Caitlin’s Creative Business Bookshelf - Episode 2
Episode 2, and we’re looking at our first book! Today, I’m chatting about Keep Going by Austin Kleon and the power of pep talks.
Hey, welcome back to the podcast. How exciting that I get to say that. So today we are on one of the first book related episodes of season one.
I briefly alluded to it in the intro episode, but reading was a really huge part of my burnout recovery and it's now a really ongoing piece of my creative routine, too. I love reading fiction, I love a good novel, don't get me wrong, but nonfiction is definitely where my love really lies, I think.
So I wanted to kick things off by talking about a book that I think is really good, especially for those of you out there who might not identify as being immediately creative. Keep Going by Austin Kleon.
If the name isn't instantly familiar, you may have seen his most famous book around because it was very popular, I think is Steal Like an Artist, which I'm sure if you saw the cover of, you would recognise. He also has a really good and inspiring weekly email newsletter as well, which I'd really recommend checking out. I'll leave a link to that in the show notes because the stuff he sends out is really, really interesting and again, quite accessible stuff.
You don't necessarily have to be like an immediately creative person in order to get stuff out of it. I think he's great. He's an author, an artist, poetry writer. An example of what features in this book, actually, is some of his blackout poetry, which is where you essentially have, like, a chunk of text and you black out certain words to make poems a very hard thing to describe, but hopefully you know what I'm referring to. So Keep Going is one of his less famous books, I think, but one that I really, really loved.
I picked it up from my local library recently, which was great. Shout out to my local library. And essentially, the book is a very digestible, fun and accessible creative pep talk. Basically. It's very short. It's around the 200 page mark. There's lots of illustrations in it as well, lots of quotes from famous creative people to kind of back up what he's talking about. And the book essentially walks you through ten principles to stay creative in good times and in bad, too. What I really liked about the book was a lot of the advice he gave wasn't advice that was kind of instantly cliche advice, I suppose.
It wasn't advice that I kind of read and thought, oh, okay, I've heard that one before. You could tell he lived it, I think. And I found so much of it not just painfully relatable, but really, really inspiring stuff. All the principles discussed in the book are actionable and accessible.
My beef with books on creativity sometimes, and this is a beef I will definitely talk about more than once, because it's quite yeah, it's quite a big beef. I suppose sometimes books on creativity aren't always very accessible. A lot of them are quite abstract in the way they talk about creativity and quite abstract in the advice that's being given, or they kind of target themselves as only being for a certain type of creative. So appealing to the very traditional artists and traditional creatives, and maybe not very appealing to those of us out there that are more casually creative. That's a category that I would put myself in sometimes, and I think it's maybe a category that a lot of us feel like we belong to. So that's my beef with a lot of books on creativity.
And that's partly why I'm kind of discussing the books I'm discussing, because I don't think they have to be abstract books that are only for traditional artists and full of these abstract principles or concepts and maybe a bit more spiritual leaning as well.
But anyway, I digress. Like I said, that is a big piece I have. So, yeah, I mentioned that purely because I think this book is a real antithesis to that. Like I said, everything is really accessible, it's really grounded and down to earth and it's really easy to read as well. It's really fun to read.
So the ten principles, I thought it'd be fun if we went through a few of my favourite principles from the book, and ones that I think would be useful for us to consider in our creativity, and also ones that I think can definitely be brought into our business running as well. And, yeah, principles that I think have interesting little nuggets.
But the book is great. I think you should get a hold of the book anyway, be it buying a copy or yeah, hopefully your local library has it as well. The first principle I want to discuss is the first one in the book, which is simply called Every Day is Groundhog Day. And in that principle, Austin Kleon talks about the importance of a routine and having a routine as part of your creative practice. This is something I talk about a lot, because I don't think that creativity and practicality are antithesis and they're not direct opposites.
When we think about how we get things done in the day, especially things like doctors appointments or work for clients or meetings with people, we have them in the calendar, right? We set aside space and time to do them, which obviously makes sure that they are done. I always find that we're very good at prioritising client work when we run businesses or customer work, or making sure certain tasks get done. But then when it comes to ourselves and our own self care, we won't diarise it, we won't pop in our calendars. It's kind of a thing that's maybe on the to do list, but not necessarily so.
A big chunk of why I do what I do is because I want us to treat our creativity, our creative self care, with exactly the same priority that we do with our client work, with our customer work, with the work that makes us money. Because our self care is also what makes us money and what keeps us thriving and happy and healthy. So we should be popping those in the diary and in the calendar. So for me, not only was that principle of having routines and keeping consistent on a practical level, not only was that, like, a good reminder for me personally, but also a good I think I've definitely been thinking about the relationship between creativity and practicality for quite a long time now, because I think it's an underplayed relationship.
It's an underrated relationship. They don't have to be at odds with each other. I think they complement each other really beautifully, actually.
The second principle I wanted to mention as well, again, one that not only I feel like I talk about and think about quite a lot, but one that was a good personal reminder to me as well. Demons hate fresh air. And this essentially is and we've all been there, we've all done it when we're looking for inspiration or something's, perhaps not flowing as we would like it to, and our instinct is to kind of mentally chain ourselves to our desks until the ideas flow or until something happens.
Our best work, and I mean this both in the creative sense and in the actual kind of physical work you do, our best work doesn't come from those times. It doesn't come from the times when we're forcing things and really struggling and pushing and, yeah, even just saying that, you can feel that the energy is not quite right. So in the Demons Hate Fresh Air principle, Austin Kleon talks about the need to be outside and away from things so that we can let things percolate.
My best ideas never come from pushing, they always come from doing something unrelated. And like I said, that can be like content creation. Sorry for using the phrase, but it was all I could think of. Sorry, you're gonna have a bit of ASMR with my cat purring in the background, but, yeah, go outside, touch some grass.
It's a really amazing thing that you can do for your creativity and just for your brain in general. Having regular breaks in your workday is really, really important and it's something that I think we don't do a lot of. But, yeah, so if you're hearing this and thinking, oh, my goodness, I need to take more of a break, I need to have some outside time in the day, 100% factor that in. That's really, really important.
The third principle I wanted to talk about as well, which I love, I think it's my favourite one actually, this is a really interesting reframe. And yeah, just a really interesting way of looking at our creativity and a way of looking at our business as well. The principle in the book is called Make Gifts, and it basically is the idea that when we're creating anything, a reframe that we can have is to think of them as gifts we're making for other people.
Pushing this back to our businesses for a second when we talk about appealing to our ideal clients and making sure that we're making something that like creating businesses that other people want to buy into. When we create content, thinking about our dream clients, et cetera, et cetera, it's kind of around that idea in a way. The idea that when we create something, regardless of whether it's something practical or like a new service we're creating or like a course or whatever, thinking about it as a gift is such a nice way to think about it. Thinking of it in the sense that we're creating something for somebody else.
We're creating something that is not only going to appeal to, like, our dream customer and get our sales and all that, but something that they will genuinely, actually love, which I think is really important. I mean, how much more fun does it feel to think of our businesses as a gift, to think of what we're offering to other people as a gift that feels so much nicer than thinking about our client avatars or our dream clients or what have you. When we think of it as like a gift that we can give somebody, I just love it.
It's a reframe I really, really love and I think is really if you take one thing away today yeah. Remember that your business is a gift. What you do is a gift. “If you get lucky one day and a big audience shows up for what you do, chances are there will only be a handful of people whose opinion means anything to you. So you might as well identify those people now, make gifts for them, and keep making gifts for them.” Right?
The example he gave in the book as well, which was something I didn't know, actually, is that a lot of the really famous stories for kids exist because they were a gift for somebody else. So apparently the AA. Milne who wrote the Winnie the Pooh books had written those for his son originally, and The Hobbit. I didn't know this, but CS. Lewis had encouraged J RR Tolkien to write down all the stories he told his kids and put them in a book and give them as a gift to his kids.
And obviously we know how that ended up, but, yeah, so many things in the world exist because they've been created for somebody else and then shared to give joy. And an example that I was kind of thinking about from my personal life was I love different crafts. I love making things. And when I make something intended to be a gift for somebody else, part of the joy that I get from it is, of course, giving it to the person and that person having a gift. But also the fact that I have been through the process of making and that I have been through the process of having fun creating it and learning new skills along the way and things like that.
So, yeah, remember that what you do and what you create and what you give to the world is a gift.
So I want to close off with the question that I guess I'll be asking at the end of all these book related episodes. Would I recommend this book? Yes, 100%. I absolutely loved it. I think it would make a really lovely gift for the creative person in your life and for the business person in your life as well.
If it isn't you, obviously, if you want to gift it to yourself, then please do. But I think, like I said at the start of this episode, a lot of what I love about the book is the fact that it is so relatable and down to earth and accessible and isn't kind of full of ideas that aren't very relatable. I think this is a really good pep talk to just have around and keep on your desk. I got so much out of it, and I wasn't expecting to with a book that was, like, that short and that small and that wasn't that text heavy.
But I got so much out of it, and I hope that the little bits that I've shared about the book in here as well is helpful, too, and inspires you to read it if you haven't checked it out, or even if you're unfamiliar with Austin Kleon's work.
I definitely want to check out his other books, which I think, to be fair, are kind of more for, I guess, people who would consider themselves as creative and maybe have a creative career and things like that. But if you're looking for a book to inspire you, if you're looking for a book to kind of like, fire you up and to yeah, and to just kind of cheer you up, just make you feel good, I think Keep Going by Austin Kleon is definitely one to check out.
SHOW NOTES
