Business Book Review: Keep Going by Austin Kleon

Unlocking your creativity is one thing. Finding the courage to share it, is a whole other pursuit. Kleon helps inspire how to keep doing both.   

My Rating: ★★★★

Length: 224 pages
Publisher: Workman
Released: 2019

Key Takeaway for Personal Branding

Austin Kleon’s best-sellers, Steal Like an Artist and Show your Work, shared how to unlock and share your creativity. As the proverb goes, good things come in threes. Keep Going inspires readers to stay creative, sharing Kleon’s ten principles for doing so.

Here’s a three of my favourite takeaways:

Every Day Is Ground Hog Day (Principle 1)

Like the movie, Kleon proposes embracing every day as Ground Hog Day. Yesterday is gone, tomorrow may never come and today is all you have. Don’t worry about being a “painter” (or whatever your equivalent is) and just paint.

Building a Bliss Station (Principle 2)

Kleon highlights what Joseph Campbell called a “bliss station”. Described as a sacred place or hour in the day. Calling attention to the importance of daily action, he says,

“This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.”

Forget the Noun, Do the Verb (Principle 3)

Kleon refreshingly calls for a disconnect to titles and focus on the action.   

“Let go of the thing that you’re trying to be (the noun), and focus on the actual work you need to be doing (the verb). Doing the verb will take you someplace further and far more interesting.”

Favourite Quotes

Leonardo da Vinci made “to-learn” lists. He’d get up in the morning and write down everything he wanted to learn that day.

There’s almost nothing in the news that any of us need to read in the first hour of the day. When you reach for your phone or your laptop upon waking, you’re immediately inviting anxiety and chaos into your life.

Airplane mode is not just a setting on your phone: It can be a whole way of life.

Job titles aren’t really for you, they’re for others. Let other people worry about them. Burn your business cards if you have to.

If you share work online, try to ignore the numbers at least every once in a while. Increase the time between your sharing and receiving feedback.

“Art is the highest form of hope,” said painter Gerhard Richter. But hope is not about knowing how things will turn out—it is moving forward in the face of uncertainty. It’s a way of dealing with uncertainty.

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 some other human living hundreds if not thousands of years before you.

Like the book's predecessors, Keep Going is a thought-provoking yet easily digestible read. The accompanying illustrations are carefully curated to further enhance Kleon’s messages. Kleon has mastered the art of clarity. Though thoroughly well-referenced, the book is highly succinct and a joy to read.

As Kleon himself says, he wrote the book he needed to read. This book is for anyone who needs encouragement to keep going.

Keep Going by Austin Kleon: Available on Amazon.