrote 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, there's

so much adaptation going on. There's so much improvisation that's going on that you know, nature almost resembles a comedy more than a 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 there's a great person and they have a vision and they mold the world into their vision yep, 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 and they're 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 to Keep Going, Well, 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, yeah, 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 yeah, more just like a guy who's doing what he can with what's in front of him, you know, and being flexible and not having too lofty you know, just being flexible and adaptive and learning. To me, that's just been like

terrific 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. Yeah, 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'll be over.

a worrier in general. We had Rain Wilson on the show, The Guy from Office, and yeah, he talked about something that 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.

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. Yes, 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 it's Tales of the Afterlife.

He imagines all these different afterlives, 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 of you brushing your teeth, and then here's thirty days of you 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, is it shows you the meaning in

your everyday life. You're right, if I did live it that way, it wouldn't have the same meaning.

that we have. So when we just keep adding I should do this, I should do that, I should do this, we get discouraged because we haven't I really thought about what we're not going to do in order to make that happen. So it's really helpful for you to think about where is this going to fit and what in my life might I need to remove. If you want to step by step guide for how you can easily build new habits that feed your good Wolf, go to good Wolf dot me, slash change and join the free masterclass.

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 life and it's going to have its own twists and turns, and that's part of the game.

been working on the tenth anniversary edition. It's going to be like a hardcover and I wrote a new afterword 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 Yeah, 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 I'm 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.

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. Yeah, 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 fool 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 how I'm gonna 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. Yes, I'm very much like you showed 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 gonna be more.

The experience is really what's going to 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 going to 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 are the things you have available to you right now, you know, like the things that are the most raw and pure and available you could get tomorrow, you know. And so that's part of the wisdom too, I suppose totally.

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 Darmagates are countless. I vowed awaken to them. It basically means everything is a dharmagate, meaning a path to freedom, a path to insight, a

path to awakening, every little thing. Yes, you know. One translation of it says I vowed 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, I.

attention to it. And you and I both quote John I don't know if you say it terrant, 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.

progress that's like set in stone. And I'm always like fascinated when I realized just how much deep wisdom there is and 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. It's that your eyes actually shone out into the universe, and yeah, like a spotlight.

That's fascinating, and you know you think, oh haha, 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 eye 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 as something that shoot out beams and you know, you look around, then all of a sudden, it makes you active.

at something to draw it, then you really see it. Yeah, 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 ibeams again, you're like, wait a minute, this is much stranger 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 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 too. 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 up words. You know, poems I was going to mention before. The poets are the people who are really good at taking ordinary life and making an extraordinary. Yes. 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 that if you're just you know, if you're just going to work or doing your communing, 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 pulling in my piano back here. I have been blown away lately by how I can take a song that 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. Yeah, 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 as 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, Yeah, yeah, 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 fell 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 wright 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? I did this. One of my biggest teachers is a woman named Linda Barry, and she believes really powerful 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.

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.

to take a picture of it. That's 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 invites things. You know. Thoreau 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.

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 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, salads. Sure. Really, you know, like if you ask yourself, like spiritually or mentally, like what am I kind of missing here? 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. With all that said is like so much of this stuff is subconscious. You know. You got to kind of train yourself and then you do

a lot of it on an autopilot. It's not like I sit around in my office like, oh, I think I think it's walk time. It's like this doesn't really happen.

it's so hard now because it's so easy to share things. Yes, 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 can take a picture of it putting 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. Yes, 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 impose surveillance. I mean we all have, like so many people have Instagram accounts. And I wrote a book 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,

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, or blog or newsletter, all these things that we have.

There's such wonderful tools to build audience and connect with audience and get our stuff out there and run our lit 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.

like writing in the studio or composing. Yes, 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.

did it and it was over right. I'm talking about a process here, right, 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 idea I have. You've got a chapter called Forget the Now and 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 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 if you're good at something, do more of it and sell it.

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 going to be 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. Orwell 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's 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, 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. Yeah, you said something so beautiful. It's like, once I stopped looking at my guitar as 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 as something. They'll get you something, then something can happen, right, 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, or you know, just getting into that idea of the I'm going to make something for someone else and I don't expect anything in return. I'm gonna take the gifts they've been giving me and the'm going to 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 can 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 write at night, or I'm gonna you know, I'm gonna become an insurance vice president of this insurance company and then 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.

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. Mick Jagger jumping on stage at a bar. It's like a musician, you know, jamming. Yeah, 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.

your life. How can you just practice? You know, it would be like if Lebron did a pickup game and a print or something, you know, whatever it was that, you know, you 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 again, and all that energy that the writer put into it, it'll be there forever. Yeah, Like when you pick up Moby Dick whatever we're dark crazy energy Melville channeled into that. Whoever picks up Moby Dick and opens the page like

it's there for them. Yeah, And that I think is part of the magic of art, and it's what really sustains me in my rougher days is 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 someone that the Row energy. I need some of the Hockney energy. You know. It's like, go to it and it's there for you.

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 in aer 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.