Austin Kleon

This is going to sound kind of like hoity, but I've read a lot of Henry David Thoreau, not Walden, but his journal.

I love his journals.

And something that happens with Thoreau is that he has notebooks with him and he knows he's going to write later in the day.

So he takes his morning walk.

He needs stuff to write about.

So he's paying like super close attention to the world.

And that's where all those really great, you know, he's one of the great chroniclers of the season, for example, the seasons.

And he just pays like such close attention to the world.

And part of the reason I swear that he's paying such close attention to the world is he knows he needs something to write about later.

And someone the other day, they said, you know, they read a recent book of mine.

They said, you seem like someone who really pays attention to your kids a lot.

And I said, well, I love to write.

I have a diary and then I have a notebook and I'd love to draw all the funny stuff.

They said the minute I started writing down the funny stuff that my kids said that I just decided I'm going to start writing down all these funny things.

They just kept coming, you know, because I was paying attention.

I was like, oh, I can put that in the book.

You know, and so it's like, I always like with people who want to pay more attention to your life, I'm like, well, one thing that you can do is just start like a one line a day journal or something like that.

I love those five year diaries, you know, because the very act of knowing that you're going to have to write in your journal later tonight or tomorrow, it just causes you to pay more attention.

Photographers know this.

If you carry a camera around all day, well, all of a sudden you start looking for shots and all of a sudden you start noticing things that you wouldn't notice before.