The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad by Austin Kleon

Austin Kleon’s Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad (2019) completes the informal trilogy begun with Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work. Where the earlier volumes championed the playful theft of ideas and the vulnerability of artistic visibility, Keep Going emerges as the most meditative of Kleon’s works, written not from the exuberance of discovery but from the lived necessity of persistence. It is less a manifesto than a companion—an intimate handbook for navigating the fatigue, doubt, and monotony that inevitably accompany the creative life.

Stylistically, Kleon continues to employ his signature visual-literary collage: short aphoristic chapters, hand-lettered notes, blackout poems, and sketches punctuate the prose. This fragmentary structure reflects the book’s central conviction—that creativity flourishes in modest, daily increments rather than grand epiphanies. In its mosaic form, the book enacts what it prescribes: a discipline of assembling the small and ordinary into a coherent, sustaining rhythm.

Thematically, Keep Going resonates with a long philosophical tradition. Kleon’s insistence on routine, for instance, recalls Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations or Thoreau’s repetitive observations at Walden Pond—texts that tether the human spirit to cycles of nature and habit. His rejection of the cult of productivity in favour of “the art of going easy” aligns him with the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, embracing imperfection and impermanence as generative conditions. At the same time, his pragmatic encouragement to “make gifts” and “walk away” converses with modern anxieties about burnout, echoing both contemporary psychological research on resilience and the perennial wisdom of artists who endured long seasons of obscurity.

What makes Keep Going particularly relevant is its refusal to romanticize creativity as an ecstatic, unbroken state. Kleon instead foregrounds its ordinariness. By likening the creative process to a daily walk, he democratizes artistic practice, suggesting that anyone—writer, painter, parent, teacher—can cultivate a life of making if they commit to the humble discipline of showing up. This ethos situates the book within a larger cultural pushback against hustle culture, offering a vision of artistry that is sustainable, humane, and deeply relational.

Critically, the book’s brevity and accessibility may strike some readers as lacking depth. Kleon resists academic theorization, choosing instead to curate quotations, anecdotes, and practical wisdom. Yet this is also his strength: he is less a theorist than a curator of voices, weaving together artists, poets, and philosophers into a polyphonic chorus. In this sense, Keep Going is not meant to be definitive but catalytic—a spark to keep the reader’s own creative fire alive.

In sum, Keep Going is a modest but resonant text, one that speaks with the clarity of a friend rather than the authority of a critic. It reminds us that creativity is not a linear ascent toward mastery but a cyclical practice of renewal. Its wisdom lies not in its originality but in its quiet insistence that the way forward is, paradoxically, to return—to the page, the canvas, the garden, the walk.