Quick Answer
Steal Like an Artist is Austin Kleon's 2012 manifesto arguing that nothing is original and that creative work means studying, crediting and transforming your influences rather than inventing from nothing. It takes under an hour and removes one specific belief that stops people starting.
Key Takeaways
- Stealing means studying, not copying: Kleon is explicit that he means understanding how work is made and transforming it, with credit, rather than taking the surface.
- The originality demand is two centuries old: it arrives with Romanticism. Before that, apprenticeship meant copying masters for years and nobody considered it a failure.
- Choose your influences deliberately: pick one maker, learn them completely, then work outward to everyone who formed them. Depth in a lineage beats shallow contact with many sources.
- It is thin on purpose: one argument, made and stopped, in a category where most books pad a single idea to three hundred pages.
- Rudolf Steiner connection: every esoteric tradition transmits by lineage, where you receive a practice, work it through your own constitution and pass on something altered. Kleon has rediscovered transmission and given it a modern name.
🕑 14 min read
What the Book Is
Austin Kleon published Steal Like an Artist in 2012, expanded from a talk he had given to a group of students. It is short, illustrated, and physically small, and it can be read in a single sitting on a train.
That format is a decision rather than a limitation. Kleon is making one argument, and the book is exactly as long as the argument requires. In a category where a single idea is routinely inflated to three hundred pages with case studies and repetition, finishing in ninety minutes is a courtesy.
The argument runs like this. Nothing is original. Every piece of work descends from work that came before it. The demand that you produce something without precedent is both impossible and historically recent, and it stops a great many people from starting. Once you accept the inheritance, the real question becomes which sources you take from and what you do with them.
The specific paralysis this addresses
Kleon is treating one obstacle, and it is worth naming precisely because it is so common. A person has an idea, discovers someone has done something similar, and abandons it. Not through laziness or fear of work, but through a genuine belief that the existence of a precedent disqualifies the attempt. That belief is false, it is widespread, and removing it releases a surprising amount of stalled work. If that is not your obstacle, this book will feel slight.
What Stealing Actually Means
The title is deliberately provocative and Kleon spends real effort making sure it is not misread.
He is explicit that stealing does not mean plagiarising, skimming or ripping off. It means studying, crediting, remixing, mashing up and transforming. The distinction he draws is between taking the surface of a work and taking the thinking behind it. Copy an artist's look and you produce imitation that everyone can see. Understand why they made those choices, what problem each decision solved, and that understanding enters your own work in a form nobody can trace.
The test he offers is transformation. If what you produce would embarrass you next to the original, you took the wrong layer. If the original's author would recognise the influence and not the theft, you took the right one.
He also insists on credit, which is not decorative. Naming your sources is what separates the practice from the thing it is named after, and it has a second benefit: a person who says openly where their material came from is forced to know, and that knowledge improves the work.
Where the Originality Demand Came From
Kleon asserts that the originality myth is false. It is worth adding the history he leaves out, because knowing how recent it is makes it far easier to drop.
For most of Western history, learning to make anything meant copying. A painter's apprentice ground pigment, then painted backgrounds in the master's style, then whole works that went out under the master's name. A composer learned by writing in the manner of established forms. Nobody involved considered this a preliminary embarrassment to be got past. It was the training, and originality, where it appeared, emerged from inside a tradition rather than in opposition to one.
The demand that an artist produce something self-generated and without precedent arrives with Romanticism, alongside the shift Elizabeth Gilbert notes in her own work: the move from having a genius to being one. That is roughly two centuries old. It is a local convention of recent Western culture rather than a permanent condition of making things, and a great many working traditions never adopted it at all.
Why the older arrangement was kinder
Under apprenticeship, a beginner's bad work was expected and structurally accounted for. You were supposed to be derivative for years, and nobody read your imitation as evidence about your worth. The Romantic model removed that protected period. It asks a beginner to be original immediately, which means their first attempts are assessed against a standard designed for mature work, and it supplies no explanation for the gap other than personal inadequacy. Kleon is not proposing something novel. He is restoring the arrangement that produced most of the art anybody cares about.
Lineage, Which Is the Older Name for This
Kleon frames his argument in terms of art history and popular music, and it has a deeper precedent he does not reach for.
Every serious esoteric tradition transmits by lineage. A student receives a body of practice from someone who received it themselves, works it through their own constitution over years, and eventually passes on something that is recognisably the same tradition and not identical to what they were given. The transmission is the point, and the alteration is expected rather than tolerated. A student who changed nothing would have failed to digest the material.
Rudolf Steiner is a useful case because he is unusually explicit about his own sources. He locates himself in a line running through Goethe, and beyond Goethe into Rosicrucian and hermetic material, while producing something none of those sources contain. He did not claim to have invented spiritual science, and he also did not merely repeat what he received.
The pattern is exactly what Kleon describes and the traditions have thought about it for considerably longer. What they add is the requirement that the receiving be thorough. You do not remix a tradition you have skimmed. The transformation is only legitimate after the material has actually been taken in, which usually takes years, and this is precisely the part a fast culture of influence tends to skip.
Readers interested in how that transmission worked in practice will find it in our articles on the hermetic texts and their transmission and on how Steiner broke from Theosophy, which is a case study in receiving a lineage and then departing from it.
Choosing Your Influences on Purpose
The most practical instruction in the book concerns selection.
Most people absorb influence passively, from whatever is nearby and whatever the feed supplies. Kleon's argument is that this produces mush, and that the alternative is deliberate: choose one maker or thinker you genuinely admire, learn them completely, and then work outward to everyone who influenced them, and everyone who influenced those people.
What this builds is depth in a specific lineage rather than shallow familiarity with a wide field. The person who has read one author thoroughly and then their sources has something to work with. The person who has read a hundred authors for twenty minutes each has opinions.
Practice: build your tree
Name one person whose work you would be pleased to have made. Then find out who they learned from, and who those people learned from, going back three generations. This takes an afternoon and almost nobody does it. Two things usually happen. You discover that your hero's most distinctive quality was inherited from someone you had never heard of, which is instructive. And you acquire a reading list built from an actual lineage rather than from recommendations, which is worth more than any list of the year's best books.
Putting It to Work
The instruction that follows from all of this is narrower than it sounds. You are not being asked to find your voice, which is not findable by looking. You are being asked to work through material you did not invent until the residue that is left over after the imitation turns out to be yours.
Practice: the copy exercise
Take a short piece of work you admire, a paragraph, a passage of music, a small drawing, and reproduce it exactly. Then set the original aside and make your own version of the same thing from memory. The differences between your copy and your version are your actual voice, visible in isolation for once. This is the apprenticeship method compressed into an hour, and it shows you something no amount of thinking about your style will reveal.
The Other Rules Worth Keeping
Three further instructions in the book have outlasted the rest, and they are worth stating because most summaries skip them for the title.
Write the book you want to read. Kleon's argument is that the gap between what exists and what you wish existed is the most reliable brief you will ever get. It is more useful than asking what an audience wants, because you are the only audience whose taste you can actually consult, and dissatisfaction is a form of knowledge about the field.
Keep your hands in it. He advises maintaining a physical workspace alongside the digital one, on the grounds that thinking involves the body and that work made entirely on a screen loses something. He asserts this rather than demonstrating it. It happens to align with a great deal of older practice about the hand's role in learning, including the traditional insistence that a student copy texts by hand rather than merely read them.
Be boring. The advice is to keep an ordinary life, stay solvent, sleep, and let the work be the interesting part. This is the same conclusion Elizabeth Gilbert reaches from a different direction, and it is the least fashionable thing either of them says.
Why these three belong together
Read separately they look like unrelated tips. Read together they describe one posture: reduce the drama around the work so the work can be where the energy goes. Write from your own dissatisfaction rather than a market's. Use your body rather than only a screen. Keep your life dull enough to sustain the practice. In our reading this is the same instruction the contemplative traditions give about any long discipline, which is that the conditions should be plain and repeatable, because interesting conditions consume the attention the practice needs.
The Question Kleon Avoids
There is a version of this argument that gets much harder, and the book does not go near it. It matters here because readers of a site like this one run into it constantly.
Kleon's examples involve people taking from other people inside a shared culture: a musician learning from earlier musicians, a designer studying earlier designers. In that setting his instruction is sound and the worst outcome is derivative work.
The difficult case is taking from a tradition that is not yours, particularly one belonging to a people who were colonised, suppressed, or whose practices were made illegal within living memory. Smudging, sweat lodges, chakra systems, kabbalah, Yoruba divination, plant medicines with ceremonial contexts. Everything Kleon says about studying, remixing and transforming can be applied to those, and applying it produces something that looks a lot less like lineage.
The distinction that actually holds is not about permission and it is not about ancestry. It is about whether you received the material or took it. Received means from a person, inside a relationship, with obligations attached and someone who can tell you that you have got it wrong. Taken means from a book or a weekend course, with the parts you liked kept and the parts that made demands discarded, and nobody in a position to correct you.
The test worth applying
Ask what the tradition is allowed to ask of you in return. A genuine transmission comes with obligations: practices you have to keep, corrections you have to accept, a teacher who can say no. If the answer is that the tradition asks nothing and you have simply extracted the technique, you are not in a lineage. That is the honest line, and it does not depend on who your grandparents were. It depends on whether the relationship runs in both directions.
Kleon cannot be blamed for writing a short book about graphic design and popular music rather than this. But anyone applying his instruction across traditions needs the extra test, and the traditions themselves have thought about it far more carefully than the creative self-help shelf has.
The Honest Criticism
It is thin. This is the standard objection and it is accurate. The book is short, high level, and offers little for a reader wanting worked exercises or in-depth strategy. Whether that is a fault depends on what you wanted. As a corrective to one false belief it is the right length. As a guide to a creative life it is not, and it does not claim to be.
The examples skew recent and Western. Kleon draws mostly from twentieth century American music, design and writing, which limits the range of what stealing is shown to look like. Traditions with formal transmission systems, where this question has been worked out in detail over centuries, are absent.
It does not address the hard case, as set out above. In a book whose entire subject is what it is acceptable to take, the omission of the one situation where the answer is genuinely contested is a real gap rather than a matter of scope.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you have abandoned something because it had been done before. This is the exact use case and the book will pay for itself within the hour.
Read it if you work outside the arts. The originality myth does most of its damage to people who would never describe themselves as creative and who decline to start things for precisely this reason.
Skip it if you already accept that influence is normal and your problem is time, skill or persistence. Kleon has nothing for you, and Pressfield or Cameron will serve you better.
Our position: a small book doing one job properly. It restores an arrangement that produced most of the art in the world before Romanticism talked everybody out of it, and it does so without pretending the restoration is a discovery. Read it in an hour, build your tree in an afternoon, and get back to work.
Readers wanting the fuller creative picture should pair this with Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic for the fear side of the same problem, and with Steiner on Moral Imagination for what happens when something genuinely new does arrive. The state where the work stops feeling like effort is covered in flow state.
An hour to read, and one belief lighter afterwards.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. We recommend books we have read and think are worth your time, and we say plainly when we think parts of them are weak.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Steal Like an Artist about?
Austin Kleon's 2012 manifesto arguing that nothing is original, that every work descends from earlier work, and that the honest response is to study your influences openly rather than pretend you have none. Stealing in his usage means studying, crediting, remixing and transforming, and he is explicit that it does not mean plagiarising, skimming or ripping off.
Is Steal Like an Artist worth reading?
Yes, and it takes under an hour. The book is short, heavily illustrated and deliberately light, which is a design decision rather than a shortcoming. Its value is corrective: it removes a specific paralysing belief, that you must produce something nobody has done before, and replaces it with a workable relationship to influence. It is not a book you study, it is one you absorb and act on.
Does Kleon actually mean you should copy other artists?
He means you should study them closely enough to understand how their work is made, then let that understanding pass into your own work transformed. His test is whether you are taking the surface or the thinking. Copying an artist's look produces imitation. Understanding why they made those choices produces something that carries the influence without wearing it.
What does nothing is original actually mean?
That every work is descended from prior work, and that the appearance of novelty comes from combining sources in a way nobody has combined them before. Kleon's point is not that creativity is fake. It is that the raw material is inherited, the arrangement is yours, and the arrangement is where originality actually lives.
What is the main criticism of Steal Like an Artist?
That it is thin. The book is brief and stays at a high level, and readers wanting worked methods or exercises will find little to hold. That criticism is accurate and partly misses the design: Kleon is making one argument and stopping, which is a defensible choice in a category full of books that pad a single idea to three hundred pages.
How is Steal Like an Artist different from Big Magic?
Gilbert removes fear and grants permission. Kleon removes the demand for originality and grants a method of influence. They treat different obstacles, and someone paralysed by the belief that their idea has been done before needs Kleon rather than Gilbert. The two work well read together and take about three hours combined.
Where does the originality myth come from?
It is more recent than most people assume. For most of Western history apprenticeship meant copying masters for years, and inheritance was the ordinary path to competence. The idea that an artist should produce something self-generated that nobody has done before arrives with Romanticism, and it is roughly two centuries old rather than perennial. Kleon is restoring an older and more workable arrangement.
What is Kleon's advice about your influences?
Choose them deliberately and study them thoroughly rather than absorbing whatever is nearby. He suggests picking one thinker or maker you admire and learning them completely, then working outward to everyone who influenced them. Depth in a lineage produces a different result from shallow contact with many sources, and most people do the second by default.
Does Steal Like an Artist connect to older spiritual ideas?
Directly, though Kleon does not say so. Every esoteric tradition transmits through lineage, in which a student receives a body of practice from a teacher, works it through their own constitution, and passes on something changed. The idea that you begin by receiving rather than by inventing is standard in those traditions and eccentric only in modern secular creative culture.
What is the difference between stealing and plagiarism?
Transformation and acknowledgement. Plagiarism takes the finished result and presents it as yours. What Kleon describes takes the underlying method, runs it through your own material and circumstances, and produces something the original author would recognise as influenced rather than as copied. He also insists on crediting sources, which plagiarism by definition does not.
Is the book useful for people who are not artists?
Yes, and arguably more so. The originality myth does most of its damage outside the arts, where people decline to start businesses, write, teach or build because someone has done it already. Kleon's argument applies to any work that involves making something, and the audience that most needs it is the one that would never buy a book about art.
What should I read after Steal Like an Artist?
Kleon's own Show Your Work for the follow-up on sharing what you make. Pressfield's The War of Art if your next obstacle is discipline rather than permission. If the lineage idea interested you, look at how traditional apprenticeship and esoteric transmission actually worked, since both are the same argument backed by centuries of practice.
Somebody did it first, and that is the good news
Whatever you were going to make has ancestors, and they are available to study rather than to compete with. Find out who your work descends from, take what you need with the credit attached, and let the arrangement be the part that belongs to you.
Sources & References
- Kleon, A. (2012). Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative. Workman Publishing.
- Kleon, A. (2014). Show Your Work!. Workman Publishing.
- Gilbert, E. (2015). Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. Riverhead Books.
- Pressfield, S. (2002). The War of Art. Rugged Land.
- Steiner, R. (1894). The Philosophy of Freedom (GA 4), chapter 12, Moral Imagination. Rudolf Steiner Press.
- Steiner, R. Goethean Science (GA 1), on his own relationship to Goethe as a source. Rudolf Steiner Press.
- Creative Field Notes. Book review: Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon. creativefieldnotes.com.
- YourStory. Book review: Steal Like an Artist. yourstory.com.