The One You Feed - Austin Kleon on How to Stay Creative

Episode Date: November 9, 2021

Austin Kleon is a writer, artist, and speaker. Austin also speaks about creativity for organizations such as Pixar, Google, SXSW, and many others. He is the author of many books, including Steal Like an Artist, and Newspaper Blackout.In this episode, Eric and Austin discuss his book, Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and BadBut wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Austin Kleon and I Discuss How to Stay Creative and …His book, Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and BadHow his deep work has usually originated from a dark placeLife is about the balance between the light and dark in usHis long term pessimism and short term optimismMaking peace with things not ever getting easier and learning to enjoy the now.How there are no perfect conditions in life so no sense waiting or worrying about what’s nextIf/And statements and how life is not linear in that wayHis reflection on the book her wrote 10 years agoTrying to get back to the beginner’s mindSeeking curiosity over wisdomOrdinary life + extra attention = the extraordinaryPaying attention by drawing, writing, reading poetry, or walkingTrying to view things as an artist mightForget the noun, do the verbThe importance of having a hobbiesHow energy can be found in books and works of artAustin Kleon Links:Austin’s WebsiteTwitterInstagramUpstart: The fast and easy way to get a personal loan to consolidate, lower your interest rate, and pay off your debt. Go to www.upstart.com/wolfCalm App: The app designed to help you ease stress and get the best sleep of your life through meditations and sleep stories. Join the 85 million people around the world who use Calm to get better sleep. Get 40% off a Calm Premium Subscription (a limited time offer!) by going to www.calm.com/wolfIf you enjoyed this conversation with Austin Kleon, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Finding Your Creativity with Julia CameronWriting as a Path to Awakening with Albert Flynn DeSilverSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We'd all love the perfect conditions, but if you wait for them, you will wait and wait and wait, and pretty soon it'll be over. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter.

It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure?

And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to really know really.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The really know really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Austin Kleon, a writer, artist,

and speaker. Austin also speaks about creativity for organizations such as Pixar, Google, South by Southwest, and many more. He's the author of the well-known book, Steal Like an Artist, and newspaper blackout amongst others, including the one we discuss here, Keep Going, 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad. Hi, Austin. Welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure to have you on. I've admired your work for a long time, but your latest book is called Keep Going, 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad.

And we'll get to that in just a second, but we'll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there is a grandfather talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. You know, it's very dualistic, which I like. And you know, we have

bicameral minds, so it's kind of impossible not to think in dualities. But for me, I think the wolves both have their place for me. Well, what I try to do is, I don't know that I starve the dark wolf so much as I sort of follow where, I'm trying to take the metaphor,'m i don't know i don't know any wolves uh in my life but you know i think about the parable i'm like where does the wolf go at night where does he feed because well that's kind of a funny parable because you don't really feed wolves they're wild yes it's it's been told as dogs before also yeah so it's interesting So if we switch it to dogs, it's like dark dogs, you know, dogs track things and they run around. And one of the things I feel like I try to do is I try to feed my light wolf with things from the dark wolf or I try to, you know, I try to pay a lot of attention to the dark wolf, because I think the dark wolf gives me information. So I'll put it another, if you want to use another metaphor, I think a lot about poison and nourishment. So there's a lot of poisonous things that I find in my life, you know, like something like jealousy. Let's just take jealousy. Jealousy is a

very poisoning thing. But jealousy as a feeling is also just information. So if you can kind of like hold your jealousy and kind of like look at it like an object and kind of spin it around, figure out where it's coming from. Sometimes jealousy shows you something that you want or something that you're lacking. So then you can kind of think, okay, well, here's the poison. What's the nourishment? I'm someone who's driven a lot by disgust and anger. I get angry about the world and I get disgusted by things I see. But then I take that information. I think, well, what would be the opposite? So what's the antidote to this poison or what's the nourishment? And then that's what I try to put in my work. And so when people say, you know, your books are so helpful or they're so upbeat or that's what I'm going for, but

I don't think people understand how dark the books begin, like how all the books come from that dark wolf, right? How all the books come from the dark wolf and then the other wolf is the one I send into the world to greet people. You know what I mean? Yeah. So I think that it's about really looking at the wolf, really listening to its growl, seeing where it goes when no one's looking. Yep, yep. And then figuring out how to spin it. So that's where like, you know, it's taken me years to figure this out,

but a lot of my really good work has to come from a deep place of agitation. Like I like to think of my work as being fairly positive and nourishing for people, but it usually has its origins in something very kind of dark or ugly or painful. Yeah. Well, you say it early on in this book that, you know, you wrote this book because you needed to hear it. And my experience is that the people often who have the greatest wisdom to offer are the people who have earned that wisdom the hard way, usually, because it's something that we've had to work through. I was talking with a coaching client about this earlier, and she was like, I just don't feel

prepared to teach people about mindfulness because I'm not totally at peace. And I was like, the fact that you are applying it to the situations this difficult is what's going to make you someday a great teacher because you're really practicing in real life with this stuff. Yes. And I would also say that the best teachers, and I'm plagiarizing a writer when I say this, you know, some of the best teachers are the ones that need to learn the lesson. Yeah. All of my books are really the result of me not knowing about something. You know, that's the other thing about my books that I think people sort of misunderstand is that, you know, the books come from me trying to figure something out. And then the books are the product of that process of trying to learn something. And then the books are really just me saying, hey, here's what I've learned. what you said. My mom used to be a guidance counselor, and she told me that every counselor she ever met really needed counseling. And so, you know, we're drawn to things in our lives that,

you know, what we need, we seek out. And then we become the kind of peddlers or not peddlers, but, you know, we dish out what we found or what we've looked for. You know, the dualism that you're talking about, one of the reasons I love this idea about the one you feed is we're in a time and a culture right now where you have to pick one side. Where it's like, it's very like, we're not really good as a culture right now with ambiguity. We're not very good with people who have one foot in and one foot out. have one foot in and one foot out. So for example, it's very hard for people to process the idea that an artist might able to make beautiful or useful things and not be very beautiful or useful in their everyday life. And so we're having this cultural moment where if we get information about the artist that contradicts the art, all of a sudden, it's supposed to destroy the art.

Whereas I've always been someone who, you know, the people I really looked up to when I was younger came from really dark places. And, you know, they were not perfect people in their everyday lives. And they did cause a lot of suffering, maybe, or chaos in their everyday life. The good thing about the culture now is that we don't celebrate that. We were getting away from that narrative that you have to be destructive in your personal life in order to be creative in your work. But I also think there's a way that that can go too far where we start dismissing the work of people that aren't perfect in their everyday lives. And so I think it's very tricky and it's a balance right

now. And again, the reason I love the one you feed is that if you think about the culture and you think about, you know, human civilization throughout time, it's usually just balancing back and forth between the forces. You know, it's just like things get caught out of whack and things swing back and forth. And it's really just the pendulum. Or if you want to think of it the other way, it's like the big wheel that turns. Yeah. I love what you said there. I mean, I think almost certainly anytime we correct something, we almost always overcorrect, you know, it's almost inevitable that we swing way over to one side, we swing too far back over to the other. And then maybe there's a little bit of a balancing over time. Exactly. It's like when you're driving, you know, they tell you when you're driving not to swerve too fast, because in the swerve, you get the whiplash and you go too far over,

you know, so it's like, I'm not advocating for any kind of like mushy, you know, wishy washy path. But it is interesting to watch these forces come in play. And the nice thing about staying alive, which I know you and I are both interested in. Yeah, very much. The nice thing about staying alive is you get to see those swings and that's where the wisdom comes from. You know, you start seeing all the swings

and even in your lifetime and you can see a way through it. It's one of the reasons that I most wish I could live to be like, you know, 10,000 years old, is just to see how it all goes. You know, when people ask that question of like, if you could sit down with anybody in history, who would it be? I'm always like, can I flip that and sit down with somebody 10,000 years from now to tell me what has happened the last 10,000 years? Because I really want to know. really want to know. I'm curious. I mean, like, I always loved, I think it's Seneca, one of those old, you know, thousand year old writers who said, you know, when you read old books, you get to annex their lifetimes. Yeah. So that to me is always the value of reading is that if you can go back far enough or read enough people, you sort of accumulate the 10,000 years. It's just on the other side of history. As much progress as we make, you know, I'm always shocked at how much life stays the same,

you know, especially when you're reading about, you know, people a couple thousand years ago. It's always amazing to me how it's still a lot of the same stuff. thousand years ago, it's always amazing to me how it's still a lot of the same stuff. Yeah, underline all of it. There is still the very basic human tendency to want to be happy and want to avoid what makes us unhappy and to want to care for the things that we love and avoid the things that we don't love. And in some ways, that core never really changes. Love and death. It stayed true, you know, and I think that's why whenever I look into the future, I think a lot about the pandemic and how the pandemic, rather than changing life, has felt to me a lot like it's turned everything up to 11. You know,

like they say in Spinal Tap, it's just like everything gets turned up, you know, everything is just cranked up and amplified. And so some of the really good things are even better now. And then the bad or annoying things are even worse. I feel like the future to me looks a lot like the past. Just, you know, I think that maybe just amplified. I don't know. Yeah. I'm a long-term pessimist, short-term optimist.

I really feel like, you know, in the end, we're all doomed. But I'm very optimistic about the day. I'm very optimistic about what you can give with the time that's in front of you that you can sort of manipulate. There's a part early in it that you say, everything got better for me when I made peace with the fact that it might not ever get easier. You were talking about creating art in that sense, but I think we can apply it to living. Why is it helpful? Why is it good when we make peace with that, when we stop waiting for things to get easier? You know, I think a lot of this came from being a parent because when my kids were younger, I thought, God, if I could just get them out of diapers, you know, or then if I could just get them walking or whatever. And suddenly I realized like, oh, it doesn't get better. It just changes.

Everything changes, you know? And the minute I stopped worrying about when it was going to get better, I just like sort of enjoyed the now. Most of the great philosophical texts or the, you know, spiritual texts tell us that be here now, you know. But I think for art and creativity in particular, it just, you just harness whatever skills you have, whatever materials. It's very punk rock for me. It's very much like what's in front of you, what abilities you have, what techniques you have, what tools you have. You use them right now in the here and now. And I will say that I've been extremely influenced recently by this book that I read that's not very well known and it's out of print was by this guy named Joseph

Meeker. And he wrote this book called The Comedy of Survival. And Meeker studied two things. He studied literature and he studied ecology. And what Meeker sort of did is he talked about how much ecology mimics comedy. That if you think about animals and the natural world and plants and stuff, there's so much adaptation going on. There's so much improvisation that's going on. That nature almost resembles a comedy more than a tragedy. And what Meeker said is that Western civilization runs on tragedy. This idea that there's a great person you know like our dominant narratives are there's a great person and they have a vision and they mold the world into their vision yeah you know and they change things and of course in a tragedy it all

ends in blood you know i mean it's always there's always some tragic flaw, something that brings the person down in the end. And in a comedy, it's usually about normal people that sort of, they struggle, but they adapt and they stay flexible and they're improvisational. And at the end, there's a wedding or there's a celebration, there's drink. And Meeker's point was just that if we're to survive as a culture, it's going to take a comedic perspective. It's going to take a kind of flexible, improvisational approach to life. It's funny because I read that book after I finished Keep Going. Well, Keep Going, of course, starts with another modern parable, which is Groundhog Day, the movie Bill Murray's in where he wakes up every day and relives the same day. And I thought it was really funny how here's this book that's super influential on me like two years after I read this other book or a year or whatever.

But I was already influenced by comedy. I just didn't have somebody, you know, kind of showing it to me. And so I think, you know, for me, it's just more about seeing myself as a comic character, as more of a, not a Buster Keaton, but a Charlie Chaplin, but, you know, more just like a guy who's doing what he can with what's in front of him, you know, and, and being flexible and not having too lofty, and being flexible and not having too lofty, just being flexible and adaptive and learning. To me, that's just been like terrifically powerful. And that's when you don't expect things to change. And that was Meeker's great point is like, if you don't expect the world to change, then you work with what's there. And it doesn't mean that you're complacent.

with what's there. And it doesn't mean that you're complacent. It just means that you work with what's in front of you and you try to make something out of that. You don't wait for the right conditions. This is what you've got. And I think that what I just said has really been, I think, the real message of my work, I hope, for readers is that, you know, we all love the perfect conditions. But if you wait for them, you will wait and wait and wait. And pretty soon, it'll be over. Yeah, there are no perfect conditions. And you know, my son just last year graduated college. So I've been on the whole other side. Yeah, but I related with everything you said. And I got better, like you, at going like, let me just try and enjoy this scenario and try not to worry too much about the next milestone. And looking back now, I'm like, well, the worry never totally goes away.

Or the care. Maybe that's the better word. You know, the care is obviously always there. I'm not too much of a worrier in general. We had Rainn Wilson on the show, the guy from Office. And he talked about something that I don't think he created this, but I love it. It's this if-then thinking. If this, then, but in the negative sense.

If I just had this, then I would do this. And you kind of talk about this at one point in the book. You know, we think if we had the perfect art studio and we ran around with the right crowd of people and we had all these things, then we'd be able to be creative. Yeah. That's like a computer programmer type logic on steroids type thing. If than statement. Yeah. That's literally how computers run. It's like, if this condition is true, do this. And life just isn't really like that. You know, it's not, it's not that run. It's like, if this condition is true, do this. And life just isn't really like that. It's not that linear. It's not programmed that way. My wife says something beautiful that I love, and there's several pieces of fiction that kind of play with this idea. But she said, just once in a while, I'd like to live my life out of order. I'd like to live a day where they were babies, and then I'd like to live a day where they were babies. And then I'd

like to live a day when they were in their 30s. You know, of course, you know, the whole meaning of life would deteriorate if you got to do that. You know, I mean, it's really the fact that you have to live it in order that provides there's a great book about this, actually. There's a book called Some by David Eagleman, and it's tales of the afterlife. He imagines all these different afterlives. And one of them is that you have to live your life in a different order, but it's like, okay, here's nine years of you brushing your teeth. Here's two years of you brushing your teeth. And then here's 30 days of you making love. You know, it's just like, what's beautiful about the story is it shows you, and this is the thing about parables, as you know, is it shows you the meaning in your everyday life. You're right. If I

did live it that way, it wouldn't have the same meaning. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth plus does tom cruise really do his own stunts his stuntman reveals the answer and you never know who's going to drop by mr brian cranson is with us how are you hello my friend wayne knight about jurassic park wayne knight welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really.

Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. There's such a common genre of writing, which is, you know, sort of letters to your younger self. What I wish I could tell my younger self, because that's exactly it. It's this sense of like, well, I just sure wish at that age I could have the wisdom that I had then,

but it simply doesn't work that way. You know, I do think there are ways to help people as we're younger to be wiser, but a certain amount of it is you've got to figure out your own life and it's going to have its own twists and turns and that's part of the game. Yeah. So I went through this weird thing recently where my book, Steal Like an Artist came out in 2012. So it has its 10th anniversary next year. And so we've been working on the 10th anniversary edition. It's going to be like a hardcover and I wrote a new afterword for it. more time has passed in between the me now and the me who wrote that book than the me who wrote that book and the person he was writing it for. Because I was writing it for my 19-year-old self, like, oh, what I wish I had known when I was the young age of 19 when I was like 27 or whatever it was when I wrote that book. But then there was this really interesting thing that happened when I was rereading the book. I thought, I couldn't write this now.

And this is another thing people have a hard time believing if you're a writer is that if you say that, you say, I couldn't write this now. They say, what do you mean? You were you when you wrote this. And I'm like, but I'm not that guy anymore. I'm not this person. And I love his energy. I don't know where he's getting it from. He didn't have kids. Yeah. I like his certainty. You know, I read the book and I'm like, yeah, this sounds great. Let me do this. But it's not me. Like, I couldn't do it again. You know, something I always try to tell young writers in particular is, you know, they want wisdom. And I'm always like, you know, sometimes it's really the idiot or the fool or the amateur or the beginner that really makes the leaps. You know, when you're younger, you should use your raw, nascent, gooey state to really play and figure things out.

Because, you know, the amateur has just so many advantages over the professional really and the expert you know a lot of my work as a creative person is trying to get back to that full state yeah you know especially in the self-help genre everyone's like oh mastery you have to achieve mastery like that's what you need to go after and everything and as a creative person you know of course i'm trying to attempt mastery and, like, I'm trying to put a sentence together. I'm trying to get really good at the craft and things like that. But it's really being able to go back to that full state, that beginner's mind, where I don't know anything. That's where the really good ideas come from.

And, again, this is very influenced by being a parent. I have this idea of the curious elder, because I'm approaching 40. And I'm starting to think about, you know, middle age and how I'm going to do this and the relationship I'm going to have with my kids. And instead of thinking of myself as like the wise elder, I think of myself as the curious elder. Yes, I'm very much like, you show me what you're into. You're going to get the model of how I live from just seeing me and what I do and everything, but I'm going to be more interested in you. Yes. That's beautiful. I'm going to be the curious elder and you're going to show me things. You're going to teach me.

And that's sort of been my mo you know for a few years now with my kids and i'm trying to like continue it i'm like what you just said which i love is that you know you could read all the books in the world you could i love you know reading that's what i've like staked my life on you know like books and reading and wisdom and stuff but at the end of the day you've got to live your life. The experience is really what's going to drill it into you. I love it. But for me, it's like professionally, the thing to do in my position is to be like, I know these things.

I'm the expert. And today I'm going to teach you about creativity or, you know, I'm going to sell you my whatever. And I really try to be honest with my audience that, you know, I can tell you what I know, which is, I feel like a decent amount, but I would tell you that the things that are the most valuable to me are the things you have available to you right now. You know, like the things that are the most raw and pure and available you could get tomorrow, you know? And so that's part of the wisdom too, I suppose. Yeah, totally. I mean, so much of what you were saying in there reminded me of why I have been so drawn to Zen practice for big parts of my life, you know, that idea of beginner's mind

and the sense that not knowing, you know, there's a phrase from Zen, not knowing is most intimate. It's the best state to have. And that same thing that you said there at the end, too, which is that every bit of our life is the path. There's a thing I repeat. I don't know what it is, whether it's the four bodhisattva vows. It doesn't matter. But I say it and it's dharmagates are countless. I vow to wake to them. It basically means everything is a dharmagate, meaning a path to freedom, a path to insight, a path to awakening. Every little thing. Yes. You know, one translation of it says, I vow to experience them, which is a beautiful idea that, you know, like you're saying, whether it's creativity or growing wise or whatever it is, we do have what we need here. I say in the book, it's like ordinary life plus extra attention. Yes. And that's how you get

the extraordinary. Everything that feels ordinary, if you can just pay the right attention to it, it becomes extraordinary. And that's what all the great texts teach us is that there's a different level of attention. There are different vibrations, there are different visions that we can have. Just kind of have to poke beyond the surface of what's presented to you. Yeah, I loved that chapter of the book very much. It's called The Ordinary Plus Extra Attention Equals The Extraordinary. And I just think that's so great. And it's so in line with, in the Spiritual Habits program I do, we have a module.

It's called No Ordinary Moments. That's the basic idea. In the spiritual habits program I do, we have a module. It's called no ordinary moments. That's the basic idea. Like, you know, the way you make a moment non-ordinary is you pay closer and closer attention to it. And you and I both quote John, I don't know, do you say it, Tarrant? I think it is.

You say attention is the most basic form of love that he wrote. And I've got another quote of his that I use, which is to learn to attend is a beginning to learn to attend more and more deeply is the path itself. I love that. You know, attention is one of those things that the greats kind of get around to. I read a really great biography of William James, who, of course, said the famous, you know, my experience is what I choose to attend to. My experience is what I choose to attend to. I just feel like the reason to read old books too is that people think that there's some sort of truth or progress that's set in stone. And I'm always fascinated when I realize just how much deep wisdom there is in ancient stuff.

For example, in the old days, people thought that your eyes actually shot beams out, that the way that you saw things was that your eyes actually projected. It wasn't that light came and hit your eyes. It's that your eyes actually shone out into the universe and like a spotlight. It's fascinating. And, you know, you think, oh, ha ha, how funny.

But I'm very interested in useful fictions. I'm very interested in things that like, I guess this is kind of a pragmatic thing, but it's like, okay, what would be the behavioral result of that belief? And the result would be, well, you would feel that you had control over where you put your eyeballs, your eye beams. Where you shoot your eye beams is in your control, right? You know, if you think about light just hitting your eyes and that's how you see, that's a very passive idea. It's scientifically true.

But if you think about your eyeballs as something that shoot out beams and, you know, you look around, then all of a sudden it makes you active. Yeah. out beams and you look around, then all of a sudden it makes you active. So I'm very interested in when it comes to ideas, and this is why metaphor is so beautiful and history is so beautiful. It gives us these examples of images we can keep in our mind or stories we can keep in our minds that influence our behavior and how we're supposed to act. Yeah, I love that. What are some of your favorite ways for deepening attention?

I like that. You know, I'm a writer and an artist and a musician. So a lot of the ways that I pay deeper attention are about just practicing my craft. So for example, drawing, there's nothing easier in an artist's tool belt than drawing. It's cheap. It's something you can practice with almost anything. And it's something you can do your whole life. And the minute you sort of really look at something to draw it, then you really see it. Yeah. Because, you know, you think you know what a lamp looks like, but then really when you're

trying to trace it with your eyeballs, you know, those eye beams again, you're like, wait a minute, this is much stranger and even more beautiful than I thought it was. You know, my friend Wendy McNaughton just gave a really good TED talk about drawing and specifically she practices a kind of drawing that's blind contour portraits where you draw without looking down at your paper. And she practices that a lot. And that's something that I do a lot too. It really becomes a looking activity. So there's that. And then it depends on what I want to pay deeper attention to. If there's a piece of writing that I really want to pick apart, I will copy it by hand or I'll type it out.

And then I'll go line by line and circle it and look up words, you know, poems. I was going to mention before, the poets are the people who are really good at taking ordinary life and making it extraordinary. Yes. Like, so if you don't read a lot of poetry, I recommend it. You know, just start like reading, go to like poets.org or some online poetry website. They all have like daily poems or like daily poem newsletters and stuff. People who don't read poetry, just start reading poetry every day. Just take five minutes. And that's a different kind of attention that if you're just going to

work or doing your commute, you're not paying that kind of attention that the poets do. So that's something, close reading, copying. I do that a lot. And if you think about drawing as a form of trying to copy what's in front of you, that's copying too. Most recently, I've been pointing to my piano back here. I have been blown away lately by how I can take a song that I've heard for 20 years that I've listened to over and over again. And if I sit down and learn to play it on the piano, all of a sudden it's a new song. Yeah. Like I know how it works in a way that I never knew before. Some more practical things,

taking a walk, taking a daily walk as a way of paying attention to your neighborhood. Like if you drive somewhere all the time and then you walk it on foot, that is a revelation. If you walk a way that you normally drive, and if you drive a way you normally walk, you realize how much you're missing or not missing. And so I love taking a daily walk. Yeah, I'd say walking, drawing, writing. That's pretty much my ways of paying attention. I practiced meditation for a little bit, and I like the way I feel. But drawing and walking are very meditative for me, as is copying. I think the most important part of my practice is every morning I keep a diary that's sort of like half sketchbook, half writing notebook. And I just fill like three

pages, you know, like the Julia Cameron morning pages. I just do three pages in the morning. And I find that keeping a daily diary, if I do it right, and what I mean by right is if you just hold a pen and kind of start moving it and let things come out, you aren't just like, oh, what did I do yesterday? Oh, I did this. One of my biggest teachers is a woman named Linda Barry. And she believes really powerfully in this idea that you just kind of start making letters and things come. And she's taught me a lot about, you know, just kind of channel. What you're trying to do with those morning pages or with your diaries, you're not trying to recount life as much as you're trying to like figure out what's actually going on you know not what went on but what's actually going on yeah you know and i find that that

morning practice helps me pay attention to my own life it helps me pay attention to what i've paid attention to too which is i think is really important I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too?

Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, Not Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening?

Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm an abysmal drawer. I mean, it's hard to like really look too closely at life when you're like, well, I've got a stick figure. But no, I sometimes try and look like an artist would look like,

where are the shadows? Where are the lines? Where are the shapes? Because it all of a sudden gets your mind to go from, as you said earlier, sort of passively taking in to sort of shining your light beams, you know, on something. All of a sudden, I'm like, oh, because I think that's what artists are so good at doing is saying, all right, off autopilot, study this thing. Another that is good is taking pictures. Yeah. There's a great book out there called Zen Camera by this guy. And it's all about, you know, photography is a contemplative practice. And it's the same thing. And when I'm sort of doing the practices in that book, it's like, as I'm out and about, my brain is engaging in a different way. I am paying closer attention.

So I think art is so good for that. Well, you mentioned like how you try to look at the world like an artist might, like seeing the shadows. And that's such a great point is that, you know, my friend Rob Walker has a book called The Art of Noticing. And one of the exercises Rob suggests people practice is take a photo walk without a camera. So like you walk around and you look for good shots without actually having the camera there. And then what happens? Well, of course, you see a million things that you'd love to take a picture of. That's awesome. Only you had your camera. You know, it's funny when I carry a pocket notebook, I have more ideas. And I don't think it's because I have more ideas than I do when I'm not carrying the pocket notebook. It's just that,

And I don't think it's because I have more ideas than I do when I'm not carrying the pocket notebook. It's just that, well, no, that's not true. I think actually having this in my pocket, sort of rubbing against my leg all day, the same way your phone, you get that phantom weird thing from your phone being in your pocket. I think having this in my pocket all day just invites things. You know, Thoreau said that, you know, your diary was like a nest egg. And we think of nest eggs now, it's like saving up for the future. No, there's a thing called a nest egg, which is it is a fake egg that you put in a nest to get a bird to lay another egg next to it. So he thought thoughts were nest eggs. If you write one thought down in a notebook, it'll invite other thoughts to come down. It's interesting how much when you read, because I love reading old books so much, you have to really understand what they're talking about.

Because nest eggs, like who has a farm or a chicken coop? I mean, more people than they used to in some ways. But like what's a nest egg? So it's like stuff like that and it's funny like some of my friends because i have a lot of artist friends and people who are drawers and they talk all the time about how drawing is a different kind of attention than taking pictures and i think it is a different kind of attention but i don't think it's a better kind i mean it might be a slower or whatever but i think there's something about taking pictures because I love to take a lot of pictures too. I think what's fun is just have like

an arsenal, just a tool belt, just all these different ways of paying attention. And if you can ask yourself, what am I not getting? You know, like what am I deficient in right now? Or like, it's kind of like when you're hungry, if you think about what sounds really good, it's usually that's what you need in your diet. You know, if you really kind of think about, you're like, oh, salad. I should really, you know, like if you ask yourself like spiritually or mentally, like, what am I kind of missing here? Then you can kind of look at your tool belt and say, well, maybe I should do, you know,

maybe I should take a walk or something. With all that said, it's like, so much of this stuff is subconscious. You know, you got to kind of train yourself. And then you do a lot of it on autopilot. It's not like I sit around in my office like, oh, I think it's walk time. It's like, it doesn't really happen. Yep. Yep. Somewhere in the book, I don't remember which chapter, but you quote Kurt Vonnegut saying, you know, just write a poem and tear it up, you know, and something in what you could write a poem knowing that you were going to tear it up, that'd be great. Except Vonnegut wouldn't have torn up his poem. That was what his daughter was joking about, which I love.

But I do feel like if you can do things for the doing, it's so hard now because it's so easy to share things. And I think, you know, one of the problems that young writers and artists and creative people in general have is that they haven't really known. I mean, if you're under a certain age, you don't really know a world in which making and sharing were separate. on your Instagram immediately. And so, you know, there's a kind of merging of making and sharing where it can get very heavy if you're trying to make while thinking about sharing. Yes. You know, there's something about you need to be in the making state and not thinking about the sharing state. Well, we've all been under surveillance so much and self-imposed surveillance. I mean, we all have like,

so many people have Instagram accounts and I wrote a book called Show Your Work. So it's not like I'm, you know, I've contributed to this, this idea that if you want people to know about your work, you have to show it to them. You have to share with them and in a regular frequency and in a certain way, but you can't really do a lot of really good, raw, new, scary, interesting creative work if you feel like you're under surveillance. And I think part of the problem with having an Instagram or a Twitter or blog or newsletter, all these things that we have, there's such wonderful tools to build audience and connect with audience and get our stuff out there and run our lives. You know, you kind of have to forget all that stuff or be able to tune that out in order to get to that raw kind of creative

state. You know, I am a completely amateur piano player. I have tried to do Instagram lives before as like, just fun, just like I jump on Instagram live and play some Davies. He just, just, this is like a fun thing. And every time I do it, I can't believe how much worse I am because I'm so like, you know, even though there's like 40 people on there, I, all of a sudden I'm like, Oh my God, you know, cause I'm not a performer and performance is a whole different thing than like writing in the studio or composing. Yes, it is. Performance is a whole different thing. And so I think about that all the time, how it's like, you know, if you think all the

time about if I'm drawing, I'm like, what's this going to look like on Instagram? You know, that's very limiting, but it's so easy to have happen to you, you know. So to try to like get away from the surveillance mindset, to try to get away, to disconnect from the world so you can connect with your work. That's something that every creative person, and I would argue any human living today, really needs to figure out. You know, how can you disconnect so you can connect with yourself? Agreed. I think that is so true. And I feel really fortunate that I don't know how long it's been now, a decade, maybe, maybe not quite that long ago that I sort of with music went, you know what, like, nothing's going to happen with this. This isn't going anywhere. And I'm just not going to

care about it going anywhere. And it's easy to say that sounds like I just did it and it was over, right? I'm talking about a process here. But when I reemerged on the other side of it, and I just played the guitar, and I don't even anymore very often even record like a good idea I have. You've got a chapter called Forget the Noun, Do the Verb, right? It's forgetting about being a guitar player and just playing the guitar. But it's turned that into a true source of solace and joy in my life, because I really have no agenda on it, except that like, it's very satisfying. Now, in our show, we do all the music breaks. So the music shows up in there. But I mean, that is like the lowest form of like, who cares? No one cares. You know, I mean, and most of what I play in guitar never does. But it's just nice to have something like that in life. And I loved something you said in your book. I've been talking a minute here. I'm going to shut up and let you talk in a second. But you talked about making gifts. You know, you said we're now trained to heap praise on our loved ones by using market terminology.

The minute anybody shows any talent for anything, we suggest they turn into a profession. And boy, that really hit me as so true. Because when I let go of the guitar as something that might get me something, it became a solace. But that's not the way we are oriented in today's world at all. We are all taught, if you're good at something, do more of it and sell it. Anything worth doing is worth doing well, or professionally, or on stage. Yeah. I mean, this is something I learned too late, I think. I was lucky in that I sort of knew that the musician's life wasn't going to

be for me like it's funny because i used to say like i don't know getting up in front of an audience every night and trying to bear you know that sounds too hard now of course you know like a big part of my job is like getting up on stage and yeah talking to people but for me it was like i got lucky because i kind of like knew music wasn't going to be a thing. And so it happened to me like that suddenly became the hobby. Yeah. And hobby has become such a pejorative term now. Oh, it's just a hobby. He's just a hobbyist, you know.

And at different points in time and in different cultures, I mean, hobbies are what make life kind of worth, you know. Yes. I mean, the English have a much different approach to hobbies, for example. There's a really wonderful essay by George Orwell that he wrote during the war. And he said that one of the reasons he felt that the English had resisted fascism was that they were very fond of personal hobbies, things like gardening or puttering around or tinkering. Orwell really thought that one of the reasons that the English people were good at resisting fascism was because they practiced hobbies. If you think about America right now, I mean mean everyone's trying to professionalize

yeah everything is a side hustle or you know whatever and i particularly with creative people it's like most of us have tried to turn our hobbies into professions yeah and so then it becomes very very very important that you find another hobby yeah that you find something outside whether it's gardening or you know like whittling i don't know whatever it is that thing that you could do for no reason yeah you said something so beautiful it's like once i stopped looking at my guitar as something that could get me something you know get me something oh that's it really you know like that that's it once you stop looking at the thing as something that'll get me something. Oh, that's it, really. You know, like, that's it. Once you stop looking at the thing as something that'll get you something, then something can happen,

right? Like, then you can really make something happen. And I do, though, I think the way out of that market mentality is to make gifts. You know, like, if you're a painter and you're really feeling, I think like painting something for your mother or something, or you make something for a hero of yours who's been dead for 200 years. You know, just getting into that idea that I'm going to make something for someone else

and I don't expect anything in return. I'm going to take the gifts they've been giving me and then I'm going to pass them on because that's really what the gift is about. And there's a great book about that called The Gift by Lewis Hyde, where he talks about like all really great art has a gift element and that someone's brought to their gifts from the gifts of others. And then they pass on that gift through their work. So if you can kind of like just pull yourself out of that market thing for a while, long enough to get in touch with that gift again and to kind of grow it, then you can kind of get back in the game.

Or you can just pull it out completely. You can just say, I'm not doing this for work anymore. I mean, if you have that luxury, you know, and there have been multiple artists throughout history who have said, no, I'm going to work at the post office and write at night or I'm going to become an insurance vice president of this insurance company and then I'm going to write these wild poems. You know, poets, it was very helpful to me as a young man to look up to so many poets because they all had day jobs. That's right poets yeah yeah by and large there's never been any market in poetry so they've been able to kind of stay pure in a sense yeah well i really related to that not that creating a podcast is exactly a deep art but it was my love and you know when it became something that went from something i just did

because i loved doing it to something that pays the bills, there is a real change there. And I consistently have to sort of do what you're talking about, which is like, how do I get back to what started this? What was the fire that was here? You know, like it takes work to get back to that place. You know, I mean, I've been thinking a lot. My kids went back to school and I've been thinking a lot about teachers and just how many teachers I talked to a lot of teachers and they all, you know, you have to be passionate to do that because you are not going to get rewarded in a way that is commensurate with what you do, especially in this economy. There are so many professions that that happens, you know, you're brought to it because you love something and then it becomes your breadwinning. And like, how do you get through that? That's a big part of the job in some ways. And very few of our jobs train us in that, you know, how to recover some of that joy,

how to recover some of that early energy, some of that rawness. You know, you're obviously a musician. I'm a musician. So it's fun to think about how musicians do it. Mick Jagger jumping on stage at a bar. It's like a musician, you know, jamming. Prince used to, when he was on tour, you know, he'd just show up somewhere and play. You know, he'd do his big show at the arena, but then he'd show up somewhere, you know, do a set and then leave immediately. You know, because he just wanted to play yeah can you imagine sitting in a bar and prince walk in and climb up on stage and just blow the roof off the place i mean it would be unbelievable the guy was so talented i just

think about like it would be mind-melting to see that my friend's name is matt thomas and he was a prince fan long before i was and matt saw him on his piano in a microphone tour and i just think like oh man that's that's a that's a big regret of my life not going to see prince uh when he was when he was here on the planet so yeah but i mean you know it's finding those things in your life how can you just practice you know it would be like if lebron did a pickup game in akron or something you know know, whatever it was that, you know, to try to go back to that and to recapture that. I just think a lot about energy these days. Like one of the things I love about art and books is that I feel like the good stuff, it's embodied energy.

There's some sort of energy that's been locked in the piece. The reader, like with books, really good books have a kind of energy to them that is activated once the reader comes and opens it up. It's like the reader has to breathe life into it, and then all of a sudden it works again. And all that energy that the writer put into it, it'll be there forever. Like when you pick up Moby Dick, whatever weird, dark, crazy energy Melville channeled into that, whoever picks up Moby Dick and opens the page, it's there for them. Yeah. And that, I think, is part of the magic of art. And it's what really sustains me in my rougher days is trying to find, you know, I've got books around here where it's like, okay, I need some of that. I need some of that Lindy energy. You know,

I need some of that Thoreau energy. I need some of the Hockney energy, you know, it's like, go to it and it's there for you. Yeah. Well, I think that's a great place to wrap up with thinking about the energy that's embodied in great works of art. Austin, thank you so much for coming on the show. You and I are going to continue in the post-show conversation. And what I really want to talk about is a chapter title called Demons Hate Fresh Air, which is such a great idea. We'll talk about that in the post-show conversation. Listeners, if you'd like access to that, as well as a special episode I do each week

called Teaching Song and a Poem. And all the other benefits of being a member, go to oneufeed.net slash join. Austin, thanks so much for being here. We'll have links to all your work in our show notes. And I've really enjoyed this. Thank you. It was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join.

The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure And does your dog truly love you

We have the answer Go to reallynoreally.com And register to win $500 A guest spot on our podcast Or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead The Really No Really Podcast Follow us on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts

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