 To kick off the day, we'll start with the opening keynote. And I'd like to introduce the moderator for the opening keynote, Karen Brennan. And as many of you know, Karen has a very, OK, I should have given you some time. As many of you know, Karen has a very special connection with the Scratch conference. She really led the organization of the first Scratch conference 10 years ago, and then for several others in the years following that. She's now a professor at Harvard Ed School, where she leads the Scratch Ed team. And her team led a couple of workshops yesterday, so I'm sure a lot of you got a chance to interact with them yesterday, and have interacted online in all sorts of different ways. So with that, I'd like to introduce and welcome Karen Brennan. Good morning, everybody. So let me tell you a little bit about how this session is going to be structured. Austin is going to give a 30-minute talk, and then he and I are going to have a conversation for the rest of the time. So some of you may not already be familiar with Austin, so I wanted to give you a little bit of sense of my connection, how I came to know about Austin-Clean's work. So as Mitch mentioned, I'm a professor at Harvard University, and at Harvard, I teach a course about creativity. Several years ago, I found myself in my office with one of my students, and we were having a conversation about her course project, and she was on her way out the door, and she sort of very casually says, oh, who helps you think about creativity? And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's not an out-the-door question. I'm like, come back. Have a seat. Let's have a conversation about that. It's like, first of all, that's a gorgeous question. Who helps you think about creativity? Oh, my word. That's just fabulous. And three groups of people immediately came to mind, I thought, of kids. And they're just passion for imaginative play. They really helped me think about creativity. Teachers and their commitment to cultivating the cultures of creativity is my second bucket. And then the third large group is my academic inspirations, Mitch Resnick, being certainly in that first and foremost in that category, his mentor, Seymour Papert, Cynthia Solomon, Edith Ackerman, John Piaget. I started rattling off this list. And then naturally, I turned the tables and said to her, who helps you think about creativity? And she paused, and she said, I'll return with an answer in one week. I was like, I was intrigued. That felt like a big, dramatic reveal. So a week later, we found ourselves in my office. And I said, OK, it's time to let me know. And she slowly unzipped her backpack and handed me these two books, Steal Like an Artist by Austin Cleon and Show Your Work by Austin Cleon. She's like, do you know Austin Cleon? I was like, I'm not yet. But apparently, I'm going to. And these two books have been such a creative security blanket for me. Whenever I'm feeling uncertain or doubting myself or I'm feeling really stuck, I turn to these books and I just feel better. I feel reoriented. I feel grounded again in creative practice. So when Mitch asked me to organize a keynote session, I knew two things right away. One, I really wanted the focus to be about creativity, because that is one of the things that I think is so special about scratch in the world in this cultural moment is the commitment to creativity. And second, I wanted to connect you to Austin Cleon. So as my students said to me, I now say to you, Austin Cleon helps me think about creativity. And I hope he helps you too. Thank you. Austin. Wow. Hey, y'all. So I grew up in the middle of a cornfield in Ohio. And there's a point to that. And I've lived in Texas for 11 years now. So sometimes when I come to Boston, I'm like, why is everyone so angry at me? Right? But my trip has been the opposite of that this time. I feel so welcomed. And this is such a great room. And I can really feel the energy. When we were talking earlier, it's obvious that you found your people, right? Like everyone in this room. Yeah. Yeah. And I think as a creative person, that is someone who's interested in things. Finding your people is a big deal. And so I'm really happy to be spending this time with you. So thank you for having me. Thank you to Karen and Mitch. If you've never seen my work before, I want to just show you really a few pieces. And also, I'm one of the oldest millennials. And so if something happens and it's not online, it doesn't exist, right? So I'm Austin Cleon on all the things, if you want to follow me or tweet things out. Take as many pictures as you want, whatever. So let's see. And about, let's see, it'd be about 10 years ago, I first became known for doing these things. What I do is I take an article from the New York Times, and I start making boxes around words that pop out at me. And then I start arranging those words into funny phrases or sayings. And then when I'm done, I black out everything I don't need. And this is what it looks like when I'm done. Sort of looks like if the CIA did haiku. This is my ode to Texas. In Texas, there is nothing but Texas. This one's called overheard on the Titanic. I mean, yes, we're sinking, but the music is exceptional. How many people are married here? We have any married folks? All right, so I'm on my 12th year of marriage. This is my ode to marriage. What is marriage? Marriage is two people in love standing in the same bathroom. So this was actually my first book. This came out in 2010. It's called Newspaper Blackout. It is a book of poetry. And so I extended the tradition of all the poets who came before me, and I kept my day job after it came out. But after this book came out, it was interesting. What I've learned from this book and by putting my work out in the world sort of became the other books that Karen mentioned. And what these two books do together, I think, is they kind of, the two together, I think they have what I call my Robin Hood theory of creativity. First, you steal, then you share. So together, they sort of have a unified theory of creativity. But today, if I had to really summarize it, it's exactly the title of what this keynote is supposed to be, which is, creative is not a noun. When people use the word creative as a job title, I think it falsely divides the world into creatives and non-creatives. And I think it also implies that the work of a creative is being creative. But being creative is never an end. It's only a means to do something else. So creativity is really just a tool. And creativity can be used to organize your living room, paint a masterpiece, build a program and scratch, or design a weapon of mass destruction. So creativity is just a tool. It's something that you use to get to someplace else. Another way of putting this is the comedian John Cleese. He says, creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating. And so what Cleese is talking about is that creativity is almost less of a noun, something that you have. And it's almost more like a verb. It's something that you do. And because it's a noun, it's something that you can get better at. And it's a tool that you can use in your work, regardless of your job title. So for the rest of this talk, I really want to talk about a certain kind of operating that I think can help you be more creative in your life and your work. And it's a list of 10 things, because I'm a 10 things guy, 10 commandments, and all that stuff. So I just want a little caveat. I'm probably going to use the word artist a lot today. Whenever you hear the word artist, you get to be creative. And think of it as a mad lib. Just put your job title in for artist. OK, let's go. Number one, you don't have to be a genius. When we talk about creativity, the kind of cartoon version of creativity is the great genius. Usually an old dead white man who is somehow superhumanly talented and gifted and lightning strikes and inspiration comes. And they just sort of push this stuff out into the world. And we're all just supposed to gawk and awe of it, right? And so that's the kind of genius theory that great work springs fully formed from a supremely gifted individual, usually working in isolation, like up in their Garrett or their little studio. And there's a great antidote to what I call the lone genius myth. And it comes to us from the musician Brian Eno. And Brian Eno refers to his kind of theory as genius. And what genius is, is it's the sort of collective form of genius. This is a model in which great art and great ideas are born in sort of like a rich scene of people, a rich group of people who are all sort of sharing and stealing and spreading ideas out together. And what I love about genius is that it really makes room in the story of creativity and creative work for all of us. Because being an essential part of a genius is not necessarily about being superhumanly talented, but it's more about what you contribute and the kinds of connections you make in the network. What is this room but a gigantic genius, right? What is the scratch community but a gigantic genius? And to put it another way, genius is an ecosystem. And genius is more like an ecosystem. So when it comes to genius, everything is in service of that great individual. And with genius, everything is in service of developing a rich and healthy community and environment in which everyone can do their best work. So the less you worry about your own genius and the more you worry about joining and building a rich genius around you, the better the quality of your work life and your personal life will be. And we'll talk a little bit more about genius in a little bit. Number two, steal like an artist. Every artist gets asked the question, where do you get your ideas? And I think the honest artist answers, I steal them. How does an artist look at the world? First, you figure out what's worth stealing, and then you move on to the next thing. That's about all there is to it, really. And when you look at the world this way, you stop worrying about necessarily what's good or bad. There's only stuff worth stealing and stuff that's not worth stealing. Everything is sort of up for grabs. And if you don't find something worth stealing now, you might find it worth stealing tomorrow or a month or a year from now. What an artist really understands is that nothing is completely original. All the creative work we do builds on what came before. And nothing comes from nowhere. And most ideas are just a remix or a mash-up of two or more previous ideas, or a previous idea transformed into something new. Now, let's talk for a minute about that word steal, OK? Because some people get a little nervous. They're like, man, Austin, why do you use the word steal? Man, can't you say be influenced like an artist or something like that? And I always say, well, I use the word steal because I'm not very original. Pablo Picasso, he said artist theft. There's going to be a bunch of dead old white guys in this. I'm going to tell you. I'll just admit that right now, OK? Pablo Picasso, artist theft. Someone once asked David Bowie if he was original. He said, no, no, no. And he said just in that accent, because I'm really good at it. No, no, no. I'm more like a tasteful thief. He said the only art he will study is the stuff that he can steal from. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things in to what you're doing. I mean, Picasso had a saying. He said, good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas. Kurt Vonnegut told his students, if you're going to steal, steal from the best. You might not have heard of this old dead white dude, but you probably heard what he said. He said, if you steal from one author, it's plagiarism. If you steal from 100 authors, it's called research. And Bob Dylan, maybe our nation's greatest plagiarist, he wrote a song with the word steal a little and they throw you in jail. Steal a lot and they make you a king. We'll leave that to sit there right now. OK, but nobody, in my opinion, has ever said it better than the poet T.S. Eliot. And this is where that phrase, bad artist copy, great artist steal comes from. This is what T.S. Eliot said. He said, immature poets imitate, mature poet steal. Bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better or at least something different. So the good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling, which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn. What I think T.S. Eliot was saying is that there actually is honor amongst thieves. There is a sort of code of creative thievery. And the imitation is, you hear that a lot, the imitation is flattery, right? No, it's not. It's really the transformation that's flattery. It's taking someone's idea and turning it into something new. And so here's my, here's a, I see the cameras out. That's great, I love it. So there is honor amongst thieves. And so what I would say to you is this is a post-it note that my brilliant friend, Wendy McNaughton, keeps above her desk and it says, I rip off everyone I meet. So you are in this room with these brilliant, you know, there's so many enthusiastic talented people in this room. So my advice to you for the rest of the conference is rip off everyone you meet, right? Everyone you meet has something to steal. But the way you honor that person is you take it back to your desk when you get home, you put it together with other things you've stolen, try to come up with something new, give it back to the community and so other people can steal from you. Number three, write the book you want to read. It's interesting, some people ask me like how I became a writer and everything I do as a writer is rooted in my love of reading. So everything I make as an artist or a writer, it really comes from my love as a fan. I often joke to people that I became a professional writer so I could become a professional reader. And so this flow chart sort of sums up my life. I like read and read and read and when I can't find the book I'm looking for out in the world, well first I go to the library and ask for it. But if they don't have it then I sit around and think of whether I might be able to write it. And that's sort of where I, this is sort of how I operate. And I think this is sort of what we do with all of our great creative work. You sort of see a gap in the world somewhere and you see a space that you can fill with your own efforts and then you do that work. And so the manifesto is this, you draw the art you want to see, you start the business you want to run, you play the music you want to hear, you write the books you want to read, you build the products you want to use, you program the programs you want to exist, right? You do the work that you want to see done. Number four, use your hands. Okay, so it was funny because on Twitter some dude I announced that I was speaking here and some dude was like, how did an analog dude like you make to this digital conference? And I said, and we'll get to that in a minute. But one of my favorite artists, Linda Berry, she says, in the digital age, don't forget to use your digits. Especially in this room, your life is full of glowing rectangles, right? That's the real thing. Now, one thing I loved about Mitch's book, Lifelong Kindergarten, was Mitch really emphasized that not all screen time is create equal, right? That it's different building something versus consuming something. Time spent mindlessly scrolling Twitter is not the same as time coding and scratch. But so many of us use computers now for our creative work. But the problem is that never have our tools been able to interrupt our thinking like they do now, you know, all the notifications and the pings and stuff. So I think sometimes computers can alienate us from our sensory experiences because they sort of like put this pane of glass between us and the world. And I think it's very important to remember for creativity that the mind and the body, it's not a one way street that they talk to each other. And our bodies can tell our minds as much as our minds tell our bodies. And so I think that it's very important if you're feeling uncreative to always take an attempt once in a while to step away from the screen, to get your body in motion, to scribble in a notebook, to go for a long walk in your neighborhood, to strum a guitar for a little bit. Because I think it's very important to keep your senses active if you want to get better ideas. Everyone's had that moment, right, where you're really trying to get to solve this problem and then you walk away from the desk and you take a shower and all of a sudden that idea pops up, right? And that's the sort of thing we're talking about. Your body can tell your mind as much as your mind tells the body. It's for that reason that I actually, I keep two desks in my studio now. So I have a digital desk and then I have what's called an analog desk. So this goes to the guy's question about how did an analog guy like me end up in a digital place like this? So the digital desk is what you might expect. It's got my computer, it's got my scanner, it's got my little Wacom tablet, blah, blah, all that stuff. But then I have a separate area called my analog desk and nothing electronic except for a baby monitor. I see a baby monitor there. When the child was crying earlier, I felt like I was right at home. I was like, oh, well, here we go. So my analog desk is where I keep just pens and paper and analog tools. And what's interesting is that, he had me pegged as an analog guy, but I'm actually just as digital as anybody because what I spend most of my day doing is doing a sort of dance in between these desks. I really come up with a lot of my ideas for writing or drawing at the analog desk. And then I skip over to the digital desk and I actually execute the work. So I scan in the drawings, I arrange them in Photoshop, all that kind of stuff, or I blog and post it, that kind of thing. So if you're feeling a little uncreative, just in codermode, kind of like, I get that glaze when I used to code, I get that kind of glaze where you're just like, take a walk, scribble on paper, have some fun, use your body, bring your body back in. Number five, side projects and hobbies are important. The one thing I've learned in my career, it's really when you're messing around, that's when the good stuff happens, when you thought you were just goofing off. And for that reason, I'm a big believer in what I call productive procrastination. What you do is, is you have at least two projects going at one time, and then when you get bored or sick of one project, you go over to the other project and you work on that for a while. And if you do that long enough, things get done. And one of the things I find interesting, you might have this experience too, when I work on another project, when I work on what I'm not supposed to be working on, then I get the ideas for the thing that I'm supposed to be working on. So productive procrastination, very important. Other very important thing, everybody needs a hobby. How many people have seen Mad Max Fury Road here? Okay, so this is the actor who played one of the war boys and he's knitting on set. Charlize Theron taught him how to knit. So everybody needs a hobby. A hobby is something that you do for fun that's just for you. A hobby can be a form of work, but it should also be an escape from work. We used to have hobbies, now we're supposed to have side hustles, right? Resist the side hustle. Because it's not enough anymore to just be an amateur, right? Like it's not enough to bake cupcakes because you love to bake cupcakes. Now you're supposed to run a cupcake trailer, right? You have to resist the urge to monetize every single part of your life. You have to keep the love in it. Get a hobby. If you turn your hobby into your job, then you just have to get another hobby. Things become very tricky when you turn a hobby into a job. You have to keep something in your life that's just for you. That is music for me. When I play the piano, like when I play Bach on the piano, I feel like someone peeled my skull back and scrubbed my brain with a brillo pad. That's my thing, playing the piano and music. Music's my hobby. Okay, number six, share your process. Okay, so when a painter talks about her work, she could be talking about two different things. First, there's the artwork, right? That's the finished piece, the painting framed and hung in the gallery wall. But there's also the artwork, the real work of art, and that's all the day-to-day stuff that goes on behind the scenes in the studio, right? That's like looking for inspiration, like drawing your sketchbook, getting the idea, applying the oil to the canvas, all that stuff. So there's painting, the noun, and then there's painting, the verb. As in all kinds of work, there is a distinction between the painter's process and the products of the process. Now, traditionally in the arts in particular, you're supposed to keep your process hidden. Like you only reveal your work when it's in its final finished state. And I think this really made sense when there were gatekeepers and certain avenues that you could share your work through. But now we're in this connected world, right? Where everyone's connected to each other and everyone can share whatever they wanna share, whenever they wanna share it. And so let's talk for a minute about what the creative process, what I think the creative process looks like. This might resonate with some of you. So this is usually how it goes for every project that I attempt. First, this is the best idea ever, right? Get that big light bulb goes off above your head. Let's do this, yeah. And then you work on it a little bit, all right? Okay, this is harder than I thought. Then you work a little bit more. This is gonna take some work, right? Work a little bit more. This sucks and it's boring. Finally, you get to the midpoint. This is Dark Knight of the Soul, right? This is when you question everything. When you're like, I chose the wrong profession, I'm leading the wrong life, I should quit right now and just walk away from everything. This is a very crucial point. You have to make it through this point because eventually you get to the next point, which is it will be good to finish because I'll learn something for next time. And finally, you arrive at this spot. Not as bad as I thought. Right, so there's your big expectation and then there's the Dark Knight of the Soul and usually you come to a different spot, a place that you might not have even anticipated, right? So this is sort of the life of a project and actually this comes from my friend, Maureen McHugh, who's a wonderful writer. I'd like to make a plug for her books. Now, process is messy and again, traditionally you're supposed to keep your process hidden, but we live in a world now I think where we were all like sort of, my generation was raised on DVD extras and like behind the scenes stuff and I think that everybody wants to see behind the scenes. You hear like, oh, well you never want to show how the sausage is made, but I think like if the sausage, if the process is really good, like it makes the sausage even tastier in a sense. Now, let's all face it, we're not all artists. A lot of us go into our work and we feel like we have nothing to show for it at the end of the day, but I think that no matter the nature of your work, I think there is an art to what you do and there are people that would be interested in that art if you can present it to them in the right way. And so, you know, go through some time thinking about what's the residue of your process that you can kind of scoop up and save for later? Like how can you become a documentarian of what you do? Could you start a work journal? Could you write your thoughts down in a notebook or use an audio recorder, video or keep a scrapbook? You know, what are the kinds of ways that you can kind of collect your process and that you might use it later? And I think what's interesting is documenting your process, even if you don't decide to share it, there's amazing merit in that in that in documenting your process because you really do see how you work and you really can track your progress as you go. One of the most important things I do every morning is I keep a diary, a three page diary. I just write three pages in my diary and I can go back and kind of see where I've been and where I'm going. And then afterwards, take people behind the scenes. Think about how you can show other people your process and communicate what it is that you do. So let's talk for a few ways about ways that you can share your process. Number one I think is to tell good stories. This is particularly true for artists. Like sometimes you hang out with artists and they kind of like cross their arms and they say, my work speaks for itself, right? Anyone who was ever, have you ever tried this in a client meeting, right? My work speaks for itself. Doesn't really work, right? Work doesn't exist in a vacuum. Someone needs to speak for the work. Someone needs to speak for the work. And the stories you tell about your work, they have a huge effect on how people think about the work and how they feel about the work and ultimately how they accept it. So how can you become a better storyteller? Well, again, steal, pay attention to stories and how they're structured and how they're told. I wanted to show you Kurt Vonnegut, the writer, he thought that you could graph every story on this chart. So if you look at the x-axis here, he's got the beginning, every story has a beginning and every story has an end. And then in the course of a story, the characters go through good fortune and bad fortune. So let's do a couple. Kurt Vonnegut said the most famous story is man in hole. And that is, someone gets into trouble, someone gets out of it again. That's pretty much the dramatic structure right there. You get into trouble, you get out of it again. That's the life of a project we talked about earlier, right? You head into the dark night of the soul and you get back out of it. Here's Cinderella. Cinderella's having a real bad time. She's in a low spot when she starts out, right? But then her fairy godmother comes, she gets some helpers, she gets a nice dress, she gets the carriage, she goes to the ball, she meets the prince, and then midnight strikes, right? Things are very bad for Cinderella. But oh, look, here comes the prince with the glass slipper and whoosh, things get really, really good forever and ever, right? This is Kafka's metamorphosis. But Vonnegut's point was when you pay attention to stories and you pay attention to how they're told it's really the structure of stories that is so important and if you pay attention to the structure of stories, you can steal those structures for your own work. And teach what you know. I think teaching is probably the most valuable form of sharing your work. When you teach, you figure out what it is that you actually know. So I've always been, as an artist, I've always been inspired by these people, especially Snoop Dogg. No, Bob Ross and Martha Stewart. So they have a very interesting model. So Bob Ross taught people how to paint on a free PBS show and then he sold them art supplies, which made him a millionaire, right? Martha Stewart does the same thing. She shows people how to make their lives better and how to cook and all that stuff and then she makes her fortune selling them the tools to do it with. But what I've always been interested in is that when you show and when you're generous about sharing what you know, it makes you very valuable to the people that want that knowledge too. And so one of the really great things that happened when newspaper blackout came out is that I immediately sensed that other people wanted to try the form. Other people wanted to grab a newspaper and a marker and go at it. And so I found myself teaching these workshops for college students and then also elementary students and high school students and all sorts of people. And I found myself teaching for the first time and I really loved it and I loved sharing my own process but I felt like there really needed to be a place in which people could share their own poems with each other. And so I made this website called newspaperblackout.com and at one point the site's kind of falling off because I'm lazy but at one point we had like 150,000 readers and there were poems published from all over the world and I almost thought it was almost sort of like marketing stunt on my behalf. I was sort of like, oh, it's user-generated content or whatever, right? But this fabulous thing happened which is people sent me the craziest stuff. I mean they sent me the wildest stuff. I wanna point out the baseball card whereas so they've drawn a lamp shade on this dude's head and blacked out his name into lamp. But the cool thing about all this is that I found as much to steal from the people who shared as I felt like they were stealing from me and so this really wonderful thing happened where I was inspired by all these people who shared their own blackout poems. And now blackout poetry is this huge tag on Instagram. Even old aging rock musicians are into blackout poetry now. That's Roger Waters' album cover, the Pink Floyd guy and this is a letter that you too sent some of their people, or sent their fans. It blackouts have made their way back into the New York Times which has been really interesting. But I think the most important thing is that you who are teachers in this room, you know this, right? Is that when you teach, you learn in return. And for those of you who aren't teachers, if teaching feels scary, pull back a minute, forget about teaching, forget about whatever your idea of teaching is and just think about sharing. Think about how you can share your work because as the late great Christopher Hitchens said, he said, when you put a book out into the world, when you put your work out into the world, you hear from all the people you should have talked to before you actually made the work. So having your work out in the world is like a free education that goes on for a lifetime. I'm going a little long, Karen. I'm just gonna keep going with it if that's okay. All right. Number seven, don't turn into a vampire or human spam. Okay, so when we talk about a seniors, like I said before, a seniors operates on a spectrum of stealing and sharing and where you land on the spectrum determines what your role is in the community. So let's talk about vampires first. Let's go back to Picasso, Mr. Artis Theft. Picasso was a notorious vampire. His granddaughter, Marina, claimed that he used to squeeze people out like a tube of one of his oil paints. So here's what would happen. Like basically you'd hang out with Picasso and you would spend all day with Picasso and at the end you'd just be like this nervous wreck. You'd go home and collapse in your room but not Picasso. Picasso would go back to a studio and he would paint using all the energy that he'd sucked out of the people he'd hung out with, right? So most people put up with this except for this dude, Konstantin Brancusi. I'm from Texas so I can mispronounce anything I want. Brancusi was really interesting because he grew up in Romania near the Carpathian Mountains and he knew a vampire when he saw one. So Brancusi was not about to have his life force sucked out by this guy and he banished Picasso from ever entering his studio. Now what I think Brancusi practiced is what I call the vampire test. It's a simple way to know what who you should let in and out of your life. So if you find yourself spending time with something or someone and at the end you feel okay, you feel full of energy, that thing is probably not a vampire. It can be a person, place or thing. If you spend time with a person, place or thing and at the end you are depleted, you could be an introvert, that's a possibility, or that thing, place or person could be a vampire. I would like to point out this does not work with children. So if you're making a mental list of things in your life, your children can't be on it. So run through some of the things in your life, run it through the vampire test, see what happens. And if you find a vampire, do what Brancusi did, banish him from your life forever. Okay, so that's vampires. On the other side of the spectrum, on the sharing side, we have this other creature who you may know of, human spam, human spam, okay. So you know these people, they're on Facebook, they're tweeting out their every move, right? These are also the people in meetings they want to tell you all their great ideas, but then they don't want to hear your ideas, right? They're the musicians who go out and pace the whole world with flyers, but they never actually go to a gig themselves. Human spam, what do you do with human spam? If you find yourself becoming kind of spammy, I would suggest putting what you share through what I call the so what test. It's important when you share things to think about sharing as an act of generosity. That's really how sharing works. And so ask yourself the simple test. Is it useful or interesting to the people I'm sharing with? Finally, if you're feeling spammy, just shut up and listen. That is the greatest antidote to talking too much about yourself. I found that on, you know, I talk about myself a lot in my job and the great joy and relief of it is actually getting to hear from other people after I talk, so I'm looking forward to the Q and A, which hopefully we'll get to soon. So anyways, there's a really great sweet spot in between vampires and human spam and that is simply a contributor. That's someone who takes and gives, right? That's someone who is involved in both ways that pushes and pulls and a really healthy synias is full of contributors. Number eight, the ordinary plus extra attention equals the extraordinary. So if any of you have ever had the pleasure of driving down 93 South in Boston, you might have driven past this. This is a gigantic gas tank painted with rainbow stripes. It was painted by one of my heroes who was a nun named Karita Kent. Now in the 60s, Karita was running an art school in Los Angeles and she went to one of Andy Warhol's first shows in Los Angeles and she became really interested in Warhol's work and also Ed Ruchet's work and so she started screen printing and what Karita did that was so interesting is she would take pictures of advertisements and signs all over Los Angeles. The stuff we usually think of as junk and she would take these common things out of their context and she would bring out these religious messages in advertising. So here Karita's taken a bag of Wonder Bread and she's divorced the dots from the package but then she's also brought out this idea of enriched bread, like bread breaking, right? And she also added the advertising. She said she wanted to be advertising in its own game. She wanted to manipulate advertising. Finding God in all things is sort of the task of a believer and Karita was able to find it in advertising. Amazingly. So Karita took this man-made landscape around her and she paid really close attention to it and that's what she taught her students too. They had this, she would teach her students to go around with these little pieces of paper that were cut out like a camera viewfinder and she would teach her students to crop the world and to really pay attention to things on their own terms. It's easy to assume that if our lives were more extraordinary we might make more extraordinary work, right? If we could only move to Paris or rent the right studio or fall in with a great gang of misfits, you know, right? Like we would be more creative. We think if we had extraordinary circumstances the extraordinary work would follow but I think this is really wishful thinking because I really think that everything you need to make extraordinary work is in your ordinary life. You just have to pay attention to it and if you really wanna change the quality of your life pay attention to what you pay attention to. Your attention is one of the most valuable things that you possess and that's why everyone wants to steal it from you, right? So first you must protect it and then you have to point it in the right direction. Finally, be boring. Hopefully I haven't been too boring so far but be boring, it's the only way to get work done. We'll keep this real short. People think a book is really hard to do and it is but if you write one page a day it doesn't seem like much but you write a page for 365 days a year you have enough to fill a novel. Very simple, little chunks of effort build into something big over time. So be boring, it's the way to get work done. And finally we're there, where, oops, wrong slide. Okay, we're here. Creativity is subtraction. Okay, in this age of information abundance and overload I think that the people who really get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out so they can concentrate on what's really important to them. So I think a lot of times the way to get over creative block is to simply place some constraints on yourself. And my favorite story in this vein is Dr. Seuss. When Dr. Seuss wrote The Cat in the Hat there was only 236 words in The Cat in the Hat and his editor bet him that he couldn't write a book with only 50 words. And so Dr. Seuss went around, turned around and wrote Green Eggs and Ham. And Green Eggs and Ham is one of the best selling children's books of all time. And there's something, it's actually my favorite Dr. Seuss book to read to my kids too. And so there's something about constraints. There's something about putting limitations on yourself that leads to some of the best creative work. I was talking to Paula early. I don't know how to embarrass her, but I was talking to her earlier and one of the ways that she said she designs is she starts with a list of what she won't do in the project. And I love that. You have to figure out what you're not gonna do sometimes in order to figure out what you're gonna do. And so creativity isn't just the things we put into our work. It's also the things that we choose to leave out. So I hope you will choose wisely and have fun and I will leave it there. Thank you. Well, that's amazing. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. I'm so sorry, I went over. Yeah. And this is actually my favorite part. I'm not mad. So, okay, you're not mad at me. She's disappointed. Okay. No, I'm neither mad nor disappointed. No, it was beautiful. I certainly did not mind. So let me tell you about the Q&A process. So as you may have heard, we are sort of distributed across the lab, not everyone who's in the community is in the room. So I felt like a little stressed out about taking live questions in the moment from the room. It looks like all the people who can't be here. So I was like, how else could we do this? So two days ago, I posted a form online and said, hey, do you have a question that you wanna ask Austin in advance of having seen the talk? Right? Cool. Yesterday at around noon, there were like 16 questions. I'm like, okay, it was like a good selection of questions. After dinner yesterday, there were more than 100 questions. Oh. And I was like, cool. So what I did is I looked through all the questions, I sort of like grouped them thematically. This is my education researcher hat on, grouped them thematically and then tried to pick an exemplar from each category. So I have 10 questions and we're gonna play Q&A lotto. Are we gonna do lightning round? Oh, we're gonna do a lottery. Plus, plus speed round. Okay. Our first question is, okay, imagine you could give every person in this room one additional hour in each day. What would you have us all do each day that would cultivate creativity? I would, this is so easy. This is the easiest answer. Like unbelievably, I would give you an hour in the morning after you wake up. Don't look at your phone. Just do not look at your phone. Don't touch your phone. Don't go online. Give yourself an hour to wake up every morning without any kind of external stimulus from the world. Or take a walk, play with your kids, listen to Mozart, eat breakfast. If I could give everyone in this room, take an hour for yourself every morning before the day starts because. That is where, you know, many of the great creative thinkers, that's where these, you know, after that waking state, that's, there's so much good stuff that we lose because we're immediately interrupted from the world. So I would give you an hour in the morning. That's easy. I would take it. Where can I sign up? Okay, next. Next question. What are you reading right now and why? Oh, well, I am not reading much at all because I've been on vacation with my children and vacation with children is not a vacation. It's a trip. But I am, I'm dipping into an essay collection called They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us. And I will, I will, I will bungle his name but it's a collection of essays about music and culture and it's an interesting collection right now. But before that, what's the last great book I read? I love reading oral histories of music. I'm like a big fan of like oral histories of music scenes. So I love this, if you're into punk rock and you haven't read Please Kill Me. That's an amazing book. And I'm, again, I'm the oldest millennial. So I went to college from 2001 to 2005. And so there's a book called Meet Me in the Bathroom which is about the New York music scene from 2001 to 2011. And that's, that's an amazing. I like, because those books are about scenes, they're really about seniorises and how scenes develop. So I love, that's why I was reading before I came and got my reading time decimated. Also, in your weekly newsletter, I really appreciate you guiding us towards me. So if you have not signed up, I encourage you. My weekly, so every week I put out a list of 10 things I think are worth sharing. And it's my favorite thing that I do. And I think we have like 60,000 readers now. So it's like a really fun thing. And so if you're looking for something to read on Friday morning, check out my newsletter and sales pitch. No. How can I give my students feedback on their creative work without crushing their dreams? Oh, you know, this is really interesting because you know, Linda Berry, who's one of my heroes who teaches, she actually doesn't give feedback. She says good. Like she has her, her kids read aloud and she just, I'm not, I don't know about feedback. I think, you know, feedback is for Jimi Hendrix. No, I don't. I think that the more you can divorce the work from it being personal, I think the more you can take the work on its own terms and not that it's somehow, and I think this is really true of people get this idea that creative work is all about personal expression and it can be that way. But one of the things I've noticed, for example, when people make a blackout poem, they don't feel the sense of ownership with it. They don't feel like it's necessarily something that came deep from their soul. Like I could never get a room full of people to write their own poems and come up and read them. But if I gave you all a paper right now on how do you make a blackout poem, there'd be a line of people to read them. You know, because it's more like a game. So I think the more that you can kind of get students to understand that your work is not you. The things that you make, again, these are products. They're not the, you are the process. You are a process, you are a verb. These things that you make are just spinoffs of that and they don't necessarily represent you as a, even though we judge students on what they create. And maybe that's the answer. Maybe it's, see I'm thinking out loud here, maybe it's judging students based on their process rather than the products of the process. When in the creative process is it better to ask for permission and when is it better to ask for forgiveness? Oh, that's a question for an attorney. I think beg forgiveness always. But I think you have to let the thing happen with creative work and then before you, it's very important, I do think, as much as I talk about sharing process, I do think it's important to separate the making of the work from the sharing. And because I think time is really the great editor of things. If you let something sit for even 24 hours, you can really see what it's made of. And so I do think that it's okay to make something that might be in murky water, but then you really have to look at it and say, okay, now what kinds of permissions do I have to get? Or if you walk around this lab, there's lots of things that are made and then you have to like, there's a kind of process of discovery happening, but then there are questions such as, what will this do in the world? How do I have to start thinking about the ethics of this or that kind of thing? So there are consequences to putting things out in the world. So I think separating the creating of work from the sharing and publication of work is a really important thing. And it's a really important thing to get students to understand because we live in the share everything culture and copying is really how we learn. We copy people, that's how we find our own styles. We basically copy a dozen people and we arrive at some other thing that is us. But that copying needs to be a private process. It needs to be a thing that's in a protected space. And so I think it's just important to help people understand that there's creating and there's sharing. And just as there's writing and there's publishing and there are different things. We're making great time. Great. Yeah. What types of environments and experiences best support kids' creativity? I think for my, I can only speak, I'm not a teacher or I'm not trained. I don't have a lot of experience. What I do have is a five and a three year old at home. And what I have found to be the most helpful philosophically is to not think of myself in the tradition, I'm not saying this is what teachers do, but our cartoon version of what a teacher is is that a teacher has a bunch of knowledge that they then impart to students. For me it's more interesting to think of myself as a librarian. I am a person that creates environments in which my kids discover and learn for themselves. And so quite simply that could be my kids have markers and papers available to them at all times. And people come in our house and it's all white walls and they're just like, how do you let these kids have these markers? But just creating an environment in which easy access to materials, everything on hand, and letting them go whenever they want, and having a lot of uninterrupted time. I think children are interrupted a lot. There's not enough time for children to really dive in and just be obsessed with things. I let my kid work on garage band well into dinner time sometimes, because he's really into it. And then eventually halfway through dinner he comes out and he's got a song to play us and we sit down and eat. It's a balance between having very rigid structure and then allowing free play. Can you talk a little bit more about the librarian metaphor? Oh right, so I actually have way more experience as a librarian than a teacher. So when we think about, librarians really misunderstood because you think of a librarian as someone sitting at a desk who just shows you books in the card catalogs, but if you visit a public library right now, a librarian is everything from a maker space creator to a social worker to, I mean librarians have all these things that they do. And one of the most important things that librarians do is they create an environment in which people can connect with the things that they need. And so if we think about, and again I'm talking about our culture's idea of a teacher, which is that it's a one way street and that it's about imparting very specific things to the students. If you can kind of break out of that idea and just create, I really think about it as I'm creating spaces in which my children can learn and I don't think about it as I'm actually imparting things because I think as far as imparting things, they get what I am is what they get from me. What I am and how I operate is how my children learn from me, that's how they learn how to be in the world. And so this idea that the do as I say not as I do that you can't do that, you have to do and then you kind of have to become the person that you want your children to be which is the terrifying prospect of parenting. Right? Yeah. Have a good, quick, do we have more time? We've got a little bit of time. Maybe this is an appropriate question to end on. Okay. How do you know when creative work is finished? It's never, Paul Valerie said it's never finished only abandoned. There's a point at which the work has become, I can only speak to books in particular. I will speak to books. Books are crystallizations of thoughts in a particular moment. So there is a point with a book where you're like, I could add to this forever, but this book works as an object right now and it will have some sort of resilience in the future as an object and people can respond to it. But for my own work personally, my blog and my website is this sort of never-ending work of art or, you know. And so my books I really think of as catalysts, like they're almost like, they're objects that get people to think and then everything that goes on around the books I document in my other work somehow. And so I just never feel like they're finished ever. They're constantly evolving and they evolve in the form of talks and they evolve in what people do with them. And so it's really when you know when the thing is whole, when that product really holds together, that's when it's finished. That's when it's ready at least to be released. But that commitment to constant evolution, I think, is such a lovely sentiment to carry with us throughout the day, so please. And it's true of children. Let's just go back to this real quick. I think the most important thing for me is I always remain a student. Questlove says that a lot. Always a student, never a teacher. If you can actually have a blackout somewhere that's like to be a teacher but remain a student. If we can get people to realize that this is really a lifelong thing, that you will learn forever, that learning is the verb of life, that is what we have to impart to people to keep their curiosity, to keep their sense of wanting to make things of the world. And that's how the road goes on forever until it doesn't. Please join me in thanking Questlove. Thank you.