Open Tabs Left After Reading Austin Kleon’s Blog Archive

I’ve been exploring the archive’s of Austin Kleon’s blog recently, and spend a lot of time falling down rabbit holes as one interesting post expands out into multiple links and thematic obsessions carrying on over time. For the first time in years, I’m leaving a series of open tabs on my computer, waiting for things to be read and processed and talked about.

Earlier this week I curated a list of some of my favourite posts/links Kleon had written about notebooks and included it in my newsletter, and it’s proven to be one of the most popular things I’ve mailed out in the last few months.

Today, I find myself poking at two of the open tabs that didn’t fit into that list thematically, but are definitely just as interesting if you enjoy thinking about process and art.

• Don’t Discard, Keep All Your Pieces In Play talks about the gap between being interested in things and feeling like you should be doing a single thing (a tension that every creative person I know has felt on the regular, and never seems to be resolved)
• The Agony of List-making takes an idea that seems so overplayed in the internet age, where everything is list posts and top tens and constant connection, then unpacks a potential reason to keep embracing the format despite all of that.