Wisereads Vol. 105 — Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon, everything Kevin Kelly knows about self-publishing, and more

Last week, we shared Tim Ferriss' The Tao of Seneca: Volume One, the first installment drawn from Seneca the Younger’s timeless epistolary wisdom. This week, we're sharing a preview of Austin Kleon's original illustrated hit, Steal Like an Artist.

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Justin Skycak's The Math Academy Way outlines his approach to teaching math through software, but Substack writer ifjen found deeper insights on automaticity and knowledge graphs that will intrigue any lifelong learner. "Millions of man hours have been spent pretending to learn things by watching youtube videos. If you draft a knowledge graph, you can make yourself a road map towards actual ability. A scaffolded approach focuses practice hours on discrete skills of appropriate difficulty given your current competences and helps you evaluate your progress."

After interviewing countless software engineers, Superhuman co-founder Conrad Irwin has come to appreciate one thing they do that large language models can’t: maintain a mental model. "When you watch someone who knows what they are doing, you'll see them looping over the following steps: (1) Build a mental model of the requirements (2) Write code that (hopefully?!) does that (3) Build a mental model of what the code actually does (4) Identify the differences, and update the code (or the requirements)."

When Teresa Torres tested her LLM-powered coach, systematic evaluations exposed surprising failures. Her path to improvement involved automating feedback, continuous iteration, and resisting the urge to adopt too many new tools at once. "Why did I use Airtable? This is a tool that I’m familiar with; I already had plenty to learn. This is going to be a theme of this talk: I try to limit how much I have to learn in each step so that I don’t get overwhelmed."

On a side quest to learn to draw, Epic Gardening founder Kevin explored shading, perspective, and shape manipulation. His takeaways include: "Every object you can draw can be constructed from the four basic forms: box, sphere, pyramid, cylinder," and "Because everything we see IRL is just a light reflection, it's the most important thing in drawing too."

Bestselling author Kevin Kelly guides creatives and writers through the publishing pipeline, covering the tradeoffs of traditional publishing and how to self-publish once you’ve found true fans. "The way I approach publishing today is with as much self-publishing as I can handle. I’d write in public installments, as a subscription newsletter, or e-book single chapters, or simple posts on my blog. If I could find an audience that wanted more of the material, I’d rewrite, re-edit, re-compose the material into a longer form. I’d release that as an ebook, and/or on-demand printed book sold in my Shopify shop."

Write the books you want to read, and make the movies you want to watch. Better yet, don’t be afraid to bring those dreams to life by standing on the shoulders of the giants who came before. Remixing and reimagining what’s already out there as you follow your curiosity just might unlock your life’s work.

In his illustrated hit Steal Like an Artist, Austin Kleon urges creators to draw inspiration from everywhere, not chase originality for its own sake:

"What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere... Some people find this idea depressing, but it fills me with hope. As the French writer André Gide put it, 'Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.' 

If we're free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running away from it."

We’re longtime fans of Austin's work and thrilled to share a preview of Steal Like an Artist. Through the end of August, grab the full ebook for just $2.99 wherever ebooks are sold in the US and Canada.

Social scientist James Horton writes story-driven essays that combine psychology, culture, and nerdy deep-dives, from fanfiction stats to the science of charisma. From The Nonwriter's Guide to Writing A Lot: "Let’s start with an observation: You are already a prolific writer... That seems prodigious, but if you look at your own correspondence — every email, text, and post, every tweet you’ve cast into the soulless void that is Twitter — you will likely find that you have written more, by this point in your life, than Gandhi’s entire life’s work. You’re an internet user. A netizen; you write more text as an afterthought each day than most people pre-1980 did on purpose."