Steal Like An Artist: 10 Things About Being Creative By Kleon

“Fake it till you make it”

I began playing video games from an early age, It helped me because I was the only child and didn’t have a lot of friends. Seeing the graphic design and storytelling of the games, made me fancy them more. Like the majority of teenage boys, I wanted to play all the latest video games and not stop until I became a professional at it. In a way, playing video games was my escape and influence to start creating my own creative ideas.

All I had along with my ideas were a pen and paper, so I started writing stories from personal experiences, things I liked and seen before me. Whenever I was writing something, it felt like I was writing down words with emotions that my head was converting into ideas.

During my
high school years, I wasn’t involved in a lot of activities but there’s one activity I still remember. As an English assignment, the entire classroom needed to come up with their own short story. The rules were simple, it had to be creative. That’s when I pulled out from my computer files my creative short story "The Russian Roulette".

Once I delivered my story to the teacher, I felt excited to get some feedback. The following day he came back with a book, I still remember the words he said to me; "Wisthon, have you read Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski?". I responded with honesty; “I don’t read a lot of books”. Then he smiled and gave me the book as a gift. Never have I felt more intrigued to read a book before and astonish to hear that the author and I had similar ideas in each other’s story. It changed my life in a way that gave me inspiration to keep writing and let my ideas take over.

I never thought that anything I was writing was actually worth reading. I just felt like writing. One of my favorite movies is "Forrest Gump" and one of my favorite scenes that had an impact on me is when Forrest goes out for a run that slowly becomes the longest marathon of his life, and when he starts to gain followers and reporters start asking him questions like; "Why are you running?" he simply replies; "I just felt like running." Without knowing the impact he made on people.

Im always pretending to be doing something until I actually make something creative.
Austin Kleon wrote the book “Steal like an Artist: 10 things nobody told you about being creative ”. I genuinely like his book, for the reason that I started feeling unoriginal and couldn’t come up with anything creative, I read in his book that creative people collect information from ideas they like and make it better. So I wrote down a couple of options for me to express my creativity and one of them was to buy a camera and start exploring New York City while capturing moments of all its wonders.

I definitely like the idea of capturing moments and telling a story through photography. Like the majority of people say: “A picture is worth a thousand words” Thuds most historical events we see are being recorded with a photo.

"There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are," - Ernst Haas. This is another quote that I like.
In a way we create our own art, art that expresses who we are and if we limit ourselves by not knowing the right people who are also interested in the same creative field as us or we don’t share ideas and different views, then how are we going to come up with something new, something original that can make a difference in this world and make our dreams come reality so we could leave a mark in this world when our work is
finish.

“We are shaped and fashioned by what we love."-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, if you don’t choose to be an artist whatever you choose to do you gotta Fake it ‘til you make it, as in, fake it until you’re successful. To make "the starving artist" look like the greatest artist in the world because telling yourself that you have everything you want — that just kills creativity.