Austin Kleon

Thanks for the thoughtful comment. It's complicated. I'm a perfectionist miniature painter by hobby. I love the stories floating around about how quantity can lead to quality (photography, pottery): https://austinkleon.com/2020/12/10/quantity-leads-to-quality-the-origi… In most of my hobbies I feel like my growth and talent is limited by lack of volume, not my care or attention to detail. It's hard to let go and use one color instead of three, or not fix a flaw in model part nobody will ever see. I'm sure other people have the opposite challenge.

By coincidence, a relevant Austin Kleon blog post from today: https://austinkleon.com/2021/10/04/a-blessed-unrest/ This is Agnes de Mille conversing with the great dancer Martha Graham: > “But,” I said, “when I see my work I take for granted what other people value in it. I see only its ineptitude, inorganic flaws, and crudities. I am not pleased or satisfied.” > “No artist is pleased.” > “But then there is no satisfaction?” > “No satisfaction whatever at any time,” she cried out passionately. “There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

I read an article form of Kurt Vonnegut's original talk. My favourite part was the happiness/misery graph of The Metamorphosis: http://austinkleon.com/wp-content/uploads/2005/vonnegut6.gif (Found here: http://austinkleon.com/2005/12/17/graph-a-story-with-mr-vonnegut/)

+e^x for Kenny Werner's book. Kenny Werner's philosophy if you can summarize it in one sentence - is if you are a trumpet player - you must master breath control, fingering so by the time you are in performance - you are truly playing without thinking of the mechanics. There are many analogies to really focused coding, Kenny Werner's philosophy, and Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's concept of flow [1]. You must master the syntax, the grammar, the idiosyncrasies, the rules and unwritten and written customs, and the is-isms of the language before you can "effortlessly" write code in a given platform/language. This is one of the reasons beginners to programming may stumble on the hike - they are so focused on the writing of the lines of code that they are often pushed by themselves or their otherwise well-intentioned teacher to produce code. The building blocks of code are not the lines of code - it is the concepts and the system and framework and mental model behind it (the whiteboard so to speak). "This year, forget about the year as a whole. Forget about months and forget about weeks. Focus on days." http://austinkleon.com/2013/12/29/something-small-every-day/ An excerpt from Kenny Werner's book that I just pulled out of my giant stack of books Jenga style (p.85). > Practice Perhaps music feels great as long as you're fifteen feet away from the instrument, but as you move closer, a different energy takes over and your connection dwindles... How can we retain the bliss of…

As a graphic designer/artist: this question strikes me as funny because the frequent "how do I start programming" threads are always so matter-of-fact. 3-4 biblical texts get recommended, a handful of vetted resources bandied about, and then a minimal amount of hemming and hawing over which language to use. As daunting and foreign as those threads seem to me, programming has a lot of known knowns - I can see where "how do I design" would be more daunting because it's such an unqualified expanse consisting almost completely of grey area. Stand before it, naked, putting yourself in the shoes of the designer, and imagine the horror of the client's most unspeakable words: "I can't explain it to you, but I'll know it when I see it." All that aside, I think the advice that I've received from this community re: learning to program/hack is still sound as it applies to graphic design: 1) Have a project and work toward it. If you don't have one, make one. Be specific in your end goal. This focus enables you to do the most important thing: 2) Steal like an artist. (via http://www.austinkleon.com/2011/03/30/how-to-steal-like-an-artist-and-… All the other advice in this thread is pretty legit. You probably don't even know what looks good, so don't start on your own. Do your research. Look at competitors in the space (or the closest you can find to it). Use open source/CC art. Follow the crumbs back to the artist's portfolios and see the other work…

That’s interesting there was creativity experiment results proving that could be true. https://austinkleon.com/2020/12/10/quantity-leads-to-quality-the-origi…

That's such bullshit. I've managed some incredibly prolific developers and some very slow ones, and the prolific ones are pretty much always the ones more available, more willing to fix things, more willing to take feedback. And also: they make less mistakes because their skills are sharp. This anecdote comes to mind: https://austinkleon.com/2020/12/10/quantity-leads-to-quality-the-origi… If you have to constantly rationalize performance differences by demeaning others, this says more about you than the prolific people.

I remember the same anecdote, but about pottery https://austinkleon.com/2020/12/10/quantity-leads-to-quality-the-origi… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12653203 https://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-always-trumps-quality/

Technical skill has very, very little to do with the emotional impact of music. One of the most famous mantras in punk music was "this is a chord, this is another, now make a band"[1]. "Imagine" by John Lennon is a song written using the simplest scale and chord progressions, using a very low 4/4 tempo. The hard part is not knowing the biggest amount of chords, it's knowing what not to use to carry your emotions. Also, the "time investment" is the music. Once the final waveform hits the tape/DAW/recorder it's not art anymore, it's publishing. And for most artists "learn to make music" is usually the fun part. Complicated and frustrating sometimes, but rewarding. For a lot of them, the "now play it in front of other people" part is the truly annoying one, frightening in some occasions. [1]https://austinkleon.com/2019/01/13/this-is-a-chord-this-is-another/

Reminds me of exquisite corpse, where folks take turns drawing a piece / writing a paragraph and can only see the most recent one (https://austinkleon.com/2020/07/02/exquisite-corpse/)

The photography version is the original. It was retold as ceramics in the book 'Art & Fear', because the authors (who were photographers themselves) were trying to appeal to a broader range of artists. https://austinkleon.com/2020/12/10/quantity-leads-to-quality-the-origi…

Quantity can lead to quality, especially when you have immediate feedback. https://austinkleon.com/2020/12/10/quantity-leads-to-quality-the-origi…

Apple was built on a lot of peoples' ideas, some original and many borrowed (like all companies); Steve Jobs' gift was for editing. SpaceX is an entirely unoriginal company (really good execution, though). The genius of SpaceX is in the systems which enable that execution. It's not even really a particularly significant company. Founders are right person, right place, right time, and _place and time are more important than the person_. Why do so many come from America? Because _place_. The right place from about 1750 to maybe 1835 was northern England; the Bay Area has had a really good run. Brian Eno, as often, has a word for it: "scenius". https://austinkleon.com/2017/05/12/scenius/

It's almost like there's some truth to the "Trying to make dozens of shitty pots actually produces better pots than trying to make a single perfect pot". Iteration eats inspiration for breakfast. https://austinkleon.com/2020/12/10/quantity-leads-to-quality-the-origi…

Here is a good, fun, and quick-to-read book -- Show Your Work! https://austinkleon.com/show-your-work/

This reminds me of a book I enjoyed, Show Your Work. https://austinkleon.com/show-your-work/

Check this : https://austinkleon.com/tag/logbook/ I started actually something like this for a month now :)

From https://austinkleon.com/2018/08/30/reading-with-a-pencil/: "G.K. Chesterton once went through a friend's newly-published book of aphorisms and answered each one with his pencil. (It was later published as 'Platitudes Undone.')"

Character design done well? The visual design was done in a way to make these characters very distinctive & memorable, possibly the same applies to the auditory aspects? Matt Groening: The secret of designing cartoon characters — and I’m giving away this secret now to all of you out there — is: you make a character that you can tell who it is in silhouette. I learned this from watching Mickey Mouse as a kid. You can tell Mickey Mouse from a mile away…those two big ears. Same thing with Popeye, same thing with Batman. And so, if you look at the Simpsons, they’re all identifiable in silhouette. Bart with the picket fence hair, Marge with the beehive, and Homer with the two little hairs, and all the rest. So…I think about hair quite a lot. Source: http://austinkleon.com/2007/08/28/silhouettes-and-profiles/

I suck at note taking, can't do it effectively, but of people who are good note takers I think the ones who do visual note-taking seem to get the most out of it http://austinkleon.com/category/visual-note-taking/ http://www.core77.com/posts/19678/sketchnotes-101-the-basics-of-visual…

I am guessing: Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon http://austinkleon.com/2011/03/30/how-to-steal-like-an-artist-and-9-ot…

Another interesting post on the same subject: http://www.austinkleon.com/2005/12/17/graph-a-story-with-mr-vonnegut/

To support your point that we we make choices among alternative, see this document I put together circa 2010 with about 50 alternatives -- some good, some obviously bad -- we can use to address the socio-economic changes needed to maintain healthy human communities in the face of increased automation: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our…

> From that point, an LLM, which remembers everything verbatim and mixing them together is arguably making plagiarism from many sources to create their own works, while being unable to cite them accurately. A very useful property, indeed. I think this is a weak point in your argument. I support the rest of your reasoning, but this point can be attacked. For plagiarism to exist, the original work has to be easily detectable by a human. We've seen this sometimes be the case (see NYT lawsuit), but often times, the line is blurry (see Ed Sheeran lawsuit [0]). There's a reasonable argument to make that the combination of existing ideas by an AI creates something novel. It's what arguably what artists do, too. There's even a famous book called "Steal like an artist" [1]. As such, some output by AI can be plagiarism, but the very way modern AI works may not automatically mean everything is plagiarism. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcCKlsTgjeM [1]: https://austinkleon.com/steal/

For someone who's "too stupid" to understand these techs, they certainly can explain them and their drawbacks and alternatives well. This reminds me of a bit of advice from Austin Kleon that I've used frequently -- "Make bad art, too"[^1]: > “Good” can be a stifling word, a word that makes you hesitate and stare at a blank page and second-guess yourself and throw stuff in the trash. What’s important is to get your hands moving and let the images come. Whether it’s good or bad is beside the point. Just make something. This is a perspective I have to come back to, as an engineer building enterprise-scale things, when I'm working on small-scale projects. I don't need to use the same tools I use at work, I can pick "bad"[^2] architecture, I just need to build _something_. [^1] https://austinkleon.com/2020/04/15/make-bad-art-too/ [^2] "Bad" in that I know precisely how and when and what would bite me in the ass when I try to scale it.

Parable of the Pots - Quantity leads to quality https://austinkleon.com/2020/12/10/quantity-leads-to-quality-the-origi… [A] ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.