I came to Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist through a side door. A friend in Vienna who works in graphic design had recommended it, and I initially thought it had nothing to do with magic. It is a book about creativity in general — about how ideas are born, how influence works, and why no creative work is truly original. But when I read it, I realized Kleon was describing the exact process I had been living through since I first picked up a deck of cards in a hotel room years ago.
The core idea is deceptively simple: every new idea is a mashup or remix of previous ideas. All creative work builds on what came before. The artist’s job is not to create from nothing but to collect good ideas and combine them in new ways.
When I read that, I thought: this is the history of magic in a single sentence.
The Genealogy of Ideas
Kleon talks about the “genealogy of ideas” — the concept that every artist has a family tree of influences. You are the sum of the people who inspired you. And those people were the sum of the people who inspired them. If you trace the lineage far enough, you find that every creative act is connected to every other creative act through an unbroken chain of influence.
In magic, this chain is more visible than in almost any other art form. The cups and balls can be traced back to at least Seneca in ancient Rome, and possibly to the wall paintings at Beni Hassan in Egypt around 1900 BC. Every cups and balls performer alive today — from the street busker to the world-class stage performer — is performing a variation of an effect that has been passed down through literally thousands of years of human history.
But it goes further than that. Every card move, every mentalism technique, every stage illusion has a lineage. When I started learning card magic from online tutorials at ellusionist.com, I was learning moves that had been developed, refined, passed down, and reinvented by generations of performers before me. The person who taught the tutorial learned from someone who learned from someone who may have learned from Dai Vernon, who learned from watching the anonymous card cheats of early twentieth-century New York, who learned from the gamblers of the Mississippi riverboats, who learned from the card sharps of European gaming houses.
I was the latest node in a network of creative influence that stretched back centuries. I just did not know it yet.
Climbing Your Creative Family Tree
Kleon’s practical advice is this: study your heroes. Then study your heroes’ heroes. Then study their heroes. Climb the family tree. Go deep into the lineage. You will eventually find yourself in the gaps between your influences.
I took this advice literally. When I got serious about magic, I did not just learn effects. I studied the people behind the effects. I read about Robert-Houdin, the father of modern magic, who transformed conjuring from street performance into theater. I read about Houdini, who built a brand so powerful that his name became synonymous with magic itself. I studied Dai Vernon, the Professor, who spent a lifetime perfecting moves that lasted seconds. I watched David Blaine, who took everything the magic establishment believed about presentation and threw it out the window.
But I did not stop with magicians. Because my influences were not only magicians. I came to magic from strategy consulting. My creative family tree includes business thinkers, keynote speakers, writers, musicians, and people who have nothing to do with performance. When I started building presentations for my mentalism routines, I drew on frameworks from my consulting work. When I started thinking about audience psychology, I drew on behavioral economics and decision science — fields I had studied in a completely different context.
Kleon would say this is exactly how it should work. The most interesting creative work happens at the intersections between different fields. The person who steals from only one source is a plagiarist. The person who steals from many is a researcher. And the person who steals from many different fields — not just within their own discipline — creates something genuinely new.
The Swipe File
One of the most practical ideas in the book is the concept of the “swipe file” or “morgue file” — a systematic collection of things that inspire you. Not things you plan to copy, but things that catch your attention, make you think, provoke a reaction. Images, quotes, ideas, experiences, moments from other people’s performances, fragments of music, interesting objects, unusual stories.
I started keeping a swipe file for magic about three years into my journey, and I wish I had started from day one.
Mine is a combination of a digital notes folder on my phone and a physical notebook that travels with me. When I see a performer do something that makes me react — not just the magic, but a way of moving, a timing choice, a line of dialogue, a way of handling a volunteer — I write it down. When I read something in a book that connects to performance in a way I had not considered, I capture it. When I have a conversation at a conference in Salzburg or a dinner in Graz and someone says something that triggers an idea for a routine, I put it in the file.
The swipe file is not a to-do list. It is a garden. You plant things and let them grow. Most of them never turn into anything. But every few months, I flip through the file and two or three unrelated entries suddenly connect. A quote from Darwin Ortiz about the audience’s search for causal connections meets a personal story about losing my keys in a hotel room meets a technique I learned from watching a street performer in Vienna — and suddenly I have the seed of something new.
This is what Kleon means when he talks about creativity as recombination. You are not creating from nothing. You are creating from everything you have collected, experienced, and absorbed. The quality of your creative output depends directly on the quality of your creative input. Garbage in, garbage out. Interesting things in, interesting things out.
Imitation as Gateway
Kleon makes a point that I think is essential for anyone learning magic: start by copying. Not to pass off someone else’s work as your own, but to learn how they work. Through the act of copying, you discover what you cannot copy — and that gap is where your own voice lives.
This was my exact experience. When I first started performing, I copied everything. I copied the scripts I had seen in tutorials. I copied the hand positions. I even copied the tone of voice. I was performing other people’s magic, using other people’s words, presenting other people’s ideas.
And that was fine. That was necessary. Because I did not yet have my own voice. I did not yet know who I was as a performer. And the only way to find out was to try on other people’s voices until I discovered what did not fit.
The things that did not fit were the most valuable discoveries. The lines that felt wrong in my mouth. The presentational choices that contradicted my personality. The effects that worked for other performers but felt hollow when I did them. Each of those mismatches pointed me toward something genuine about my own performing identity.
Eventually, the borrowed elements fell away one by one. What remained was mine — not because I invented it from scratch, but because I had filtered hundreds of influences through my own personality, my own experience, my own perspective as an adult who came to magic from a completely different world. The remix was original because the specific combination of influences was unique to me.
Good Theft vs. Bad Theft
Kleon draws a crucial distinction between good theft and bad theft. Good theft honors the source, studies deeply, steals from many, credits openly, transforms the material, and remixes it into something new. Bad theft degrades the source, skims the surface, steals from one, plagiarizes, imitates without understanding, and rips off.
In magic, this distinction is particularly important because the community has strong norms about intellectual property. You do not perform someone else’s original effect without permission. You do not present someone else’s script as your own. You do not buy a trick and then teach it to others.
But you absolutely do learn from everyone. You absorb influences. You study techniques and principles and presentational approaches. You take a concept from one performer, a structural idea from another, a timing lesson from a third, and combine them with your own experience to create something that serves your audience in a way none of the originals could.
When Adam and I started Vulpine Creations, one of the first conversations we had was about this exact principle. Every product we design is influenced by what came before. Every effect we create exists within a tradition. The question is never whether to be influenced — that is inevitable and desirable — but whether to handle those influences with respect, understanding, and genuine creative transformation.
The Gap Between Your Influences
I want to return to Kleon’s most profound insight: you find yourself in the gaps between your influences.
For me, the gap looks like this. I am influenced by Derren Brown’s psychological approach to mentalism, but I do not share his background in suggestion and hypnosis. I am influenced by David Blaine’s stripped-down authenticity, but I perform in corporate environments where that raw street style does not translate directly. I am influenced by Darwin Ortiz’s analytical rigor about effect design, but I come from a business strategy background, not a card magic background. I am influenced by Pete McCabe’s emphasis on scripting, but my performance context is keynote speaking where magic and ideas interweave.
No one else has exactly that combination of influences. No one else approaches magic from exactly the intersection of strategy consulting, Austrian corporate culture, adult-learner perspective, and a partnership with Adam Wilber. That intersection is where my voice lives. Not because I invented any of the individual elements, but because the specific combination has never existed before.
Chase Every Reference
One more practical principle from Kleon that has served me enormously: chase every reference. When you encounter something that interests you, do not stop at the surface. Follow the footnotes. Read the bibliography. Watch the recommended videos. Go deeper than anyone else on the topics that interest you.
In magic, this means reading the books that your favorite performers read. Studying the theorists behind the techniques. Going beyond “how to do this trick” to “why does this trick work on a psychological level.” When I first encountered Darwin Ortiz’s work, I did not just read the design principles. I followed his references to cognitive psychology, to Jean Piaget’s work on causal reasoning, to the perceptual research that underpins misdirection theory. When I read Joshua Jay, I followed his references to Juan Tamariz, to Arturo de Ascanio, to the Spanish school of magic theory.
Each rabbit hole led to another. Each reference opened a door. And the cumulative effect of all that chasing was a depth of understanding that no single source could have provided. I became, as Kleon would say, a remix of all those inputs — with my own personality as the mixing board.
The Ongoing Remix
T.S. Eliot wrote: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” Kleon built his entire philosophy around that distinction. To steal, in this sense, is not to take something and claim it as your own. It is to absorb it so deeply that it becomes part of you, transformed by passing through your experience and perspective, emerging as something that belongs to you because you have made it yours.
After eight hundred posts on this blog, after years of studying these books and applying their ideas to my own work, I can say that the remix never stops. Every performance is a new combination. Every conversation with Adam about a new product is a new synthesis. Every keynote I give is a fresh arrangement of ideas I have collected from dozens of sources, filtered through my own story, and offered to an audience that has never heard them in quite this combination before.
You are a remix of your influences. The question is not whether to steal. It is whether to steal well.