Whenever I happen to exhibit some of my pieces publicly, there will always be some people who have the courage to come up to me and ask some questions. One of the most frequent questions I am asked is “Where does this all come from? How did you get the idea?”. And my answer is probably as shocking to them as it is to you – with the words of this post’s inspiration source Austin Kleon, I say: “I steal them.” And I don’t say that in an embarrassed, blushing way, I say it with full proudness and conviction.

If you haven’t read Austin’s “Steal like an Artist”, there is clearly not any book that I’ve read in the last few years that I can recommend more. It is a dense, yet lightly readable collective of principles and ideas that fundamentally changed the way I looked at my art and perceived those of others. Without spoiling too much, I want to give you a short insight into the basic principle underlying the book, so that you can profit from it as much as I did. If you happen to be interested in reading the whole book, I will have a link to it at the end of this article.

I am more than happy to break it to you: almost nothing is original. And this doesn’t only account for the crappy pop remixes of old classics that flooded the music charts in the last years. When people call something original, in ninety percent of the case they just don’t know the original sources or references that contributed into making it, says the American novelist Jonathan Lethem.

This has to do with the very fundamental genealogy of ideas. As simple as it sounds, but nothing comes from nowhere. Take any creative work in any creative field, every piece builds on what came before. A new idea is rather a mashup of a bunch of previous ideas. It’s the same for the genetics of your mother and father that got their attributes rearranged into something that is a bigger sum that its portions, the completely new you. Now we can’t choose our parents, but you can certainly pick on whatever you will let into your life. Your friends, your music, your teachers and idols, the movies you see, the places you visit – it will all form your influences, that will ultimately determine the outlook of your art.

So rather than fishing for an inspiration out of nowhere, a good artist should use his understanding of the idea process to reframe his vision of the world. Free yourself from this burden of originality, and embrace the influence of things, however depressing this may sound. French literature novel price winner André Gide once put it that way: “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”

Figure out what is worth stealing and where to better move on, that is the real question. Stop worrying on good or bad, go for “worth stealing” and “not worth stealing”. Be curious about the world in which you live. Read books. Research stuff, google the sh*t out of it. Google all of your dreams, problems. You’ll either find the answer or you’ll come uo with a better question.