Sarwar Jabed

It’s smooth, it’s refreshing! The main idea of this book can be summarized by a quote of Pablo Picasso, “Good artists copy, great artists steal”. While stealing sounds negative, this book is about why it is not, at least in cases of creativity. One true fact is that we are never capable of making a perfect copy. Thus Kleon advised to take inspiration from others and applying it in own work. As Wilson Mizner said “if you copy from one author, its plagiarism; if you copy from many, its research” One truly inspiring thing about this book is how it suggests to go offline and leave screens to improve our creativity. Austin Kleon puts it like this “Take time to mess around. Get lost. Wander. You never know where it’s going to lead you.” Austin Kleon suggests us to cheer different passions and never throwing any of them off. We never know how our various sorts of passion can blend and create a perfect juice people are willing to buy. An eye opening fact mentioned in this book is that artists are not supposed to be vagabond. A person can take care of his health, his family, can have good sleep and still be a good artist. A person should take care of his money, his decent day time job and then he can definitely take care of passion. Creativity is never supposed to go “All in”. A truly interesting fact that surprised me is how Austin Kleon maintains his logbook! That’s creative! Instead of writing details of daily incidents, he just puts the headline of major incident with a little drawing of it. That’s less effort, more interesting and more memorable, right! Overall the most interesting thing that surprised me about this book is how he presented his idea on creativity. The presentation itself made this book 100 times better. It’s simple, it’s bit fancy, it’s not a lot of text and it’s interesting. Let’s wrap it up with a quote of Austin Kleon “Creativity isn’t just the things we choose to put in, it’s the things we choose to leave out”