Kleon says you have a genealogy of ideas just like a family tree. "Chew on one thinker you really love. Find three people that thinker loved. Repeat."
Add influences. Click them to connect. YOU is at the center — drag nodes to arrange.
Click two nodes to draw a connection between them. Drag to rearrange.
Kleon's sharpest contribution: a clear framework for creative ethics. Click each pair to see examples.
Nobody starts original. You start by copying, move to imitating, then emulating, and finally find your own voice — through the failure to perfectly copy your heroes.
Each comedian tried to be the previous one, failed, and became themselves:
Drag the marker to see what each stage feels like:
"Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas." Click the slots to randomize, then see what impossible combination emerges.
"Limitations mean freedom." Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham with only 50 unique words. Try writing under constraints — you'll surprise yourself.
"The computer brings out the uptight perfectionist in us — we start editing ideas before we have them." Kleon keeps two workstations: one analog, one digital.
Ideas flow back and forth. Click each step to see what happens there:
"Keep track of the stuff you've swiped from others." Click cards to collect them into your personal swipe file. Kleon says: "Your morgue file is where you keep the dead things that you'll later reanimate in your work."
Jerry Seinfeld's productivity method: do the work every day and mark an X. "Your only job next is to not break the chain." Click days to mark them.
This book is likeable but lightweight. It's Instagram wisdom before Instagram wisdom was a genre. The ideas are real — influence genealogy, constraint-as-liberation, process-over-product — but none are developed past the aphorism stage.
Kleon spends 2 pages on "use your hands" where Papert spends 20 on the epistemology of turtle geometry. The book says in 150 pages what could be (and originally was) a blog post turned into a talk at Broome Community College.
But here's the thing: it works as a gateway. Someone reads this at 19, gets fired up, and eventually finds the deeper books. The Good Theft / Bad Theft framework is genuinely useful as a creative ethics checklist. And "our failure to copy our heroes is where we discover where our own thing lives" is a legitimately beautiful sentence.
The influence genealogy idea — that you actively choose your creative ancestors the way you can't choose your biological ones — is the book's most fertile concept. It reframes "originality anxiety" as something productive: you're not stealing, you're building a family tree.
If you've read widely in creativity, design, or education, you already know everything in this book. It's a well-designed sampler plate of ideas that exist in much richer form elsewhere.
But Kleon would probably be fine with that assessment. After all — he's the one who said nothing is original.