Steal Like an Artist

Those are the 10 things nobody taught us about how to be creative.

They’re also the chapters of the book—each supported by a few Big Ideas and stories and awesome little drawings.

Let’s take a peek at a few of my favorites!

That’s such a great image: The Beatles (!!!) as a cover band.

The Beatles?!

Yep. Cover band.

Here’s how Twyla Tharp addresses the subject of copying in her classic The Creative Habit (see Notes): “If there’s a lesson here it’s: get busy copying. That’s not a popular notion today, not when we are all instructed to find our own way, admonished to be original and find our own voice at all costs! But it’s sound advice. Traveling the paths of greatness, even in someone else’s footprints, is a vital means to acquiring skill.”

Kobe Bryant loved to copy all the best moves from the greatest who came before him.

Hunter S. Thompson used an old-school typewriter to type out, word-for-word (!), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms just so he could experience the feeling of typing a masterpiece. (Wow.)

As I’ve said before, that’s essentially what I’m doing with these Notes.

This is PhilosophersNote #296. Current plan: Get to 1,000 in the next 5.5 years. I’ll be putting in another 10,000 hours swimming in the wisdom of some of the world’s best teachers and writers, typing out a handful of their best thoughts and challenging myself to distill their wisdom into the core, most practical components.

In the process, I’m developing my own style and getting more and more comfortable with expressing myself my way as I grab cool little aspects of every author’s style and wisdom.

Back to you: Who and what do you love?

Start copying them.

Get in the head of the masters you admire as you cultivate your own style!!!

Want to be brilliant creatively?

Consider being otherwise rather boring. Save your best energy for the stuff that matters.

The last Note I worked on was The Great Work of Your Life by Stephen Cope (see Notes). He applies the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita (see those Notes as well) to our modern lives. His book is all about dharma—our sacred duty to actualize our potential and do the work we’re here to do.

One of his Big Ideas is the fact that the great people we admire created the right conditions for their genius to flourish.

He tells us: “Having first named and claimed our dharma, we next begin to systematically organize all of our life’s energies around our calling.”

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, talks about the great comfort he finds in routine. Here’s how he puts it in How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big (see Notes):

“Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice, tells us that people become unhappy if they have too many options in life. The problem with options is that choosing any path can leave you plagued with self-doubt. You quite rationally think that one of the paths not chosen might have worked out better. That can eat you.

Choosing among attractive alternatives can also be exhausting. You want to feel as if you researched and considered all of your options. That’s why I find great comfort in routine. If you ask me today where I will be at 6:20 A.M. on a Saturday morning in the year 2017, I’ll tell you I will be at my desk finishing the artwork on some comics I drew earlier in the week. That’s what I was doing last Saturday at that time and what I plan to do this Saturday as well. I can’t recall the last time I woke up and looked at my options for what to do first. It’s always the same, at least for the first few hours of my day.”

Plus: “I never waste a brain cell in the morning trying to figure out what to do when. Compare that with some people you know who spend two hours planning and deciding for every task that takes one hour to complete. I’m happier than those people.”

How about YOU?

How can you make your life more boring so it becomes more interesting? :)

Seriously.

How can you?

I shall hereby make my life more boring by removing this:

____________________________________________________________________________

_____________________________.

And more interesting by adding this:

____________________________________________________________________________

_____________________________.

(Awesome.)

Here’s a little more on that:

Note: Austin had a 9 to 5 full-time day job while he was getting going in his creative career. He published a couple books and did a ton of work while he worked 40-hours a week with a “normal” job.

<— No more excuses!! :)

His job forced him to create structure in his life and consistently allocate a certain amount of energy to his other creative pursuits.

Once he had that momentum, he kept it.

Inertia is the death of creativity.

It’s also the death of all things good habits-wise—whether it’s exercise or meditation or nutrition.

Once we get the ball rolling, let’s keep it rolling.

Remember: “Establishing and keeping a routine can be even more important than having a lot of time.”

How can you dial in your routine a little more?

The Buddha tells us that we create a happy life (or a miserable one) just like a water pot is filled with water: Little by little. DROP BY DROP.

That’s also how we create a body of work we’re proud of.

Little by little.

Baby step by baby step.

By showing up day in and day out day after day after day.

What water pot do you need (and want!) to fill?

What’s your next drop?

Want to stress yourself out?

Convince yourself you can do anything (and everything)!

Tal Ben-Shahar tells us this is one of the primary differences between an unhealthy perfectionist and a healthy perfectionist (who is so different he calls them an “optimalist”).

The unhealthy perfectionist fails to deal with the constraints of reality. They truly believe they can have it all. And that drives them (literally) NUTS! (You ever do that?)

The optimalist, on the other hand, still holds very high standards but they have a healthy relationship with reality. They know they can’t do *everything*—there are only 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week and perfection simply doesn’t exist. (Check out the Notes on The Pursuit of Perfect for more.)

Barry Schwartz describes this in a general sense in his classic Paradox of Choice (see Notes).

The paradox? More choice doesn’t lead to more happiness. It leads to less happiness.

We’re constantly bombarded with choices, choices, and more choices!! Whether it’s the 132 styles of jeans we can buy or the 87 types of cereal or the countless other mundane (and more significant) choices we face daily, we’re overwhelmed by options.

Infinite choices!!!!!!

And we think that’s good. It’s not. We need to deliberately constrain ourselves. Especially with our creativity.

Here’s how the great composer Igor Stravinsky put it: “The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision in the execution.”

My coach, Steve Chandler shared that Stravinsky quote with me in the same conversation he told me Alan Watts once said that tennis is more fun with a court.

CONSTRAINTS are good.

Austin tells us: “Write a song on your lunch break. Paint a painting with only one color. Start a business without any start-up capital. Shoot a movie with your iPhone and a few of your friends. Build a machine out of spare parts. Don’t make excuses for not working—make things with the time, space, and materials you have, right now.”

What are some constraints you can apply to your life + work?

P.S. Here are a few of my constraints:

Every single one of my PhilosophersNotes is 6 pages long. Not 4 or 5 or 7 or 8. SIX. Yes, I’d often like some more space (and a little less once in a while). But the constraint is SIX. And that makes it so easy.

PNTV episodes are 10 minutes long. I used to be absolute about that. Now I’m a little more flexible but it’s 10 +/- 2 minutes not 25 minutes some times and 4 minutes other times. 10.

Same with the Micro Classes. 3 minutes is the sweet spot.

Each of those constraints HELPS my creativity.

You?

Love that.

There are no rules.

In fact, some advice, may be a vice.

Nietzsche tells us (see Notes on Thus Spoke Zarathustra): “This is my way; where is yours?— Thus I answered those who asked me ‘the way.’ For the way—that does not exist.”

While Emerson tells us (see Notes): “Trust thyself. Every heart vibrates to that iron string.”

What’s YOUR way?