Keep Going

Book Overview

Title: Keep Going
Author: Austin Kleon
Category: Creativity / Self Development

Why I Picked This Book:

I'm exhausted. The world feels chaotic, creative work feels hard, and I'm stuck in the loop of starting projects I never finish. I loved Show Your Work! and Steal Like an Artist. This one felt like it was written for people who've been at it for a while and are wondering how to sustain creative practice when life gets overwhelming. I needed strategies for endurance, not just starting.

Who Should Read This

This book is for anyone in the middle of the creative journey, past the excitement of starting, not yet at the finish line of "making it." It's for burnt-out artists, writers, designers, entrepreneurs who love their work but feel ground down by the grind. It's for people overwhelmed by news cycles, social media metrics, and the pressure to monetize every creative impulse. It's for those who've lost their playfulness and need permission to make bad art just for fun. It's for anyone who feels like giving up but knows, deep down, they need to keep going. If you're looking for tactics to stay sane and creative in an insane world, this is your field guide.

Core Ideas & Highlights

1. Every Day is Groundhog Day, Take One Day at a Time

The creative life is not linear. It's more like a loop or a spiral, where you keep coming back to a new starting point after every project. We have so little control over our lives. The only thing we can really control is what we spend our days on. "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." Establish a daily routine. When you don't know what to do next, your routine tells you. When you don't have much time, a routine helps you make the little time you have count. When you have all the time in the world, a routine helps you not waste it.

Make lists. Lists bring order to the chaotic universe. A list gets all your ideas out of your head and clears mental space so you can actually do something about them. Keep a "Someday/Maybe List" for future ideas. Use pros and cons lists for decisions. A list is a collection with purpose. Finish each day and be done with it. Before bed, list what you accomplished, write down what you want to do tomorrow, then forget about it. Every day is like a blank page.

2. Build a Bliss Station, Disconnect to Connect

Creativity is about connection, you must be connected to others to be inspired and share your work but it's also about disconnection. You must retreat from the world long enough to think, practice your art, and bring forth something worth sharing. Build a "bliss station": a room, or a certain hour or day, where you don't know what was in the newspapers, who your friends are, what you owe anybody. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. At first, nothing may happen. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.

A bliss station can be not just a where, but also a when. Not just a sacred space, but also a sacred time. You can be more without waking to the news. When you reach for your phone or laptop upon waking, you immediately invite anxiety and chaos into your life. Give yourself some time in the morning to not be completely horrified by the news—even if it's just fifteen minutes. "The phone gives us a lot but it takes away three key elements of discovery: loneliness, uncertainty, and boredom. Those have always been where creative ideas come from." Airplane mode can be a way of life. Change FOMO to JOMO (Joy Of Missing Out).

3. Forget the Noun, Do the Verb: "Creative" is Not a Job Title

Lots of people want to be the noun without doing the verb. They want the job title without the work. When people use "creative" as a job title, it falsely divides the world into "creatives" and "non-creatives," and implies the work of a "creative" is "being creative." But being creative is never an end, it's a means to something else. Creativity is just a tool. Your real work is play. If you've lost your playfulness, practice for practice's sake. Seek out unfamiliar tools and materials. Find something new to fiddle with. When nothing is fun anymore, try to make the worst thing you can. Hang out with young kids, play hide and seek, finger paint, build a tower of blocks and knock it down. Steal whatever works for you.

4. Make Gifts Protect Your Valuables

One of the easiest ways to hate something you love is to turn it into your job, taking the thing that keeps you alive spiritually and turning it into the thing that keeps you alive literally. When you start making a living from your work, resist the urge to monetize every single bit of your creative practice. Be sure there's at least a tiny part of you that's off-limits to the marketplace. Some little piece you keep for yourself. If you want maximum artistic freedom, keep your overhead low. A free creative life is not about living within your means, it's about living below your means. "Do what you love" + low overhead = a good life. "Do what you love" + "I deserve nice things" = a time bomb.

Ignore the numbers. Money is not the only measurement that can corrupt your creative practice. Website visits, likes, favorites, shares, follower counts, all clicks have meant in the short term is that everything online is now clickbait. If you share work online, try to ignore the numbers at least every once in a while. Post something and don't check the response for a week. Turn off analytics. Download a browser plug-in that makes numbers disappear from social media. When you ignore quantitative measurements, you can get back to qualitative measurements.

"Don't make stuff because you want to make money, it will never make you enough money. And don't make stuff because you want to get famous because you will never feel famous enough. Make gifts for people and work hard on making those gifts in the hope that those people will notice and like the gifts." When you feel as though you've lost your gift, the quickest way to recover is to step outside the marketplace and make gifts. Pick somebody special and make something for them. Volunteer your time and teach someone else. Making gifts puts us in touch with our gifts.

5. The Ordinary + Extra Attention = The Extraordinary

Everything you need to make extraordinary art can be found in your everyday life. The first step toward transforming your life into art is to start paying more attention to it. Slow down and draw things out. It's impossible to pay proper attention to your life if you're hurtling along at lightning speed. When your job is to see things other people don't, you have to slow down enough that you can actually look.

Pay attention to what you pay attention to. Your attention is one of the most valuable things you possess, which is why everyone wants to steal it from you. First you must protect it, then point it in the right direction. We pay attention to the things we really care about, but sometimes what we really care about is hidden from us. Write a diary daily. Write about your life, your priorities. Then reread it. A life is made out of paying attention to what we pay attention to. Set regular time to review what you've paid attention to. If you want to change your life, change what you pay attention to.

6. Slay the Art Monsters, Art is for Life (Not the Other Way Around)

We are all complicated, with personal shortcomings, a little creepy to a certain degree. Don't rule out quitting. There's going to be an insane amount of work ahead, and your time might be better spent elsewhere. If making your art is adding net misery to the world, walk away and do something else. Find something else to do with your time, something that makes you and the people around you feel more alive.

7. You Are Allowed to Change Your Mind, To Change is to Be Alive

We're afraid of changing our minds because we're afraid of the consequences; what will people think? Certainty in art and in life is not only completely overrated, it's also a roadblock to discovery. Uncertainty is the very thing that art thrives on. To have hope, you must acknowledge that you don't know everything and you don't know what's going to happen. That's the only way to keep going and keep making art: to be open to possibility and allow yourself to be changed.

To change your mind, you need a good place to have some bad ideas. If you're going to change your mind, you might have to go off-brand, and offline is the place to be off-brand. Your bliss station, your studio, a paper journal, a private chat room, a living room full of trusted loved ones, these are the places to really think.

Like-minded vs like-hearted. We're increasingly becoming a culture that clusters into like-minded communities. Interacting with people who don't share our perspective forces us to rethink our ideas, strengthen them, or trade them for better ones. If you really want to explore ideas, hang out with people who aren't so much like-minded as like-hearted. People who are temperamentally disposed to openness and have habits of listening. People who are generous, kind, caring, and thoughtful. People who think about what you say, rather than just react. Visit the past. If you're having trouble finding people to think with, seek out the dead. They have a lot to say and they are excellent listeners. Read old books. Human beings have been around for a long time, and almost every problem you have has probably been written about by someone living hundreds or thousands of years before you.

8. When in Doubt, Tidy Up: Keep Your Tools Tidy and Your Materials Messy

French chefs practice mise en place—"set in place." It's about planning and preparation: making sure all ingredients and tools are ready before you set to work. Your station, and its condition, is an extension of your nervous system. We don't have to keep our spaces perfectly clean. We just have to keep them ready for when we want to work. Keep your tools very organized so you can find them. Let the materials cross-pollinate in a mess. If you can't lay your hands on the tool you need, you can blow a day seeking it.

Tidying is exploring. It's a form of productive procrastination, avoiding work by doing other work. The best thing about tidying is that it busies your hands and loosens your mind so you either: (a) get unstuck or solve a problem in your head, or (b) come across something in the mess that leads to new work. Sleep tidies up the brain. When you sleep, your body literally flushes out the junk in your head. Cerebrospinal fluid flows more rapidly, clearing out toxins and bad proteins that build up in brain cells.

9. Demons Hate Fresh Air: To Exercise is to Exorcise

The people who want to control us through fear and misinformation; corporations, marketers, politicians want us plugged into phones or watching TV, because then they can sell us their vision of the world. Our screens have made us lose our senses and our sense. When we're glued to our screens, the world looks unreal, terrible, not worth saving. Everyone seems like a troll or a maniac. But when you get outside and start walking, you come to your senses. Walking is a way to find possibility in your life when there doesn't seem to be any left. So get outside every day. Take long walks by yourself, with a friend, a loved one, a pet. Walk with a coworker on your lunch break. Always keep a notebook or camera for when you want to capture a thought or image.

10. Plant Your Garden: Creativity Has Seasons

"Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long." You have to pay attention to the rhythms and cycles of your creative output and learn to be patient in the off-seasons. You have to give yourself time to change and observe your own patterns. Our lives have different seasons. Some of us blossom at a young age; others don't blossom until old age. Our culture mostly celebrates early successes, people who bloom fast. But those people often wither as quickly as they bloom. Patience is everything.

This, too, shall pass. No one lives forever. Every day is a potential seed that we can grow into something beautiful. There's no time for despair. None of us know how many days we'll have, so it'd be a shame to waste the ones we get. Try your best to fill them in ways that get you a little closer to where you want to be. Go easy on yourself and take your time. Worry less about getting things done. Worry more about things worth doing. Worry less about being a great artist. Worry more about being a good human being who makes art. Worry less about making a mark. Worry more about leaving things better than you found them.

Keep working. Keep playing. Keep drawing. Keep looking. Keep listening. Keep thinking. Keep dreaming. Keep singing. Keep dancing. Keep painting. Keep sculpting. Keep designing. Keep composing. Keep acting. Keep cooking. Keep searching. Keep walking. Keep exploring. Keep giving. Keep living. Keep paying attention. Keep doing your verbs, whatever they may be. Keep going.

My Reflections & Thinking

What resonated with me

• "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." This isn't theoretical it's the brutal truth I've been avoiding. I waste hours on social media, news, distractions. If my days are chaotic, my life will be chaotic. The only thing I can control is what I spend my days on. That's both empowering and terrifying.
• JOMO (Joy Of Missing Out) vs. FOMO. I've been operating on FOMO for years terrified I'm missing the conversation, the trend, the opportunity. But Kleon reframes it: what if missing out is joyful? What if disconnecting is the prerequisite for creating anything worth sharing? That's permission I didn't know I needed.
• "If making your art is adding net misery to the world, walk away." This is the anti-hustle message I needed to hear. I've been grinding on projects that drain me and everyone around me because I thought "real artists never quit." But Kleon says: if your art makes you and others miserable, it's not art it's a trap. Walk away. Find something that makes you and the people around you feel more alive.

What challenged or changed my perspective

• "Make gifts for people, don't make stuff to make money or get famous." This contradicts the entire personal branding / monetization industrial complex. I've been obsessed with "how do I turn this into income?" But Kleon says: when you focus on gifts, on making things for specific people you care about, you reconnect with the reason you create in the first place. Monetization can corrupts. Gifts restore.
• The bliss station as a when, not just a where. I've been waiting for the perfect studio, the perfect space. But Kleon says: it's a time, not just a place. The first hour of the morning, before the news, before the phone that's my bliss station. I don't need a new space. I just need to protect my time differently.
• Like-hearted vs. like-minded. I've been curating a like-minded bubble, people who agree with me, reinforce my views, validate my opinions. But Kleon says: seek like-hearted people. People who are temperamentally open, who listen, who think about what you say instead of reacting. That's harder. It requires humility and vulnerability. But it's the only way to actually grow.

Final Note

This book didn't teach me "how to be more productive" or "how to crush it." It taught me how to endure. How to keep creating when the world is on fire and your brain is exhausted and the numbers don't make sense and you've lost your playfulness. Kleon's framework: establish a daily routine, build a bliss station, make gifts not products, pay attention to what you pay attention to, tidy up when stuck, walk every day, plant your garden and be patient, removes the mystery from creative endurance. It's not about inspiration. It's about small, daily rituals that protect your attention, your energy, and your gifts from the marketplace. I've been treating creativity like a sprint, trying to "make it" as fast as possible, monetize everything, optimize for growth. But Kleon says: it's a marathon. A spiral. A garden with seasons. Some years you bloom. Some years you lose leaves. The only mistake is quitting. So I'm going to stop chasing numbers. Stop waking up to the news. Stop monetizing every creative impulse. I'm going to establish a routine, protect my bliss station, make gifts for people I love, pay attention to what I pay attention to, and walk every single day. Because creativity has seasons. And right now, I'm in winter. But spring always comes if you keep going. So I'm going to keep doing my verbs. Whatever they may be. Keep going.