Austin Kleon

Whatever feels like a waste at the time, you realize actually that was formative in this one little weird particular way now.

You know, I kind of went into it like a lot of dads.

I was like, oh, well, you know, I'm a best-selling New York Times creativity author.

Like, I should know how, you know, kids create, how to make a nice environment for kids to create and what they should do with themselves, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff.

And then it was really funny because when they got here, they just didn't really seem interested at all in being taught by me.

They basically were like, over there, dad, get out of the way.

And I learned how to deal with them in this very particular way, which was just to kind of be there if needed, but otherwise just butt myself out of the situation.

So I kind of found myself in this interesting place where it was like,

I'd always been the artist in my house, and suddenly there were these little, like, two cavemen Picassos that were running around making all this great stuff, and I was kind of the studio assistant, you know?

And I thought, what if I just kind of, like, lean into this role?

What if I'm not actually, like, a classroom teacher here?

What if I'm more like an assistant or even a librarian, you know?

Because I used to work in a library.

It's like, what if my job is to just...

give these kids the time, space, and materials and kind of let them rip.

And so, yeah, they really taught me kind of more what it was like to be able to access the truly raw content

kind of creative urge the title of the book is stolen from something that the artist John Baldessari said which is you know I learned so much from watching a kid draw kids don't call it art they're just doing stuff you know and I just thought that was good enough to steal so so

But yeah, it was like me stealing from children.

Cause there was this weird, and we had this weird thing going on when my kids were like three, four, five, where they would make stuff and I would make stuff.

And I remember one day I came out from the studio and Owen looked at me, my oldest, and he said, what did you make today, Papa?