The Vine

“It’s one of my theories that when people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past.”

So begins Steal Like An Artist, a rich and engaging book that Austin Kleon has penned—in words and playful illustrations—to his nineteen-year-old self. Stemming from a talk he gave to students at Broome Community College, Kleon shares practical wisdom about creativity and creative processes that he wishes he’d known when first starting out.

Now, if the notion of “stealing” other people’s work makes you feel twitchy, let’s first clarify that everyone does it—even the great masters of art and literature built on the works that preceded them—but not everyone does it well.

T.S. Eliot: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”

You honor others when you steal from them authentically. And, let’s be clear, that does not mean skimming the surface, copying the veneer of someone’s work. (See Kleon’s chart of good vs. bad theft.) It’s immersing yourself in the body of work of a thinker who inspires you, internalizing his or her ideas, and remixing them in a way that’s uniquely your own.

“Don’t just steal the style, steal the thinking behind the style,” Kleon says. “You don’t want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes.”

Next, he suggests, go find three thinkers who inspired your thinker, and repeat the process. Over time you’ll build a creative lineage to draw from—and add to.

“Seeing yourself as part of a creative lineage will help you feel less alone as you start making your own stuff,” Kleon says. “I hang pictures of my favorite artists in my studio. They’re like friendly ghosts. I can almost feel them pushing me forward as I’m hunched over my desk.”

Steal Like An Artist is a small, elegant book that’s packed with practical insights about creativity and creative habits—things like kindness, generosity, productive procrastination, and the importance of hobbies and working with your hands. It is a brilliant manifesto for successfully navigating this age of combinatorial creativity, where ideas are ubiquitous and value is created through synthesis and symphony.

As Kleon puts it, we are a mashup of the things we let into our lives, and “anyone can be creative if they surround themselves with the right influences, play nice, and work hard.”

My advice: Make this book one of the things you let into your life. Your inner artist will thank you.

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While we’re talking about books worth reading, here are a few more that have captured my imagination lately. All enthusiastically recommended.

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The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive
Brian Christian
Book description: Each year, the AI community convenes to administer the famous (and famously controversial) Turing test. Named for computer pioneer Alan Turing, the test convenes a panel of judges who pose questions—ranging anywhere from celebrity gossip to moral conundrums—to hidden contestants in an attempt to discern which is human and which is a computer. The machine that most often fools the panel wins the Most Human Computer Award. But there is also a prize, bizarre and intriguing, for the Most Human Human. Brian Christian, a young poet with degrees in computer science and philosophy, was chosen to participate in a recent competition. This playful, profound book is not only a testament to his efforts to be deemed more human than a computer, but also a rollicking exploration of what it means to be human in the first place.

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My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store
Ben Ryder Howe
Book description: It starts with a gift, when Ben Ryder Howe’s wife, the daughter of Korean immigrants, decides to repay her parents’ self-sacrifice by buying them a store. Howe, an editor at the rarefied Paris Review, agrees to go along. Things soon become a lot more complicated. After the business struggles, Howe finds himself living in the basement of his in-laws’ Staten Island home, commuting to the Paris Review offices in George Plimpton’s Upper East Side townhouse by day, and heading to Brooklyn at night to slice cold cuts and peddle lottery tickets. My Korean Deli follows the store’s tumultuous life span, and along the way paints the portrait of an extremely unlikely partnership between characters with shoots across society, from the Brooklyn streets to Seoul to Puritan New England. Owning the deli becomes a transformative experience for everyone involved as they struggle to salvage the original gift—and the family—while sorting out issues of values, work, and identity.

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Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian
Avi Steinberg
Book description: After defecting from yeshiva to Harvard, Avi Steinberg has only a senior thesis essay on Bugs Bunny to show for his effort. While his friends and classmates advance in the world, he remains stuck at a crossroads, unable to meet the lofty expectations of his Orthodox Jewish upbringing. Seeking direction—and dental insurance—Steinberg takes a job as a librarian in a tough Boston prison. The prison library counter, his new post, attracts con men, minor prophets, ghosts, and an assortment of quirky regulars searching for the perfect book and a connection to the outside world. There’s an anxious pimp who solicits Steinberg’s help in writing a memoir. A passionate gangster who dreams of hosting a cooking show titled Thug Sizzle. A disgruntled officer who instigates a major feud over a Post-it note. A doomed ex-stripper who asks Steinberg to orchestrate a reunion with her estranged son, himself an inmate. Over time, Steinberg is drawn into the accidental community of outcasts that has formed among his bookshelves—a drama he recounts with heartbreak and humor.

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A Year of Mornings: 3191 Miles Apart
Maria Alexandra Vettese and Stephanie Congdon Barnes
(This is a beautiful book made all the more special because it was a gift from a friend.)
Book description: On the morning of December 7, 2006, Maria and Stephanie each took a digital photo of everyday objects randomly arranged on their kitchen tables and, unbeknownst to one another, uploaded them to the website Flickr. Noticing a remarkable similarity between their images, they agreed to document their mornings by posting one photo to a shared blog every weekday for a year. A Year of Mornings collects 236 images from this uniquely 21st-century artistic collaboration. While clearly kindred spirits, the two women have met in person only once. Their friendship is maintained solely online, sustained by a shared love for moments of serenity, solitude, and peacefulness.

Joe Nocella is the owner of 718 Cyclery in Brooklyn. In the fantastic video below, “The Inverted Bike Shop,” he talks about co-creating with customers, bringing them into the design process, and even letting them participate in the assembly of their custom bicycles.

“I found that people really wanted to be involved in the process,” he says, “not just buy a bike.” And there it is.

People don’t want to “just buy a _______.”

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Eudaimonia is a Greek word commonly translated as “happiness” or “success,” but linguists seem to agree that a more accurate translation would be “human flourishing.” As Aristotle applied the term, it suggested finding one’s true purpose, fulfilling one’s promise and potential.

Great organizations can also be said to experience eudaimonia, both collectively and individually in their people. (Pixar, Patagonia, TOMS, Trader Joe’s and Southwest Airlines come to mind.) They bring their humanity to, and express their humanity through, their work.

That’s my take on it anyway. If this sounds a bit ethereal, management guru Patrick Lencioni offers a far more practical, grounded perspective in his excellent new book, The Advantage. Lencioni eschews the Greek in favor of a more modern concept, “organizational health.” And he argues that it is the single greatest competitive advantage in business today.

Organizational health, he says, trumps strategy, research, technology and brainpower. So what is it?

“At its core, organizational health is about integrity,” Lencioni says, “but not in the ethical or moral way that integrity is incorrectly defined so often today. An organization has integrity—is healthy—when it is whole, consistent and complete, when its management, operations, strategy and culture fit together and make sense.”

Think of it as a multifaceted process of alignment. It begins with a clearly defined organizational purpose, a set of values that you live by even when they’re detrimental to profits. It’s supported (or undermined) by decisions and behaviors that align (or not) with your purpose. IDEO general manager Tom Kelley likens this to verbal language and body language—what you say vs. what you do—and warns that if they’re not consistent, your body language is what people will interpret as the “real” you.

That integrity (or alignment) then promotes a culture of authenticity, vulnerability, trust, and willingness to engage in productive conflict, all of which are essential to unleashing creativity. Pixar president Ed Catmull attests to this in his fascinating article for the Harvard Business Review. When a crisis emerged during the making of “Toy Story,” the studio’s executives began to coalesce, through the crucible of healthy debate, into what is now a legendary creative community. “Since they trusted one another, they could have very intense and heated discussions,” Catmull recalls. “They always knew that the passion was about the story and wasn’t personal.”

Healthy, aligned organizations are characterized by high morale and productivity, minimal politics, ego and confusion, and low turnover among the best employees. What enterprise doesn’t want that? And why are they so rare?

Because the process is really hard. And really messy (humans tend to be that way).

Organizational health is about creating a thriving, supportive community. It’s about people and relationships, and it involves honest, subjective and sometimes uncomfortable conversations. It also requires standing for something—and being willing to polarize people who don’t stand with you.

The Advantage is a pragmatic, engaging and helpful guide for how to navigate this difficult but essential process. Lencioni is well known for his bestselling business fables (The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and Death by Meeting among them) in which he uses fictional narratives to illustrate powerful teaching points about teamwork, trust, communication, culture and other similarly elusive dynamics. This is his first nonfiction book, and although it covers a lot of the same territory as his previous offerings, it synthesizes the topics nicely while adding new perspectives on strategy and implementation.

If there’s anything Vine readers might find missing, it’s the element of physical spaces and environments, and how they influence interaction, collaboration and productivity. But given Lencioni’s forte as a leadership and management thinker, there’s certainly nothing wrong with focusing on his strengths and ceding design to designers.

I enjoyed The Advantage immensely, and my copy is now thoroughly marked with highlights and margin notes.

In the end, what better compliment could you give a book?

Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, is an astrophysicist with a gift for making science understandable to the rest of us.

In an interview with Time magazine, Tyson was asked to share what he considers to be the most astounding fact about the universe. His response, set to a Tree of Life-esque video montage below, is a wonderfully moving reflection on the human yearning for connectivity—which is, according to Tyson, at once cosmic and personal.

We are in the universe. But more importantly, he says, the universe is in us.

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In honor of TED 2012 getting underway today (and in anticipation of more fantastic videos sure to come from it), here’s one of our favorite talks from the past year.

Brené Brown is a research professor who has spent the past ten years studying human connection—our ability to empathize, belong and love. In particular she looks at how and why people are connected (or not) to others around them. Without giving away too much of her presentation, Brown asserts that the basis for meaningful relationships is vulnerability, and the greatest impediment is shame. People who lack connections don’t consider themselves worth connecting with.

It’s a fascinating, heartfelt and deeply moving talk. Highly recommended.

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With TED 2012 kicking off next week and awarding its annual TED Prize not to an individual, but rather to the idea of promoting “The City 2.0,” the video below seemed like a perfect tie-in.

Urbanized, the third installlment of Gary Hustwit’s design film trilogy, is a feature-length documentary about the design of cities, featuring commentary from some of the world’s foremost architects, planners and policymakers—Rem Koolhaas, Eduardo Paes, Norman Foster and Oscar Niemeyer, to name a few.

In the filmmakers’ own words:

Over half the world’s population now lives in an urban area, and 75% will call a city home by 2050. But while some cities are experiencing explosive growth, others are shrinking. The challenges of balancing housing, mobility, public space, civic engagement, economic development, and environmental policy are fast becoming universal concerns. Yet much of the dialogue on these issues is disconnected from the public domain.

Who is allowed to shape our cities, and how do they do it? Unlike many other fields of design, cities aren’t created by any one specialist or expert. There are many contributors to urban change, including ordinary citizens who can have a great impact improving the cities in which they live. By exploring a diverse range of urban design projects around the world, Urbanized frames a global discussion on the future of cities.

The film is being screened at festivals and events in North America and Europe, with more dates to be announced. You can also stream it online for a fee, or rent it from Netflix or iTunes. And the trailer is below.

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When your mother-in-law gives you a book and says, “It was too gross for me, but it seems right up your alley,” should you: (a) be alarmed, (b) be offended, (c) be flattered, or (d) start reading it immediately?

I chose (c) and (d), which is how I discovered Charlatan, Pope Brock’s fascinating, brilliantly told, historical account of medical quackery in the early 1900s. Think The Devil in the White City meets The Road to Wellville.

It is, on one level, the story of John Brinkley, who got his start as a transient hawker of miracle tonics, obtained a medical license from a shady diploma mill, and eventually grew famous and wealthy as one of the pioneers of “rejuvenation”—that is, the transplantation of goat testicles into impotent men.

But underneath the bizarre, sleazy and frequently abhorrent practices of Brinkley and many others (medical hucksters flourished in this more provincial, trusting era), you will find a story of human gullibility, suspension of reason, and willingness to be led, however implausibly, by the promise of a shortcut to happiness. The central characters, then and now, are you and I.

It’s easy to “tsk tsk” those simple, unenlightened souls of an earlier age. Who would pay the equivalent of $8,000 in current value for such a dubious experimental surgery, one aggressively condemned and repudiated by the AMA? (Brinkley would eventually be sued for more than a dozen wrongful death cases.)

But you could just as well ask, why do people today pay $29.99 for an “energy” bracelet whose benefits are acknowledged to be entirely bogus? Why is cosmetic surgery a $30 billion—and growing—global industry? Why did so many of Harold Camping’s followers sell their possessions and quit their jobs in anticipation of the Rapture?

Because we want to believe—in God, in Nature, in scientific discovery, in something beyond ourselves—never more so than when our health and vitality are involved. (We think we’re applying reason, but research shows we’re drawn to evidence that confirms what we already believe.)

“Unlike most scams, which target greed, quackery fires deeper into the Jungian universals: our fear of death, our craving for miracles,” Pope writes. “When we see night approaching, nearly all of us are rubes.”

If this sounds misanthropic, I don’t mean it to be. I’m not at all condemning belief. Objective reality has gaps in it, and each of us fills them in with something.

Just not goat testicles, please.

Photo credits: Shane Rounce, Nina Jean, Mike Fisher

Lana Canova points us to this fun and clever video—an exercise, ahem, “carrot.” One cynical commenter on the Vimeo site complains that it’s using sex to sell bottled water. I say lighten up, it’s a playful way of using human nature to generate a conversation around wellness. Apprécier!

Saw this short bumper video while watching Nick Jr. with my kids this morning. Bob Marley’s classic “Three Little Birds” visualized in a charming cartoon. Couldn’t resist sharing it here.

Is it sappy and lightweight to offer this up as content on a business-oriented blog? Perhaps. But it’s two minutes of whimsy and encouragement—and two minutes of not checking the DJIA or Irene coverage. We could all use a bit of that right now. Enjoy.

UPDATED: The YouTube video previously linked below has since been removed. (Apparently Twentieth Century Fox didn’t appreciate the user’s copyright infringement.) You can instead view it here on the website of the animators who created it.

The web is awash in Steve Jobs tributes today, so this feels a bit like piling on. Still, it’s a perfect opportunity to post the video of his famous, often quoted (and even internationally plagiarized) Stanford commencement address from 2005. The full transcript is here.

As Jobs told the Stanford grads, “You’ve got to find what you love.” I think it’s safe to say, he did.

Golden Richards has four wives, twenty-seven children, and—as if his relationships weren’t complicated enough already—a mistress.

Golden is the patriarch of Brady Udall’s tragicomic novel, The Lonely Polygamist. It is a tenderly and unflinchingly told story of the dysfunctions we pass from parent to child, generation to generation. A story of tribes and alliances and the yearning for, at once, individuality and belonging.

And, okay, yes…a story of a guy with four wives, a practice (and an underlying belief system) that mainstream society regards as anywhere from odd to abhorrent. But Udall treats this matter with careful neutrality, and in the midst of this fictional family’s bizarrely complicated relationships, you will begin to recognize the patterns and peculiarities of any family’s—of your own family’s—dynamics.

(In researching the book, Udall was surprised to find that most of the polygamists he met did not fit the stereotype of buttoned up, controlling men with meek wives. They were instead average, everyday men and women—or as he puts it, “Normal people living in a very abnormal way.”)

In their own peculiar (to us) manner, Golden and his brood simply aspire to, Udall writes, “that most wondrous and impossible of things: one big happy family.”

Here’s a selection.

Look closely and you’ll see: in this house there is trouble. There has been trouble here for a good many years, though you’d hardly know it by appearances. The children, rambunctious as always, scamper and gossip and play, the mothers busy themselves making dinner, and the father—where is he, anyway?—labors somewhere in the outer precincts of the backyard.

No, nothing obviously the matter. If you didn’t know any better you might think: domestic sweetness, familial bliss. But look a little closer, get right up close, and you can’t miss the off-kilter rituals, the sorrows nursed in isolation, the back-door transactions, the mini-dramas of dread and anxiety and longing. At this very second, for example, you’ll find Daughters #2 and #3 in an upstairs bedroom, hatching a plot of revenge on Daughter #5 for being a kiss-up and a tattletale and exposing their respective crushes on two of the best-looking boys in the valley, while Daughter #5 herself is curled up in her hiding place under the stairs, trying to stanch the most recent of her spontaneous nosebleeds, which she believes to be divine punishment for impure thoughts and questionable intentions, and because of which she has become a tattletale and Miss Goody Two Shoes in hopes of getting on God’s good side. In the woodshed you’ll find Son #4 weeping bitterly and eating his own earwax. In the front room is Daughter #10, right out there in the open, sitting alone on the lavender Queen Anne divan, talking openly, idly to her dead brother, Son X, while two of her living brothers, Sons #11 and #6, aim their homemade rubber-band guns at the back of her head and count: one, two, three. And maybe, if you’re paying attention, you’ll notice Mother #2 slipping into the hall bathroom the second it comes open to give her wig a quick adjustment and stuff her latest and rather unpredictable roll of stomach fat under the band of her pantyhose—she wants to look good for her man tonight!—and coming back to the kitchen, letting out that braying laugh with which she tries to hide large and complicated feelings.

The house, a gothic Victorian with a jagged roofline and a three-story tower fashioned from blond sandstone, makes proud display of its odd-shaped rooms and narrow hallways and tilting staircases—an architecture that, despite Mother #1′s every attempt to suppress such things, encourages factionalization and secrecy and disorder. Away from the warm bright center of the house where the mothers try to outdo each other in the kitchen, there is a shadow world of disputed territories and black-market economies, a shifting and complex geography of meeting places and neutral zones and sour little crevices and dusty pockets where children go to steal a few desperate moments of solitude.

Here’s a very clever play on the Whole Foods/organic/green culture—which, let’s be honest, is often served with a generous helping of smugness and piety. (C’mon, it’s healthy to laugh at ourselves.) Interesting to consider that the lifestyle is mainstream enough to be parodied.

Here’s the first thing you should know about author-speaker-über motivator Tim Sanders: he’s intensely interested in what you’re doing for other people.

I met Tim at a Fast Company conference in 2002. He would give a keynote address later that afternoon, but this was a small, early-morning breakfast session for members of the magazine’s online community. After his talk—which was brimming with energy and practical wisdom in spite of the early hour—I approached Tim with two copies of Love Is the Killer App for signing.

One was for me, and we had a friendly exchange as he inscribed it. The other was for a young manager I’d recently hired, and this is where Tim absolutely lights up. What’s her name? How long has she been with you? How cool that you’re investing in someone else’s development. Don’t ever stop.

Tim Sanders has been described as Dale Carnegie for the digital age, and it’s an apt comparison. One of the core ideas in Carnegie’s books is that you can change other people’s behavior by changing the way you react to them—in other words, build up yourself by building up the people around you. What Tim does so effectively is take classic principles of positivity and bring them into a modern business context. Carnegie, Peale, et al. meet the networked, social, always-on world.

Remarkable individuals are shaped by remarkable forces, and in his latest book, Today We Are Rich, we meet the force who shaped Sanders. Billye Coffman is the grandmother who raised him as a son and instilled in him the values of generosity, positivity, gratitude and confidence. She is, in effect, a single mom raising Tim while also caring for her elderly mother, coping with the disintegration of her marriage, and facing staggering debt. Her wisdom, safe to say, is hard-won.

“Confidence is rocket fuel,” Billye tells Tim in the midst of her struggles, and he elaborates on this:

“Self-confidence is a purifier of sorts that reduces the chatter in your head and allows you to fall into a state of flow… When you believe you’ll be successful, you achieve a calmness that improves your ability to slow life’s game down and see things more clearly…

“When you think you’ll get an A, the test is an opportunity to shine, not a daunting task. Your relaxed mind is able to add two plus two and come up with four, in contrast to the nervous mind, which can be fraught with basic errors in math, logic, reason, and judgement.”

Messages of positive psychology too often veer into mawkish, homespun, Stuart Smalley territory, but that’s certainly not the case here. Today We Are Rich is deeply grounded—in Billye’s life-tested truisms, for starters, and also in Tim’s simple yet powerful (and challenging) examples of how to put principle into practice. This book is an upbeat life coach merged with a disciplined, rigorous, kick-your-ass personal trainer.

We know from neuroscience that fear has a paralyzing effect on our brains, creating a bunker mentality and shutting off the creativity and adaptability we need to get out of difficult situations. The first remedy for fearfulness, say Billye and Tim, is to “feed your mind good stuff.”

TWAR is a great place to start. Well worth buying a copy.

Better yet, buy a copy for someone else.

Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson, speaking at The Vine in Napa, asked the audience to raise their hands if they considered themselves an artist. In a room of 200 people, maybe a dozen responded.

If you ask a class of kindergarteners the same question, he observed, every hand goes up. So where, along the path from childhood to adulthood, do we start believing the lie that we’re not artistic and creative?

It’s a false belief that’s instilled and reinforced by many different sources—our own selves among them. I’ll allow that most do so unwittingly and with the best of intentions, but it’s a lie nonetheless. And far too many of us buy into it.

It’s fitting (and no coincidence), then, that profound insights into creativity can be found in children’s literature, as I was recently reminded while reading with my daughter.

Ish is the wonderful story of Ramon, a young boy who loves to draw—until a critical remark by his older brother causes him to fixate on all the ways his pictures are not “right.”

Fortunately Ramon has someone who believes in him, a younger sister who helps him see the beauty and meaning in his “ish” drawings. His trees, while not perfect, are tree-ish. His silly feelings are expressed in images that are silly-ish. And when he begins to write, even though he’s not sure if he’s writing poems, he knows they’re poem-ish. And that’s enough.

As the author Peter Reynolds tells it, “Thinking ish-ly allowed his ideas to flow freely.”

Now, of course structure and order and precision matter. I don’t want my dentist coloring outside the lines while performing a root canal. But an over-emphasis on exactitude can be the very thing that bottlenecks our creativity.

Jim Collins has famously pointed out that “good is the enemy of great”—that our willingness to settle for good prevents us from achieving greatness. But so too is perfect the enemy of great.

The next time you find yourself hitting a creative wall, think of Ramon.

Think ish-ly.

I recently finished—and was thoroughly moved by—Paul Murray’s much acclaimed novel, Skippy Dies.

Many book reviews have already been written, so I won’t duplicate the effort here, other than to comment it’s been a long time since I was so vividly reminded what fourteen felt like—the sheer intensity of being, so easily exhilarated and yet so easily crushed—and how much of that experience we unwittingly carry with us into adulthood.

There’s one passage in particular that seems worth sharing, as it’s resonant with many of the themes we’ve explored throughout past Vine gatherings.

Murray reflects:

“Maybe instead of strings it’s stories things are made of, an infinite number of tiny vibrating stories; once upon a time they all were part of one big giant superstory, except it got broken up into a jillion different pieces, that’s why no story on its own makes any sense, and so what you have to do in a life is try and weave it back together, my story into your story, our stories into all the other people’s we know, until you’ve got something that to God or whoever might look like a letter or even a whole word.”

Somewhere Margaret Wheatley is nodding her head.

If Catcher in the Rye had a three-way with Lord of the Flies and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, their love child would look a lot like Skippy Dies.

Don’t read it if what you want is feel-good (it’s an Irish tale).

Do read it if what you want is to feel.