Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

This chapter seeks to reframe how people might think they need to approach their creative process. Rather than having a creative practice that is singularly focused, Kleon argues that having a wide creative practice can be beneficial to artistic creation.

This chapter pairs conceptually with the preceding chapter where the concept of non-digital activity and creation as “play” rather than “work” was introduced. In this chapter, he offers more strategies that can help with The Difference Between Work and Play. He encourages “productive procrastination,” by having “a lot of projects going at once so you can bounce between them” (65). Kleon shows how this is different than multi-tasking or switching rapidly between successive tasks. Multi-tasking can lead to decreased efficiency, increased mistakes, decreased focus, and decreased learning. Productive procrastination involves purposefully moving between creative tasks when one task becomes stymied. Reducing this cognitive fixation can in turn lead to increased creative output: Breaking the cycle of considering only one way forward in your process can lead people to surprising innovations or decisions they otherwise wouldn’t have come by. Having a backlog of hobbies and side projects one is passionate about creates many opportunities to have “time to mess around” (67), which in turn can lead to creative solutions.

Kleon encourages side projects and hobbies whose only benefit is making one “happy” (72). When a creative practice becomes something that someone relies on to “make money or get famous off” (72), it begins to take on an undue amount of pressure. Projects completely disconnected from economic gain are “regenerative” (72): They feed energy rather than take from it. These are the types of practices that Kleon suggests people integrate into their “productive procrastination.” That way, people are always pursing something that refills their energy and creativity.