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Austin Kleon's book on creative theft

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Book by Austin Kleon

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Tim Harford's Ted Talk

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Tim Harford: A powerful way to unleash your natural creativity

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What can we learn from the world's most enduringly creative people? They "slow-motion multitask," actively juggling multiple projects and moving between topics as the mood strikes -- without feeling hurried. Author Tim Harford shares how innovators like Einstein, Darwin, Twyla Tharp and Michael Crichton found their inspiration and productivity through cross-training their minds.

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Video of Cleese's Talk

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A summary from Brainpickings

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Much has been said about how creativity works, its secrets, its origins, and what we can do to optimize ourselves for it. In this excerpt from his fantastic 1991 lecture, John Cleese (b. October 27, 1939) offers a recipe for creativity, delivered with his signature blend of cultural insight and comedic genius. Specifically, Cleese outlines "the 5 factors that you can arrange to make your lives more creative":

1. Space ("You can't become playful, and therefore creative, if you're under your usual pressures.")

2. Time ("It's not enough to create space; you have to create your space for a specific period of time.")

3. Time ("Giving your mind as long as possible to come up with something original," and learning to tolerate the discomfort of pondering time and indecision.)

4. Confidence ("Nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.")

5. Humor ("The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.")

The lecture is worth a watch in its entirety, below, if only to get a full grasp of Cleese's model for creativity as the interplay of two modes of operating - open, where we take a wide-angle, abstract view of the problem and allow the mind to ponder possible solutions, and closed, where we zoom in on implementing a specific solution with narrow precision. Along the way, Cleese explores the traps and travails of the two modes and of letting their osmosis get out of balance.

Transcribed highlights below.

Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.

We need to be in the open mode when pondering a problem - but! - once we come up with a solution, we must then switch to the closed mode to implement it. Because once we've made a decision, we are efficient only if we go through with it decisively, undistracted by doubts about its correctness.

Cleese goes on to caution against a trap in this duality, one particularly hazardous in politics:

To be at our most efficient, we need to be able to switch backwards and forward between the two modes. But - here's the problem - we too often get stuck in the closed mode. Under the pressures which are all too familiar to us, we tend to maintain tunnel vision at times when we really need to step back and contemplate the wider view.

This is particularly true, for example, of politicians. The main complaint about them from their nonpolitical colleagues is that they've become so addicted to the adrenaline that they get from reacting to events on an hour-by-hour basis that they almost completely lose the desire or the ability to ponder problems in the open mode.

Cleese concludes with a beautiful articulation of the premise and promise of his recipe for creativity:

This is the extraordinary thing about creativity: If just you keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your unconscious.

For a related treat, see Cleese's reprise of the talk nearly two decades later at the 2009 Creativity World Forum, then revisit this pioneering 1939 guide to the creative process, outlining what we can do the five steps of ideation.

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John Cleese on the Five Factors to Make Your Life More Creative

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Much has been said about how creativity works, its secrets, its origins, and what we can do to optimize ourselves for it. In this excerpt from his fantastic 1991 lecture, John Cleese (b. October 27, 1939) offers a recipe for creativity, delivered with his signature blend of cultural insight and comedic genius.

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The Creative Architect: Inside Psychology’s Most Ambitious and Influential Study of What Makes a Creative Person

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The Creative Architect: Inside Psychology’s Most Ambitious and Influential Study of What Makes a Creative Person

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Article by Mary Popova from Brainpickings

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"Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating," John Cleese proclaimed in his widely beloved 1991 lecture on the five factors of creativity. What may seem like the clever packaging of a commonplace truism today was once a radical proposition, the seed for which was planted just three decades before Cleese's proclamation. Although this "way of operating" - the constellation of intuitions, cognitive patterns, and habits of mind which we call "creativity" - is responsible for every human civilization that has ever existed, it is only in the last blink of evolutionary history that we have turned an inquisitive eye toward what creativity actually is and how it can be cultivated.

Until the middle of the twentieth century, creativity was considered a nebulous and hokey subject unfit for scientific study. It may be a rather curious system bug of our consciousness that we so easily dismiss the most elemental and highest-order objects of human aspiration as somehow unserious and unworthy of rigorous research - Harvard's pioneering study of happiness, which began in 1938, had to upend enormous cultural and academic norms, as did the first systematic study of love in 1958.

The turning point for creativity came in 1959, thanks to a researcher by the name of Dr. Donald MacKinnon, director of the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR) at UC Berkeley.

Just as trailblazing Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner was revolutionizing the study of creativity on the East Coast, his West Coast counterpart was undertaking a study of unprecedented size and range at IPAR - a rigorous inquiry into what makes a person "creative," what motivates such people's work, how they are able to overcome self-doubt, what environmental conditions are most conducive to manifesting creativity, and whether it is possible to identify the creatively gifted before their talents bear tangible fruit.

The subjects of IPAR's most landmark study were forty of the era's greatest architects, including Eero Saarinen, Philip Johnson, and I.M. Pei. Subsequent studies over the course of three decades focused on other groups of high achievement - Air Force officers, women mathematicians, research scientists, and managers. Their insights, which laid the foundation for contemporary research into the psychology of creativity, have been cited in innumerable publications for decades, but the original findings have remained buried in university archives for more than half a century - until now.

Pierluigi Serraino tells the story of IPAR's revolutionary endeavor and its lasting legacy in The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study (public library). He writes:

IPAR was determined to take the alchemy out of any conversation on creativity and use fieldwork to corroborate their hypothesis that creativity was the result of a set of conditions, external and internal to individuals, without any teleological explanation of its origins. Adopting a solid research angle and studying creativity through a direct examination of the individuals hailed as leaders in their fields was of the essence to circumvent the precariousness and unreliability of the countless opinions that pseudo-experts were circulating on the topic.

More than that, IPAR's research, with its focus on creativity as a profoundly human and humane faculty, became a counterpoint to the era's growing fear of mechanization. Serraino explains:

At the core of the effective functioning of the IPAR research unit was a fundamental position shared by MacKinnon and his colleagues: that creativity conformed to certain rules and that its patterns of appearance could be objectively measured and explained. But even more importantly, all those involved in the study - researchers, sponsoring agencies, the subjects themselves - held the mental process of the individual to be the center of the creative processes, dispelling all the rhetoric associated with genius.

[...]

As alarming visions of an Orwellian society dominated by automated technologies were going viral in postwar Western civilization, the investigation on creativity was seen as a crucial tool in the race for humanity's very survival, saving it form an obliteration of its own making by solving problems such as the population boom, the anxiety of a nuclear annihilation, and the intelligent use of technology in civic life.

Due to the demands of postwar society, IPAR's initial focus wasn't on creativity but on effectiveness. Serraino quotes original IPAR researcher Ravenna Helson, the only surviving team member at the time of his writing:

One could be effective - meet one's goals, such as running a tight ship, making a lot of money, getting a PhD in a short time - without the goals involving creativity.

In 1953, IPAR's focus began to shift toward creativity, commencing their trailblazing studies of writers and architects, which were unlike anything that had been done before in psychology. Serraino reports on their process:

A staff of psychologists would observe and test the creative people during "live-in" assessments at the Institute's lab, a three-day block of intensive testing on-site, so as to extract for the first time a veritable picture of their inner drives and of the external circumstances supporting their creative expression. A new element in the IPAR approach was the study of group dynamics, undertaken by observation of subjects in a social context. Assorted into groups of varying sizes according to the nature of the experiment at hand, subjects and researchers were to discuss pre-established questions, resulting in formal and informal exchanges that opened new paths to unique data retrieval.

The researchers identified four key areas of interest - "the creative person, the creative process, the creative product, and the creative situation." Serraino writes of the first one:

Certain hypotheses had already formed: for instance, that creative people have an above-average capacity to retrieve information from their pasts and exhibit a marked absence of repression of their own impulses. Their findings, thus far, led IPAR to surmise that "the greater expressiveness of the creative person contributes also to a greater independence of thought and action." At this early stage, they had already detected a correlation between intelligence and self-assertiveness as predictors of autonomous thought and performance. Furthermore, [the researchers] saw a stable link between complex visual and conceptual capacity and originality in creative people. Psychodynamic complexity, greater personal scope, independence of judgment, self-assertiveness, social dominance, and the suppression of impulse control were firm points in the growing understanding of the emotional universe within the creative person.

Alongside the four dimensions of creativity the scientists identified three types of creative people: Those whose creative work embodied Ann Truitt's assertion that "artists have no choice but to express their lives" - novelists, poets, and playwrights fell within that category; those whose work aimed at objective goals drawing on an external reality - this class included physicists, mathematicians, chemists, and engineers; and those whose work was a combination of the other two, partway between subjective self-expression and objective, testable inquiry - architects and music arrangers were placed in that group.

The researchers found a number of intriguing patterns and correlations: In the arts, creative work seemed to arise from psychic restlessness and resolve some internal conflict, whereas in the sciences it seemed to express what Serraino terms "personal cosmologies of external reality." The notable common denominator was that across all fields, creative breakthroughs required a solid foundation of preexisting expert knowledge - a testament to Pasteur's famous tenet of ideation, "chance favors the prepared mind.

Of all the different types in the study, MacKinnon was most intrigued by and invested in the architects - a profession that tempers the creative wildness of the artist with the testable prototyping of the scientist and the savvy of the entrepreneur. He identified 64 high achievers in architecture - alarmingly but unsurprisingly, given the era, all male and almost entirely white - and invited them to what he promised would be a landmark study of creativity and the qualities of successful people. Astonishingly, forty of them - including some of the most renowned architects of the time - agreed to participate. They became Group I and were joined by another 84 lesser-accomplished architects subdivided into two more groups, for a total of 124 participants.

But as rigorous a psychologist as MacKinnon was, he lacked the expertise needed for identifying what constitutes creativity in architecture. So he enlisted the help of architecturally adroit collaborators like Elizabeth Kendall Thompson, a powerful tastemaker and West Coast editor of Architectural Record. With their help, MacKinnon designed a sophisticated study, which was to be conducted over the course of a weekend - an impressive time investment for participants of this caliber, but many of the architects were lured by the opportunity to mingle with their peers and competitors. The researchers proceeded to study such dimensions of creativity and character as thinking and feeling, introversion and extroversion, individualism and collaboration, self-awareness, childhood conditions, and much more, enlisting existing tests like the Myers-Briggs alongside their own original questionnaires.

MacKinnon echoed Virginia Woolf's assertion that the most creative mind is the androgynous mind in summarizing the most crucial findings:

The evidence is clear: the more creative a person is the more he reveals an openness to his own feelings and emotions, a sensitive intellect and understanding, self-awareness, and wide-ranging interests, including many which in the American culture are thought to be feminine.

One of the subtler, most paradoxical, yet most important findings had to do with the role of parenting in the development of the creative person. Serraino writes:

Many subjects indicated that as children they had enjoyed a marked degree of autonomy from their parents. They were entrusted with independent judgment and allowed to develop curiosity at their own pace without overt supervision or interference. MacKinnon noted of these parents, "They did not hesitate to grant him rather unusual freedom in exploring his universe and in making decisions for himself - and this early as well as late. The expectation of the parent that the child would act independently but reasonably and responsibly appears to have contributed immensely to the latter's sense of personal autonomy which was to develop to such a marked degree."

But this autonomy had a darker side - it coexisted with a certain emotional detachment from one or both parents. Serraino writes:

The offspring often reported a sense of remoteness, a distance from their elders, which ultimately helped them avoid, the scientists argued, the overdependence - or momentous rejection - that often characterizes parent-child relationships, both of which were believed to interfere with the unencumbered unfolding of the self through the creative process.

Despite this sense of disconnectedness, one parent - typically the mother - played a significant role in emboldening the child's creative exploits during his formative years. While the fathers modeled work ethic, the mothers of the most creative architects - and the layered cultural significance of this finding couldn't be emphasized more - displayed an uncommon degree of independence from their husbands and led highly engaged lives animated by professional, intellectual, and creative interests of their own.

Another crucial factor in the development of the creative person was the influence of a teacher or mentor in their formative years - something the impact of which Albert Camus articulated in a touching letter of gratitude to his boyhood teacher days after he received the Nobel Prize. Serraino writes of this influential figure:

This person is a portal into the challenging and intense joy of practicing an art. The vocation of architecture requires a combination of skill, competence, knowledge, devotion, and enthusiasm, traits that together launch these individuals on a life-long mission to excel and enjoy the fruit of their commitment to a meaningful activity offering them a way to demonstrate their capabilities and self-worth to themselves first and foremost.

But perhaps the most important finding, as well as the one most difficult to swallow as we face a culture which increasingly demands of us to fragment ourselves along identity variables, had to do with the elusive art of inner wholeness, conveyed in MacKinnon's own poignant words:

Most persons live a sort of half-life, giving expression to only a very limited part of themselves and realizing only a few of their many potentialities. The creative person has the courage to experience opposites of his nature and to attempt some reconciliation of them in an individuated expression of himself.

Half a century later, Mary Oliver would articulate the same sentiment in her piercing observation that "the most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time."

In the remainder of The Creative Architect, Serraino delves into the finer details of the study, down to the original handwritten questionnaires, to reveal the inner workings of the creative mind and the equally fascinating meta-creativity of designing and implementing this enormously inventive, daring, influential, and still unparalleled study. Complement it with physicist David Bohm on the nature of creativity and pioneering psychologist Jerome Bruner on its six pillars, then hear Serraino's Design Matters interview about the backstory of his ambitious project:

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inside the great midcentury personality study

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The Creative Architect: Inside Psychology's Most Ambitious and Influential Study of What Makes a Creative Person

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"Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating," John Cleese proclaimed in his widely beloved 1991 lecture on the five factors of creativity. What may seem like the clever packaging of a commonplace truism today was once a radical proposition, the seed for which was planted just three decades before Cleese's proclamation.

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The Identification of Creative Abilities 

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The Identification of Creative Abilities 

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Paper written by Donald MacKinnon (1964)

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Links to Talks and Books from the artist

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Here's video of a 40-minute keynote I gave during the Scratch Conference at MIT's Media Lab last month. It was one of the most enjoyable talks I've given - it's a kind of mashup of my books, and it was received by a great room full of enthusiastic people. (Followed by a Q&A with the wonderful Karen Brennan.) If you're interested in having me speak at your event, check out my speaking page.

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A few weeks ago I gave a new talk at Bond in San Francisco. It's a list of 10 things that have helped me stay creative in such chaotic times:

1. Every day is Groundhog Day

2. Build a bliss station

3. Forget the noun, do the verb

4. Make gifts

5. The ordinary + extra attention = the extraordinary

6. Art is for life (not the other way around)

7. You are allowed to change your mind

8. When in doubt, tidy up

9. The demons hate fresh air

10. Spend time on something that will outlast them

I really loved giving this talk. (And, as I've hinted, it is a preview of my next book.) If you've been struggling too, hopefully you'll find something helpful in it. Please share it with anybody you think could use it. The full video is below.

(Special thanks to Andy McMillan for inviting me and Paul Searle for the great video.)

UPDATE: I've adapted "How To Keep Going" into a book!

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If you didn't get to see me on tour, here's video of the 30-minute talk I gave about the notebooks and journals that influenced The Steal Like An Artist Journal, filmed during the last stop of the tour at BookPeople in Austin, Texas.

A couple of links I mention in the talk:
Get a copy of the journal.

I was too sick then to remember much of it, and too lazy now to write much about it, so I'll let Omar Gallaga recap:

In his keynote presentation on Friday, local author and artist Austin Kleon tackled the big themes: death, creativity and, most importantly, "Has SXSW gotten too big? Is it over?" (...) In tackling the subject of SXSW's growth, Kleon suggested making more human connections, sharing instead of self-promoting all the time... he suggested SXSW attendees stop chasing the new, next big thing and think about longevity, the creative work that will stand the test of time.

Here's the video:

Here are sketchnotes of the talk by Eva-Lotta Lamm:

Thanks to Shawn O'Keefe and the SXSW gang for giving me the stage.
Photo above by Rodolfo Gonzalez

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Can't see the video? Watch it here. No time to watch? Download the audio podcast.
A few weeks ago I flew up to Seattle to film an interview with photographer Chase Jarvis. We talked a lot about my books (including the new one) and art and creativity in general. We also took a lot of questions from the live and online audience. The resulting video is sort of a 90-minute primer for my work. It's probably better than any talk I've given.

I'm trying to figure out what it is about the Q&A format that puts me so much more at ease when speaking to an audience, and how to bring some of that ease into my talks. Chase made a joke at one point that I'm like a machine for giving 140-character ready answers. I joked back, "I'm a writer. Putting sentences together is my job."

But it's something more than that-I have a terrible memory for names and events and everyday things that happen in my life (which is why I need my logbook), but when I'm faced with a question from someone, it's like the RAM in my brain boots right up and I can immediately access this database of quotes and lines from stuff I've read and written. I'm reading Temple Grandin's Thinking In Pictures, and in the first chapter, she describes being able to access a library of images in her head like a computer. When she's faced with a design problem, she can grab these images and try them in difference combinations in order to come up with a solution.

To me, a question is a kind of problem to solve, or maybe more like a prompt. Sometimes I do feel like I'm flipping through my blog tags and tweets and book sentences in these Q&A sessions, but I'm also making up new combinations on the fly-thinking on my feet. However: I'm making the thinking up on the fly, and most of what I say I don't even remember later! This is why I try to record all of my Q&A sessions on tour: you never know what tossed off thought is going to become a new piece of writing. For example, one of Chase's fans transcribed this line in his blog comments:

That's the thing you have to understand about the whole process of art (or the work that we do) - you're only half of the equation. It's an interaction between you and the person who's going to experience the work. The person who's going to experience the work is bringing just as much to it and is just as important as you are.

I don't even remember saying that!

Anyways, thanks to Chase and his team for being such great hosts. Seattle was really beautiful, and I hope we can swing back for the next book tour. If you ever get a chance to take the Coach Starlight from Seattle to Portland - do it! So beautiful. Some photos and video from the ride below:

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Very pleased (and no, not at all terrified, not me!) to announce that I'll be giving the opening keynote at SXSW Interactive 2014. I've been drawing and organizing panels at the conference since 2008, but this is quite the step up, and I'm honored that the SXSW crew asked me.

I gave my last keynote back in June at HOW Design Live in San Francisco. It was a huge room with a couple thousand people - definitely the biggest room I'd done up until that point, and probably the best talk I've given, ever. Alas, due to a miscommunication on my part, we didn't get any video, but some lovely people on Instagram captured bits and pieces, which you can see below.

Maybe my favorite part of speaking, other than Q&A (yes, I actually love Q&A, because it's unrehearsed and time I get to think on my feet), is signing books afterwards and getting to talk to people who were in the audience. The line at HOW was at least a hundred people long and it took me 2 hours to get through, but, as should be expected from a design conference, there were some creative moments along the way, such as when Genevieve asked me to sign with a silver Sharpie (why had I never thought of that!?)...

...and when Allan (maybe frustrated from the line length), did a blackout on the last page of Steal:

I'm not doing a lot of speaking for the second half of 2013, but I'll be hitting the road again next spring for the release of Show Your Work! If you're interesting in having me talk at your event, drop me a line.

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It was my pleasure to give the inaugural talk at the first Creative Mornings here in Austin last month. The monthly theme was "The Future," so I tried to make the talk a sort of rallying cry to encourage future presenters and attendees to open up and share the process of their creative work, not just the products of that process. (That happens to also be the subject of my next book.)

If you don't want to watch the video, I've pasted my notes and a few slides from the talk below. Enjoy.

* * *

It's weird to try to give a talk about the future, because most of the time, talks like this are actually about THE PAST. A speaker is asked to get up on stage and talk because they're someone who's accomplished something, so they must have something to say, some sort of wisdom or experience or advice to impart to the audience.

But I happen to think that most advice is autobiographical - a lot of the time when people give you advice, they're really just talking to themselves in the past.

Now, we usually think that the past is behind us, and the future is in front of us. This seems totally natural, right? But years ago I read about this tribe of indigenous people in South America called the Aymara, and they have this very different way of talking about the past and the future.

When they talk about the past, they point to the space in front of them. When they talk about the future, they point behind them. Strange, right?

Well, the reason they point ahead of them when talking about the past is because the past is known to them - the past has happened, therefore it's in front of them, where they can see it.

The future, on the other hand, is unknown, it hasn't happened yet, so it's behind them, where they can't see it.

This kind of blew my mind when I read about it. The past is right in front of us, but the future is behind us.

The future is hard to talk about because it hasn't happened yet - it's behind us, where we can't see it.

[Read more...]

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When I was 13, I wrote to the artist Winston Smith, and he wrote me back a 14-page handwritten letter that changed my life:

15 years later, I got to meet him.

I told the whole story two days after it happened when I spoke at Pixar, and then I retold it a few months ago at UX Week and they got it on video. It's probably my favorite talk I've ever given. Enjoy:

Can't see it on mobile? Watch it here→

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Here's video of "Steal Like A Writer," a talk I gave back in June at Cleveland's Weapons of Mass Creation festival. It's sort of a remix of the ideas in Steal Like An Artist geared towards designers, musicians, and anybody who wants to get better at writing. Here's the original description:

No matter what your discipline, it's hard to get any good work done without clear, straightforward communication. Simply put, being a good writer makes you better at your job. Using a few school supplies, a little visual thinking, and a whole lot of creative theft, this talk will help get you started on the way towards becoming a wordsmith.

Here's the remixed list of ten:

And here are the slides:

And here are the links to the recommended reading:

It was a fun talk to give and a really nice audience - thanks to Joseph Hughes and the folks at WMCFest for having me.
See more of my talks→
UPDATE: Wanted to share these cool sketchnotes of the talk by Carolyn Sewell:

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Can't see the video? Watch it here→
I was so thrilled that my friends and favorite bloggers Maria Popova, Maris Kreizman, and Maud Newton agreed to be part of this panel last week in NYC. It was really really fun, McNally Jackson was packed, and best of all, someone was there filming and has posted a video of the conversation online for your viewing pleasure.

Also, dig these hand-drawn notes by @mosteverybody:

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AUSTIN KLEON : BLOG : Posts tagged \'Talks\'

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Here's video of a 40-minute keynote I gave during the Scratch Conference at MIT's Media Lab last month. It was one of the most enjoyable talks I've given - it's a kind of mashup of my books, and it was received by a great room full of enthusiastic people.

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Animated Summary of Steven Johnson's book

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WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM by Steven Johnson

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Video Promo for book by Rod Judkins

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The Art of Creative Thinking is a book by Central Saint Martins tutor Rod Judkins that shows you how to improve every aspect of creativity. There are 89 different chapters that show you how to begin a project, solve creative blocks, breathe life into a project that's gone stale and much more.

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Coursera Course

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Coursera | Online Courses From Top Universities. Join for Free

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1000+ courses from schools like Stanford and Yale - no application required. Build career skills in data science, computer science, business, and more.