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Steal Like an Artist
A small illustrated book of 10 things nobody told you about being creative
Why it’s worth your time
In Steal Like an Artist, Austin Kleon argues that nothing is wholly original, so the way to begin is to study and transform the work you admire. A new project or a new role that has you convinced you've got nothing new to bring is a good moment to pick it up.
How to be creative when nothing feels original
The book · About 1 hour of reading · Buy or borrow
How to get it
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- Start with the first chapter.
It sets out what Kleon means by stealing: studying, crediting and transforming what you admire, never passing it off as yours. Each of the ten principles gets its own short chapter, so after that, skip to whichever one catches you.
- Borrow one move and name where it came from.
Pick a piece of work you admire, from a colleague or from your field, and work out one thing that makes it good: the structure, the opening, how it handles questions. Use that move in your next piece of work, and tell the person, or note the source.
Good moments for this: before your first project on a new teamafter you see work you wish you'd madewhen you're asked to bring ideas to a meeting
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
Kleon's version of stealing includes saying where things came from. Naming whose approach you built on tends to earn goodwill, and leaving it out can look like taking credit, especially when the person is junior to you or not in the room.
What might make this harder
Say where it came from before anyone asks, and point to what you changed for this audience. If you can't name a change, keep working on it before you share it.
Questions people ask
What is Steal Like an Artist about?
It's Austin Kleon's 2012 illustrated book of ten principles for creative work, expanded from a 2011 talk he gave to college students. Its core idea is that nothing is wholly original, so you learn by studying, crediting and remixing the work you admire until something of your own comes out.
Does steal like an artist mean copying other people's work?
No. Kleon separates his kind of stealing from plagiarism. In his sense you copy your heroes as practice, to understand how they think, then credit them and transform what you took.
How can I be more creative at work?
One small way in is to study something good that someone else made, name the one thing that makes it work, and try that move in your next draft. Keeping a folder of examples you admire makes the next one easier to find.
Is Steal Like an Artist only for artists?
Kleon says in the introduction that he came to see the ideas as being for anyone trying to bring some creativity into their life and work. A deck, a process or a team ritual can be borrowed and reworked the same way a drawing can.
What it says, and how it holds up
Austin Kleon's premise is that nobody starts from nothing. Originality, as Kleon sees it, comes mostly from what you collect and how you combine it. The work is to choose your influences on purpose, study them closely, and keep changing what you take until it becomes yours.
The book began in 2011, when a community college in upstate New York asked him to speak to its students and he built the talk around ten lessons from his own start. He posted the text and slides online, they spread widely, and Workman published the expanded book in 2012. It's small and full of his drawings, with one short chapter per principle. Alongside stealing well, it argues for writing the book you want to read, keeping a side project, being nice because the world is small, and keeping a steady routine so the work gets done. Kleon writes that the book is him talking to his younger self.
Maria Popova, reviewing it at Brain Pickings (now The Marginalian), called it a manifesto for remix culture, and the author's page says it has sold over a million copies. Kleon calls it a manifesto too. Some research fits its central claim about recombination. A 2013 study in Science by Brian Uzzi and colleagues, covering 17.9 million scientific papers, found that the highest-impact work mostly drew on familiar combinations of earlier ideas while adding a dose of unusual ones. Fast Company's praise, quoted on the publisher's page, describes a book of anecdotes from Kleon's own experience along with stories and quotes from well-known names.
If the ideas are there and what's missing is the nerve to let people see them, his follow-up, Show Your Work!, is aimed at that problem. It picks up where this book's principle about sharing good work leaves off.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.