jedioffsidetrap’s Reviews > Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative > Status Update

Don’t throw any of yourself away. Don’t worry about a grand scheme or unified vision for your work…what unifies your work is the fact that you made it. One day, you’ll look back & it will all make sense.

Take time to mess around, get lost, wander. You never where it’s going to lead you.

…if you live different things, you just keep spending times/them. Let them talk to each other. Sthg will begin to happen.

It’s important to have a hobby. A hobby is sthg creative just fo you. You don’t try to make money or get famous…you just do it b/c it makes you happy.

Practice productive procrastination…

I think it’s good to have a lot of projects going at once so you can bounce b/t them. When you get sick of one project, move over to another & when you’re sick of that one, move back to the one you left.

It wasn’t until I started bringing analog tools back into my process that making things became fun again & my work started to improve. … The process engaged most of my senses: the feel of newsprint in my hands, the sight of words disappearing under my lines, the faint squeak of the marker tip, the smell of marker fumes…

Has an analog desk & a digital desk…most work born in the analog desk, edit & pub digital

If we just start going thru the motions [use our hands] Strum a guitar, or shuffle sticky notes around a conference table or start kneading clay, the motion kickstarts our brain into thinking.

Our failure to copy our heroes is where we discover where our own thing lives.

So: copy your heroes. Examine where you fall short. What’s in there that makes you different? That’s what you should amplify & transform into your own work.

In the end, imitating our heroes is not flattering them. Transforming their work into sthg of your own is how you flatter. Adding something to the world only you can add.

Salvador Dali: Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

The writer Wilson Mizner said if you copy from one author, you it’s plagiarism, but if you copy from many, it’s research.

Gary Panter: if you have one person you’re influenced by, everyone will say the next whoever. But if you rip off a hundred people, everyone will say you’re so original!

Make things, know thyself

If id waited to know who i was or what i was about before i started “being creative” well, id still be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things. In my experience, it’s in the act of making things and doing our work that we figure out who we are.

You have to be curious about the world in which you live. Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else… Google everything…

…chew on one thinker—artist, writer, activist, role model—you really love. Study everything there is to know about that thinker. Then find three people that thinker loved, and find out everything about them. Repeat this as many times as you can. Climb up the tree as far as you can go. Once you build your own tree, it’s time to start your own branch.