The Friday Filter

Austin Kleon Made Me Want to Make Things Again: 9 things I learned from Don’t Call It Art about making bad art, wasting things, and finding my creative energy again

Creativity / /

1. If you can’t write 1 book, write 100 books

If you’re struggling to write a book, here’s a great way to get unstuck:

Write hundreds of tiny books instead.

Inspired by Austin Kleon’s new book Don’t Call It Art, the words poured out of me when I changed my tools (paper scraps instead of Google Docs), scaled down the size, and decided not to call it a book.

2. What would this look like if it were fun?

If you want to be more efficient, you could ask: What would this look like if it were easy?

If you want to be more creative, you could ask: What would this look like if it were fun?

I taped that question to my monitor as a reminder.

3. Play is the important work!

I used to be too busy to play. I had too much important stuff to do.

But one of the best things I’m continuing to learn is that play is the important work!

Part of my office wall—the part that’s not covered floor to ceiling in books—used to have a random picture and an unused whiteboard. No fun allowed was apparently the message I was going for.

But after reading Don’t Call It Art, I broke out of my mental prison.

I tossed the picture and the whiteboard and put up a pegboard and paper holders. Then I took my art supplies out of the drawers they’d been crammed into and gave them a home—one where I can see them, reach for them, and interact with them every day.

And that’s exactly what I do now: create every day.

Just looking at it makes me smile.

4. Throw out the instructions

Some of the best, most original work gets made when the creator is not aware of the “right” way to do things. They aren’t trying to be groundbreaking. They just don’t know the rules yet.

Forget the instructions. Erase them from memory if needed.

Remember: elephants have great memories—it’s why they get stuck in place.

5. Waste things

The urge to save my materials—paper, stories, markers, pens, time—for the best ideas has no doubt deprived me of some of my best ideas.

I’ve come to learn: materials are not precious things.

They’re important, sure, but they’re not the point. They’re there to serve your craft and enrich your life.

Art is for life—not the other way around.

Use your best stuff now. It’s the only way.

6. Quantity leads to quality

Most often, the reason you feel stuck is because you’re thinking about quality.

The only way to get unstuck is to forget about quality and focus on quantity…which, inevitably, leads to quality.

7. Problems of output are usually problems of input

Ray Bradbury said he never had problems with output because he spent so much time on his input.

“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music,” he said, “you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful.”

We, too, must feed ourselves “to the point of bursting.”

8. You don’t need a vision—just create with what you have right now

Think of one of the best things that has ever happened to you.

Odds are you didn’t plan it. Odds are you couldn’t have planned it, because it was something beyond anything you could have dreamed of. The universe, fate, God, randomness—whatever you want to call it—worked on your behalf.

I’ve learned to let go and stop planning everything.

I had to stop obsessing over “vision.” Not only because vision is laughably limited, but because it keeps me from the only thing that matters: what I do in this very moment.

9. Make bad art and share it with the world

We don’t sing because we can’t hold a tune. We don’t paint because we’re not that good at it. In school, we learn to draw human forms with anatomical exactness and when you clearly don’t have a knack for it you spend the next 25 years not drawing because why bother when you suck at it?

The biggest thing I got from Don’t Call It Art is that it’s a great thing to make bad art.

I draw like a 4-year-old. And guess what? No one cares! Actually, I bet people would care if I shared it with them. There’s nothing more inspiring than art that looks like a 4-year-old could have made it.

It’s just so not that serious.

Create the things that make you feel alive, and share them with the world.

That’s your only task.

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Think About the Rats: On Letting Go So You Can Keep Going

Creativity, Philosophy / /

In the 1950s, a Johns Hopkins biologist named Curt Richter dropped rats into glass cylinders half-filled with water and watched them swim.

The rats paddled around in frantic little circles, searching for a way out. Richter, as Nir Eyal writes, sat nearby with a stopwatch and recorded how long they kept going before they stopped trying.

Most lasted around fifteen minutes.

What’s interesting is that the rats were not drowning from exhaustion. Their muscles still worked, their lungs were fine. They had just decided, in their little rat brains, there was no point.

So Richter ran the experiment again, but with one small change.

He dropped a fresh group of rats in and watched them swim. Right when each one was about to give up, he reached in, scooped the rat out, dried it off, let it catch its breath, and plopped it back in the water.

How much longer would you guess those rats swam?

Thirty minutes? An hour? Double their original time? Triple it?

The answer: sixty hours.

Not sixty minutes. Sixty hours. Two and a half straight days of paddling. Roughly the amount of time it takes elite ultra-marathon swimmers to swim from Cuba to Florida.

They were the same type of rats as the first batch, with the same bodies. The only difference was that they now believed rescue was possible.

When I’m on the treadmill and my breathing is labored, I think about the rats.

I think about the rats when a blister on my foot is screaming, or when my mouth is painfully dry. Basically, I think about the rats when my brain is begging me to quit, but my body is still capable of continuing.

Marcus Aurelius said it’s shameful for the mind to give up when the body is still going strong. That’s what the rats remind me of. With the first group of rats, their minds had given up before their bodies.

The second group didn’t suddenly become stronger. They didn’t get better at swimming. Nothing about the water changed.

They had been pulled out once before. They knew, in whatever small way rats know things, that rescue could come.

So they kept swimming.

Their only job was to keep going.

Don’t Get Stuck in Preparation

Before landing roles in Euphoria and The White Lotus, Lukas Gage struggled to break into the industry.

At eighteen, he moved to LA and enrolled in an acting class while searching for an agent. But it turned out to be harder than he imagined. No one would talk to him. Maybe he just wasn’t cut out to be an actor.

Feeling low, he asked his acting teacher, Leigh Kilton-Smith, if she had a moment to talk. He confessed his doubts about his abilities.

“I really need you to tell me the truth,” he said. “What’s the worst thing about my acting?”

“You know my biggest criticism right now of where you are in your career,” she said. “I see your plan.”

“What?”

“Did I stutter? I said I see your plan. I see that you’ve done the work and now a day later you’re stuck in preparation, and you haven’t done the necessary work to let your plan go. [. . .] You’re relying on your plan, and that’s when your work runs the chance of being dull and uninteresting. You’re many things, Lukas, but uninteresting ain’t one of them.”

He thought he might cry. She was right, he knew, but he wasn’t ready to fully accept it.

“But if I don’t know what’s going to happen—”

Suddenly, something flew toward his head.

Reflexively, he reached out and grabbed it: a tissue box his teacher had thrown at him.

“What the actual fuck?”

“Bet you didn’t see that coming, did you?”

He had not.

“And yet you caught it. You didn’t have to think about it. You didn’t have to reference any notes on how to catch a tissue box being thrown at your head by your crazy acting teacher. You simply caught it, instinct kicked in, and you were in a state of trust.”

“Trust!” she continued. “Trust in yourself. It’s what’s missing from your characters, and from you, Lukas. The art suffers and runs the risk of looking and feeling and smelling and being like everyone else.”

Trust.

That was it.

The work he’d already done was in him. He didn’t need to cling to the plan anymore. He needed to trust himself enough to let it go.

“I can only say all this,” she added, “because I’m also deeply and profoundly afraid every moment of every day. I am a fuckup, I’m a fraud, but either I trust my life experiences and my path or I become the world’s oldest hooker.”

“Fuck you: you know how to do this.”

Early in his career, Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston was auditioning constantly.

After each audition, he would pace by the phone, anxious to hear if he had gotten the part.

“And then when I heard I didn’t get the part, I’d marinate in disappointment and introspection. Could I have done something differently?”

His wife eventually set him up with a self-help coach, who told Cranston he needed to focus on the process, not the outcome.

That’s when everything changed.

By detaching from the outcome, Cranston put himself back in control. He realized auditions weren’t about competing with other actors. They were about giving something.

“I wasn’t there to get a job. I was there to do a job. Simple as that. I was there to give a performance.” Whether or not he got the part was not up to him, and therefore not his concern. Instead of pacing by the phone after each audition, he would throw the script in a basket when he got home and forget about it.

“I’d let go. You can’t fake letting go. You have to really genuinely detach from it. If I’d get a callback, I’d fish out the script and say, ‘Oh yeah, I remember this guy.’”

Auditioning became enjoyable.

How could it not?

With the outcome no longer in charge, with his trust placed in himself and in the work instead of the result, he walked into each audition holding all the power.

That’s the thing about trusting yourself: it’s more a decision than a feeling.

When Christina Applegate first started working on the set of Anchorman, she had never done improv comedy. She walked around asking anyone who would listen, “Teach me, Obi-Wan.”

Steve Carell insisted that she didn’t need to be taught. She could do it on her own.

It was, Applegate writes, “such a beautiful act of belief in me.”

“No one sat me down and held my hand and looked lovingly into my eyes and told me their wisdom. They just said: ‘Fuck you: you know how to do this.’”

Trusting yourself is deciding to put your weight on what you’ve already practiced, what you’ve already lived through, what you already know.

The rest of it—the part you don’t control—you set down.

Then, you keep going.

Implement and microinvent

Life, Philosophy / /

I changed up my reading plan this year: fewer books, more time with each one—wrestling with the ideas instead of just collecting them.

This month I read 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History—and How it Shattered a Nation. It sent me down a rabbit hole—hours with ChatGPT, filling gaps in my investment knowledge, and asking it to explain things in new ways so I could understand. Then I actually did something about it, and made a few moves I’d been circling for months.

Knowledge is the easy part. Implementation is harder. And much, much more valuable.

In late 1928, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin—an achievement hailed as one of the greatest inventions in any field. But for over a decade, penicillin had done practically nothing for humanity. It wasn’t until millions of dollars and hundreds of American scientists and engineers modified the production process, established clinical trials, and distributed the drug at scale that penicillin became viable. By March 1945—seventeen years after its invention—enough penicillin existed for nearly every person in America. Fleming won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.

We tend to view inventions as these great Eureka moments. Edison’s lightbulb in 1879. The Wright brothers’ airplane in 1903. The big names everyone knows: Franklin, Bell, Tesla. It’s the Hollywood tale of the hero inventing something that saves the world.

“But this approach to history is worse than incomplete: it’s downright wrong,” write Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in Abundance. “Implementation, not mere invention, determines the pace of progress.”

“‘Most major inventions initially don’t work very well,’ the economic historian Joel Mokyr said. ‘They have to be tweaked, the way the steam engine was tinkered with by many engineers over decades. They have to be embodied by infrastructure, the way nuclear fission can’t produce useful electricity until it’s contained inside a working reactor. And they have to be built at scale, the way Ford’s Model T came down in price before it made a big difference to the country.’”

In short, inventions need what Mokyr calls microinventions—“incremental improvements needed to turn a new idea into a significant product.”

Think of what Edison actually did.

In his lab, he tested hundreds of materials by burning them in a glass vacuum before discovering that carbonized bamboo worked as a lightbulb filament.

But inventing the bulb, Edison understood, was only part of the job.

If electric light was going to work in people’s lives, he needed to build the whole system around it—generators to produce the power, wires to carry it, sockets and switches to control it, and meters to track how much electricity people used so they could be billed.

“Edison did not make electric light possible,” Klein and Thompson continue, “But his microinventions did something more important: Through exhaustive tinkering, embodying, and scaling, he made electric light useful.”

In the late 1990s, Jennifer Doudna and her partner Jamie Cate produced a working model of an RNA molecule—the foundation of CRISPR, the most widely used gene-editing system today.

And here’s what’s interesting: scientists had already known about RNA for decades. But by implementing, by microinventing, Doudna and her team made RNA useful.

And this isn’t just for scientists.

At age 84, with a career spanning more than six decades, Bob Dylan is still writing, recording, and performing. He’s become an object of study: where does his creativity come from?

“These songs don’t come out of thin air,” he says. “If you sang ‘John Henry’ as many times as me—‘John Henry was a steel-driving man / Died with a hammer in his hand / John Henry said a man ain’t nothin’ but a man / Before I let that steam drill drive me down / I’ll die with that hammer in my hand.’ If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you’d have written, ‘How many roads must a man walk down?’ too. All these songs are connected. I just opened up a different door in a different kind of way. . . . I thought I was just extending the line.”

He discovered the music he loved, then implemented it into his own creativity kit. Microinventing, one line at a time.

If I had to sum up 2026 so far in a word, it would be implementation.

I signed my wife and me up for a CPR class and stocked up on first aid supplies. I pulled the trigger on a few investments I’d been sitting on. I’ve folded George Raveling’s line—choose to be happy, or very happy—into my daily affirmations. And I spent months immersed in Peter Attia’s Outlive, swapping in his diet and exercise advice until the scale started moving. I’m down 25 pounds so far.

Knowledge without action is like buying a “Come and Take It” bumper sticker but driving a Prius. The aggression is there, but the outlet isn’t.

Knowing is the easy part. The value is in the doing.

You know what you need to do.

Consider this permission to go ahead and do it.

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