Austin Kleon's Keep Going and the Imagination Facet (O1)
Austin Kleon wrote Keep Going for the part of a creative life that the success stories skip: not how to start, but how to not stop when the work stops being exciting. His fix for people frozen by the size of their ambitions is a shift from identity to action, put plainly on the book's own page: "Forget the noun, do the verb." Stop trying to be a writer and just write today. The inner life all of that is meant to protect is, in the Big Five, one facet.
A vivid inner world is the Imagination facet
That facet is Imagination (O1), under Openness, the richness of your inner world and the ease with which your mind wanders, invents, and daydreams. Kleon's whole book assumes a person with something creative that wants out and keeps getting talked down by doubt, which is O1 looking for a daily channel. A high scorer has plenty of raw material and mostly needs a way to keep showing up for it. A low scorer, more anchored to the concrete and less pulled toward invention, may find the deeper problem is not persistence but a well that fills more slowly to begin with.
The reason "do the verb" works is that imagination is fed by use, not by waiting for the mood, so a small daily action keeps the inner world in motion where a grand identity just adds pressure. A vivid mind still goes quiet under a deadline and a fear of being bad at the thing, and the verb is what carries it across the dry stretch. For a high-O1 reader that is the real gift of the book, permission to make something ordinary today instead of something worthy of the noun you are trying to earn. The imagination does not need to be impressive. It needs to be kept running.
Read your O1 to know what Keep Going is protecting. If it runs high, the book is guarding a resource you already have in abundance, and the daily verb is mostly a way to keep the tap from rusting shut during the flat weeks. If it runs low, the more useful question is whether the creative work is one you actually want or one you feel you should want, since the machinery of staying at it only pays off when there is a live inner world on the other end of it. The noun is a trap that waits for you to feel ready. The verb is available this afternoon.
Read the book: Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad by Austin Kleon.
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Research Citations
Kleon, A. (2019). Keep going: 10 ways to stay creative in good times and bad. Workman Publishing.
Kaufman, S. B., Quilty, L. C., Grazioplene, R. G., Hirsh, J. B., Gray, J. R., Peterson, J. B., & DeYoung, C. G. (2016). Openness to experience and intellect differentially predict creative achievement in the arts and sciences. Journal of Personality, 84(2), 248-258.
Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78-89.
Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) professional manual. Psychological Assessment Resources.