Illustrated Booknotes - The Art of Asking

There’s a difference between wanting to be looked at and wanting to be seen.

When you are looked at, your eyes can be closed. You suck energy, you steal the spotlight. When you are seen, your eyes must be open, and you are seeing and recognizing your witness. You accept energy and you generate energy. You create light.

One is exhibitionism, the other is connection.

Not everybody wants to be looked at.

Everybody wants to be seen.

From what I've seen, it isn't so much the act of asking that paralyzes us--it's what lies beneath: the fear of being vulnerable, the fear of rejection, the fear of looking needy or weak. The fear of being seen as a burdensome member of the community instead of a productive one.

It points, fundamentally, to our separation from one another.

There's really no honor in proving that you can carry the entire load on your own shoulders. And...it's lonely

There's really no honor in proving that you can carry the entire load on your own shoulders. And...it's lonely

A farmer is sitting on his porch in a chair, hanging out.

A friend walks up to the porch to say hello, and hears an awful yelping, squealing sound coming from inside the house.

"What's that terrifyin' sound?" asks the friend.

"It's my dog," said the farmer. "He's sittin' on a nail."

"Why doesn't he just sit up and get off it?" asks the friend.

The farmer deliberates on this and replies:

"Doesn't hurt enough yet.

American culture in particular has instilled in us the bizarre notion that to ask for help amounts to an admission of failure. But some of the most powerful, successful, admired people in the world seem, to me, to have something in common: they ask constantly, creatively, compassionately, and gracefully. And to be sure: when you ask, there’s always the possibility of a no on the other side of the request. If we don’t allow for that no, we’re not actually asking, we’re either begging or demanding. But it is the fear of the no that keeps so many of our mouths sewn tightly shut.

Collecting the dots. Then connecting them. And then sharing the connections with those around you. This is how a creative human works. Collecting, connecting, sharing.

You can’t ask authentically and gracefully without truly being able to accept “No” for an answer. Because if you’re not truly willing to accept “No” for an answer, you’re not really asking, you’re demanding — you’re begging. At least, that’s how I’ve come to understand asking.

You can’t ever give people what they want. But you can give them something else. You can give them empathy. You can give them understanding. And that’s a lot, and enough to give.

Brené Brown writes: In a 2011 study funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, researchers found that, as far as the brain is concerned, physical pain and intense experiences of social rejection hurt in the same way…Neuroscience advances confirm what we’ve known all along: emotions can hurt and cause pain. And just as we often struggle to define physical pain, describing emotional pain is difficult. Shame is particularly hard because it hates having words wrapped around it. It hates being spoken.

It was essential to feel thankful for the few who stopped to watch or listen, instead of wasting energy on resenting the majority who passed me by.

I boarded the plane and kept writing, unable to stop. the ink flowing to the blank pages to the book were my lifeline. My IV, my only escape from collapsing. In that moment I understood something about my writer husband, that i had never understood before: i had a small glimpse on the act of writing something down as a direct, very viable escape from pain. I had no desire to publish this writing, I wasn´t thinking about an audience. I just needed to do it. Or else I´d weep and not being able to stop weeping. For the first time I experienced the physical truth of what was it like to dwell in the act of creation as an escape hatch from an unbearable reality.

Illustrated Booknotes - Ultralearning

Every month I put together a series of Illustrated Booknotes on books that I’ve read and are useful to me.

This month we’re looking at Ultralearning by Scott H. Young, how you can master hard skills, outsmart the competition, and accelerate your career.

From the foreword by James Clear

He has a bias toward action

He isn’t focused on simply soaking up knowledge. He is committed to putting that knowledge to use. Approaching learning with an intensity and commitment to action is a hallmark of Scott’s process.

Directness is the practice of learning by directly doing the thing you want to learn. Basically, it’s improvement through active practice rather than through passive learning. The phrases learning something new and practicing something new may seem similar, but these two methods can produce profoundly different results.

Passive learning creates knowledge. Active practice creates skill.

Finally, deep learning is possible. Paul Graham, the famous entrepreneur and investor, once noted, “In many fields a year of focused work plus caring a lot would be enough.”

Similarly, I think most people would be surprised by what they could accomplish with a year (or a few months) of focused learning. The process of intense self-directed learning can fashion skills you never though you could develop.

Start speaking the very first day.

*with any of these concepts, think how could this apply to me? You may not want to learn a language, but how could you start doing XXXXX on the very first day?

Don’t be afraid to talk to strangers. Use a phrase book to get started; save formal study for later. Use visual mnemonics to memorise vocabulary.

What struck me were not the methods but the boldness with which he applied them.

Lewis was fearless, diving straight into conversations and setting seemingly impossible challenges for himself.

Aggressive self-education

“I wanted the colours to pop.” So he researched colour theory and intensively studied other artists to see how they used colours to make things visually interesting.

Eric Barone - video game builder

Because this project was my own vision and design, it rarely felt painful, even if it was often challenging. The subjects felt alive and exciting, rather than stale chores to be completed. For the first time ever, I felt I could learn anything I wanted to with the right plan and effort. The possibilities were endless, and my mind was already turning toward learning something new.

My goal for the project wasn’t to get a job but to see what was possible.

How much better could I be if I held nothing back and optimized everything around learning a new language as intensely and effectively as possible?

What if, instead of just hoping you’d practice enough, you don’t give yourself an escape route?

I had enjoyed drawing as a kid, but like most people’s attempts, any faces I drew looked awkward and artificial. I had always admired people who could quickly sketch a likeness whether it be street-side caricaturists to professional portrait painters. I wondered if the same approach to learning MIT classes and languages could also apply to art.

I decided to spend a month improving my ability to draw faces. My main difficulty, I realised, was in placing the final features properly. A common mistake when drawing faces, for instance, is putting the eyes too far up the head. Most people think the sit in the top two-thirds of the head. In truth, they’re more typically halfway between the top of the head and the chin. To overcome these ad other biases, I did sketches based on pictures. Then I would take a phot of the sketch with my phone and overlay the original image on top of my drawing. Making the photo semi transparent allowed me to see immediately whether the lead was too narrow or wide, the lips too low or too high or whether I had put the eyes in the right spot. I did this hundreds of times, employing the same rapid feedback strategies that had served me well with MIT classes. Applying this and others strategies, I was able to get a lot better at drawing portraits in a short period of time.

Ultratlearners had a lot of spread traits. They usually worked alone, often toiling for months and years without much more than a blog entry to announce their efforts. Their interested tended toward obsession. They were aggressive about optimising their strategies, fiercely debating the merits of esoteric concepts such as interleaving practice, leech thresholds, or keyword mnemonics. Above all, they cared about learning. Their motivation to learn pushed them to tackle intense projects, even if it often came at the sacrifice of credentials or conformity.

What if you could create a project to quickly learn the skills to transition to a new role, project, or even profession? What if you could master an important skill for your work? What if you could be knowledgable about a wide variety of topics?

What if you could become good at something that seems impossible to you right now?

Ultralearning isn’t easy. It’s hard and frustrating and requires stretching outside the limits of where you feel comfortable. However, the thins you can accomplish make it worth the effort.

Chapter 2 - Why Ultralearning Matters

Ultralearning: A strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge that is both self-drenched and intense.

Ultralearning is intense. All of the ultralearners I met took unusual steps to maximise their effectiveness in learning. Fearlessly attempting to speak a new language you’ve started to practice, systemically drilling tens of thousands of trivia questions, and iterating through are again and again until it is perfect is hard mental work. It can feel as though your mind is at its limit..

An intense method might also produce a pleasurable state of flow, in which the experience of challenge absorbs your focus and you lose track of time. However, with Ultralearning, deeply and effectively learning things is always the main priority.

How many of us have dreams of playing an instrument, speaking a foreign language, becoming a chef, writer or photographer? Your deepest moments of happiness don’t come from doing easy things; they come from realising your potential and overcoming your own limiting beliefs about yourself. Ultralearning offers a path to master those things that will bring you deep satisfaction and self-confidence.

“Average is over” - Tyler Cowen- economist

Because of increased computerisation, automation, outsourcing, and regionalisation, we are increasingly living in a world in which the top performers do a lot better than the rest.

If you can master the personal tools to learn new skills quickly and effectively, you can compete more successfully in this new environment. That the economic landscape is changing may not be a choice any of us has control over, but we can engineer out response to it by aggressively learning the hard skills we need to thrive.

Technology exaggerates both the vices and the virtues of humanity. Our vices are made worse because now that are downloadable, portable, and socially transmissible. The ability to distract or delude yourself has never been greater, and as a result we are facing a crisis of both privacy and politics..

Spaced repetition

By choosing a valuable skill and focusing on quickly developing proficient, you can accelerate your normal career progression.

Ultralearning is a potent skill for dealing with a changing world. The ability to learn hard things quickly is going to become increasingly valuable, and this it is worth developing to whatever extent you can, even if it requires some investment first.

Learning, at its core, is a broadening of horizons, of seeing things that were previously invisible and of recognising capabilities within yourself that you didn’t know existed. I see no higher justification for pursuing the intense and devoted efforts of the ultralearners than this expansion of what is possible. What could you learn if you took the right approach to make it successful?

Who could you become?

The core of the ultralearning strategy is intensity and a willingness to prioritize effectiveness.

What matters is the intensity, initiative, and commitment to effective learning, not the particulars of your timetable.

The ability to acquire hard skills effectively and efficiently is immensely valuable.

Public speaking is a metaskill. It’s the kind of skills that assist with other skills: confidence, storytelling, writing, creativity, interviewing skills, selling skills. It touches on so many different things.

Once, when faced with the choice between polishing an existing speech and creating a brand-new one from scratch, de Montebello asked what he should do. Gendler’s response was to do whichever was scariest for him.

Another friend with a background in theater gave him tips on stage presence. He took do Montebello through his speech and showed how each word and sentence indicated movement that could be translated to where he moved on the stage.

Make me care.

What differentiated de Montebello wasn’t that he though he could go from near-zero experience to the finalist for the World Championship in six months. Rather, it was his obsessive work ethic. His goal wasn’t to reach some predetermined extreme but to see how far he could go.

Ultralearning in my view, works best when you see it through a simple set of principles, rather than trying to copy and paste exact steps or protocols.

Aggressively paced coding boot camps can get participants up to a level where they can compete for jobs much faster than those with a normal undergraduate degree.

Over the long term, the more ultralearning projects you do, the larger your set of general metalearning skills will be. You’ll know what your capacity is for learning, how you can best schedule your time and manage your motivation, and you’ll have well-tested strategies for dealing with common problems. As you learn more things, you’ll acquired more and more confidence, which will allow you to enjoy the process of learning more with less frustration.

Determining why, what, and how

I find it useful to break down metalearning research that you do for a specific project into three questions: “Why?” “What?,” and “How?” Refers to understanding your motivation to learn. If you know exactly why you want to learn a skill or subject, you can save a lot of time by focusing your project on exactly what matters most to you. “What?” Refers to the knowledge and abilities you’ll need to acquire in order to be successful. Breaking things down into concepts, facts, and procedures can enable you to map out what obstacles you’ll face and how best to overcome them. “How?” Refers to the resources, environment, and methods you’l use when learning. Making careful choices here can make a big difference in your overall effectiveness.

Why?

The first question you try to answer us why you are learning and what that implies for how you should approach the project. Practically speaking, the projects you take on are going to have one of two broad motivations: instrumental and intrinsic.

What?

Once you’ve gotten a handle on why you’re learning, you can start looking at how the knowledge in your subject is structured. A good way to do this is to write down on a sheet of paper three columns with the headings “Concepts,” Facts,” and “Procedures.” Then brainstorm all the things you’ll need to learn.

Concepts are ideas that you need to understand in flexible ways in order for them to be useful.

Facts are anything that suffices if you can remember them at all.

Procedures are actions that need to be performed and may no involve much conscious thinking at all.

Once you’ve finished your brainstorm, underline the concepts, facts, and procedures that are going to be most challenging. This will give you a good idea what the major learning bottlenecks are going to be and can start you searching for methods and resources to overcome those difficulties.

When I started my portrait-drawing challenge, for instance, I knew that success would depend highly on how accurately I could size and place facial features. Most people can’t draw realistic faces because if those attributes are off even slightly (such as making a face too wide or the eyes too high), they will instantly look wrong to your sophisticated ability to recognise faces. Therefore, I got the idea of doing lots and lots of sketches and comparing them by overlaying the reference photos. That way I could quickly diagnose what kinds of errors I was making without having to guess. If you can’t make these kinds of predictions and come up with these kinds of strategies just. Yet, don’t worry. This is the kind of long-term benefit of metalearning that comes from having done more projects.

Benchmarking

The way to start any learning project is by finding the common ways in which people learn the skill or subject.

The quality of materials you use can create orders-of-magnitude differences in your effectiveness. Even if you’re eager to start learning right away, investing a few hours now can save you dozens or hundreds later on.

The 10 percent rule

You should invest approximately 10 percent of your total expected learning time into research prior to starting.

The best research, resources, and strategies are useless unless you follow up with concentrated efforts to learn.

Focus

In the realm of great intellectual accomplishments an ability to focus quickly and deeply is nearly ubiquitous.

The struggles with focus that people have generally come in three broad varieties: starting, sustaining, and optimising the quality of one’s focus. Ultralearners are relentless in coming up with solutions to handle these three problems, which form the basis of an ability to focus well and learn deeply.

Failing to start focusing - procrastination

The first problem that many people have is starting to focus. The most obvious way this manifest itself is when you procrastinate: instead of doing the thing you’re supposed to, you work on something else or slack off. For some people, procrastination is the constant state of their lives, running away from one task to another until deadlines force them to focus and then having to struggle to get the job done on time.

*I need to have tighter deadlines and the accountability to back them up.

Much procrastination I’d unconscious. You’re procrastinating, but you don’t internalise it that way. Instead you’re “taking a much-needed break” or “having fun, because life can’t always be about work all the time.” The problem isn’t those beliefs. The problem is when they’re used to cover up the actual behaviour. - you don’t want to do the thing you need to be focusing on, either because you are directly averse to doing it or because there’s something else you want to do more. Recognising that you’re procrastinating is the first step in avoiding it.

Make a mental habit of every time you procrastinate; try to recognize that you are feeling some desire not to do that task or a stronger desire to do something else. You might even want to ask yourself which feeling is more powerful in that moment - is the problem more that you have a strong urge to do a different activity (e.g., eat something, check your phone, take a nap) or that you have a strong urge to avoid the thing you should be doing because you imagine it will be uncomfortable, painful, or frustrating? This awareness is necessary for progress to be made, so if you feel as though procrastination is a weakness of yours, make building this awareness your first priority before you try to fix the problem.

A first crutch comes from recognizing that most of what is unpleasant in a task (if you are averse to it) or what is pleasant about an alternative task (if you’re drawn to distraction) is an impulse that doesn’t actually last that long. If you actually start working or ignore. A potent distractor, it usually only takes a couple minutes until the worry starts to dissolve, even for fairly unpleasant tasks. Therefore, a good first crutch is to convince yourself to get over just the few minutes of maximal unpleasantness before you take a break. Telling yourself that you need to spend only five minutes on the task before you can stop and do something else is often enough to get you started. After all, almost anyone can endure five minutes of anything, no matter how boring, frustrating, or difficult it may be. However once you start, you may end up continuing of longer without wanting to take the break.

If you find yourself setting a daily schedule with chunked hours and then frequently ignore it to do something else, go back to the start and try building back up again with the five-minute rule and then the Pomodoro Technique.

K. Anders Ericsson, the researcher behind deliberate practice, argues that flow has characteristics that are “inconsistent with the demands of deliberate practice for monitoring explicit goals and feedback and opportunities for error correction.

Fifty minutes to an hour is a good length of time for many learning tasks.

If I have difficult reading to do, I will often make an effort to jot down notes that reexplain hard concepts for me. I do this mostly because, while I’m writing, I’m less likely to enter into the state of reading hypnosis where I’m pantomiming the act of reading while my mind is actually elsewhere.

More intense strategies, whether solving problems, making something, or writing or explaining ideas aloud, are harder to do in the background of your mind, so there are fewer opportunities for distractions to creep in. ****apply this to my life!!!

A random worry about some future event might bubble up, let’s say, but you know you shouldn’t stop the activity you’re working on right now in order to deal with it. Here the solution is to acknowledge the feeling, be aware of it, and gently adjust your focus back to your task and allow the feeling to pass.

If you “learn to let it arise, note it, and lease it or let it go,” this can diminish the behaviour you’re trying to avoid.

Drawing ‘A High-Altitude Encounter’

Today I’m going to go through the steps involved in creating this cartoon..

I was looking at some pictures of goats having encounters with cougars and thought I’d try to draw something similar. However, after sketching a few ideas set on mountains, I thought I’d set the action a little higher than intended on top of a biplane.

1. The initial outline

After getting the idea, I started drawing it before I’d decided what the background would look like.

2. Adding the background outline

I thought a few simple lines would suffice for the mountainous backdrop.

3. Adding washes to the background

I used a digital water brush set at 20% opacity to build up the layers, making sure that the mountains are darker at the bottom, and also get progressively lighter

4. Colouring the characters

Or perhaps that should be ‘adding washes to the characters.’

5. Adding hatching and shading

I really like the effect of putting hatching on top of the shading. It really seems to increase the sense of depth.

6. The finished cartoon

What’s next

I put out a cartoon newsletter with a whole bunch of different characters and occasional cartooning tips. Add your name and mail to the orange box below and I’ll wing a copy your way.

Extreme Dish-Washing

Making your cartoons a bit more bizarre.

You may have heard of extreme ironing where people combine the the love of adventure sports with the desire for a freshly pressed shirt, but have you ever heard of extreme dish-washing, where folks combine daring with doing the dishes?

That certainly sounds a bit bizarre, and after looking at a few examples, we’ll look at some ways you can explore the wonderful world of the bizarre with your own cartoons.

Trans-Atlantic Scrubbing

Sally Squeegee took advantage of a trans-Atlantic crossing to do some dishes while helping to offset part of her fare. She was on the bring of setting a new mid-ocean pot cleaning record, when a passing porpoise pinched her washing-up sponge.

Desert Dish-washing Dashed

The Atacama desert in Chile has one of the lowest rainfalls in the world. Martin Gonzalez narrowly missed the annual rainfall due to over-sleeping, and this was unable to take advantage of this rare opportunity.

Waterfall Washing

Zara Azruddin ventured into the Alps to seek the purest water possible for her dishes.

High-Altitude Himalayan Household Chores

Pioneering aviatrix, Betty De Havilland and partner Chuck Flashley, were able to set a new record for the highiest alttude dish-washing when making a flight over the Himalayas in 1927.

So how can you apply this to your own cartoons?

Any subject can be made to be more bizarre. Ironing and dish-washing are both everyday activities made to be more unsual and amusing.

Let’s take a different activity, a business meeting and apply ‘thinking bizarre’ to it.

Here are a few questions.

• What is the most unusual location you can think up for the meeting?

• What bizarre characters could be attending the meeting. Think of different human personalities, animals, aliens etc.

• What strange topic could be the focus of the meeting?

• Anything else?

Over to you:

Now think of a topic of your own and apply some bizarre thinking to it. You can apply some of the above questions to it, or try to do an ‘extreme’ version of it.

What’s next?

I put out a Cartoon Newsletter, which contains a whole variety of characters, along with some bizarre events and occasional cartooning tips. Add your name and mail to the orange box below and I’ll wing a copy your way.

A Mindful Train Journey

How to reduce stress on the train

People often say that they don't have time to meditate, or not as much as they would like. this article gives some ideas on how to turn your commute into an opportunity to practice mindfulness and not just a drudge you have to put up with twice a day.

While you are waiting

As you are waiting for the train, gently bring your attention to your breath. When you breath in, notice where you first feel the in-breath - is it on the upper lip or the tip of your nose or your nostrils?

If you start wondering if the train is going to be late, or what might happen at work today, bring your attention back to the breath. Willing the train to appear won't make it arrive any faster and you can't control future events from a train platform, so just go back to the breath - the day will unfold without you thinking about it all the time.

Breath in for a count of four and then out for a count of six. After a couple of minutes of this your breath will have slowly come down to six breaths a minute, about half as slow as an average persons rate.

This will naturally make you feel calmer, very useful if you are about to step onto a busy rush-hour train, often the mere thought of which can make some  people start to feel a bit more anxious. Keep attention on the breath and keep breathing in this way until the train pulls up in front of you. As as you've found your place on the train, whether sitting or standing, resume the 4/6 breathing pattern.

Jostle…jostle…

4/6 breathing can help you even in the middle of a crowded train car or a busy station. It actually calms you in two ways: 1. the effect on your body as mentioned above. 2. By putting your attention on the counting 1..2..3..4......1..2..3..4..5..6.. and the sensations of breath, you are making it more difficult for your mind to wander off onto thoughts about the busy train, the day ahead or anything else that is outside of your control that might be bothering you.

Mind the gap

Simply concentrate on your breath in 1..2..3..4........out 1..2..3..4..5..6.. (repeat) for the duration of one journey between stations. Simply concentrate and late the train do the timing for you.

Use the gaps between stations as a natural timing mechanism. Take a brief break when the train reachers the next station. This way it breaks up the journey into easily bite-size pieces, rather than trying to be mindful for the entire journey.

You can even use the ‘train timing’ to practice other things such as a body scan . You can also use it when studying to break down whatever it is you are trying to learn into smaller ‘between stop’ chunks.

When you reach the end of your journey try to keep part of your attention on your breathing as much as possible. Also, use 4/6 breathing throughout the day when you feel the need to be a little calmer.

What’s next?

I have a cartoon newsletter that I put out everyday. There’s a whole host of characters, as well as occasional tips on cartooning and mindfulness. Add your name and mail to the orange box below and I’ll wing a copy your way.

Three Ways Your Commute Can Help You To Draw More

Usuallly travelling on a commuter train in Tokyo is a quiet affair, with most folks still waking up, having a quick snooze, or burying their heads in their phones. However, one day there was a major commotion break out when a guinea pig, that someone had put in a carrier up on the rack, managed to break out and make a dash for freedom. It’s liberty was short-lived as one brave commuter managed to catch it as it plummeted off the end of the rack, and it was soon back in prison.

A lot of commuters feel that their morning or evening train as a bit of a prison, and that the journey is dead-time that they’d rather not go through. We’re going to instead look at how the morning or evening commute can transform into a creative opportunity.

What we're going cover is:

• Use the deadtime to draw

• Your journey is a natural timer

• Use the routine of your commute to establish a drawing habit

Using dead-time to draw

We often regard commuting time as deadtime. It’s time when life is not really happening, when we’d rather not be there and be doing something else instead.

Some of us might read, We frequently spend the journey on social media which we know isn’t good for us, or playing games that don’t mean much.

Instead we could bring this so-called deadtime to life with a little art and creativity. Instead of the commute being something with have to endure, we could actually get to look forward to it as it gives us the time and space to work on our drawing.

Your journey is a natural timer

Your journey acts as a natural timer in several ways.

The length of the journey itself. The journey from home to work becomes your drawing time.

The journey between stops. The gaps between stations acts as a mini-timer, and it can actually help turn it into a bit of a game as you try to complete a section of drawing before you reach the next station.

Drawing while stopped. For more complex pieces of drawing where you require a steadier hand, you can also try doing as much as you can while the train is halting at a station.

Using the routine of your commute to establish a drawing habit

Establishing a new habit is not an easy thing to do. It becomes easier if you can connect it to part of your everyday routine without thinking about it.

As you do your daily commute automatically, if you connect your drawing practice to travel time, then you are guaranteed to get some drawing done.

Establishes a drawing habit connected to your existing everyday routine.

In short: You get on the train, you draw.

But I don’t only want to draw on the train!

You don’t have. This is merely a way to get some daily drawing in.

The train moves about too much.

I realize that it’s less than ideal conditions. The point is that it’s better to get some drawing done regardless of the circumstances rather than to do nothing at all. If you establish the regular habit of drawing on the train, then you’re more likely to draw at other times as well.

In Singapore, there’s a group called Commute Sketchers who share their drawings online, and have even had an exhibition sponsored by the Singapore MRT transport system. Full-time artist Alvin Mark Tan, said that the group’s art allows people to see their mundane, daily commutes in a different light.

Here’s what we covered:

• Use the deadtime to draw

• Your journey is a natural timer

• Use the routine of your commute to establish a drawing habit

So far I haven’t witnessed any more animal escapades on trains, although I have seen quite a few animals brought onto the trains in carriers, including a fair number of rabbits...which made me think of foxes and is why I chose to have Fenix the Fox illustrate this article.

Next Step:

-In the next article we’ll look at how you can also improve your drawing on your commute.

How To Use A Ulysses Pact To Get More Drawing Done

Those Greek heroes became legendary for battling a variety of monsters, but sometimes it was a case of brain over brawn. One such example is Ulysses (also known as Odysseus).

Ulysses wanted to hear the beautiful voices of the sirens, dangerous creatures who used their enchanting voices to lure sailors onto the rocks surrounding their island.

Ulysses had his men’s ears blocked with wax, so they couldn’t steer the ship off it’s path, and for safe measure had himself tied to the mast. It worked, Ulysses and his crew steered past the dangerous damsels and was able to resist their allure.

Ulysses was smart enough to know that he couldn’t rely on will-power alone to resist temptation, and it that’s a good idea for a Greek hero, then maybe it’s a good idea for us too.

Here’s what we’re going to cover:

An Ulysses pact is a decision that you make now that binds you to do something in the future. In our heroes case, he took the precautionary measures of having himself tied up, and his men’s ears blocked with wax. No need for such drastic measures ourselves, however we will have a look at:

• Resisting using the phone

• Distractions when out and about

• Surfing the net

The phone

Switching off the phone sounds like a no-brainer. And is certainly a good idea idea. However, it’s even better if you put the phone out of sight so that you’re tempted to switch it on again. So many of our reactions/habits regarding our phones have become automatic that we can easily find ourselves picking it up, switching it on, and using it automatically.

Out and about

Maybe you find it difficult to find time to draw at home and instead try to get some done on your commute or in a coffee shop.

There can be even more distractions when you are out and about as the novelty factor is lot higher than at home.

So how you can avoid distractions when there are so many all around you?

One thing you can try is to have your drawing materials at hand so that you can reach for them easily. Next, set the intention that as soon as you sit on the train or at the table in the cafe, you will immediately draw for ten minutes.

Choose a short period of time, rather than set some heroic goal of drawing for an hour or completing a masterpiece. After ten minutes you may well find that you continue drawing anyway.

Resisting surfing

Maybe you’ve made a firm vow not to surf the web for the day/hour/next ten minutes, only to end up doing so, and then beat yourself up for having failed to stick to your intention.

Instead of this familiar pattern, try setting a specific time when you are allowed to visit whatever sites you like. The caveat is that you can only surf during the allocated time, say at 4pm for twenty minutes. It’s easier to resist surfing earlier in the day if you know that you have it to look forward to later on.

But I’ve got to keep my phone by me in case anything important happens!

If it’s a genuine case that there is something actually important that you need your phone for, then perhaps it’s not a good idea to be drawing in the first place, as it’s going to be really difficult to focus. If, onthe other hand, it’s nothing life-threatening, but you’re not going to miss out on anything vital if you put your phone away for a while.

Sue and her sketches

Sue had a busy work life and an even busier homelife. She wasn’t kidding when she said she never had much time for drawing. What he did have was her morning commute. She took the train every morning for about thirty minutes, and decided to use part of the journey for her drawing time. She kept a sketchbook and pencil in her bag, in fact she put it in there the night before so that she didn’t forget it in her morning rush.

Dave and his doodles

Dave was a self-confessed social media addict. He also loved drawing cartoons, that is when he got around to it.

To trick himself into drawing more, he made a deal with himself that after he’d completed one cartoon, he could check his phone for ten minutes.

What we covered:

• Resisting using the phone

• Distractions when out and about

• Surfing the net

Sandwich:

Let’s return to our Greek hero one more time.

This is a passage from ‘The Art of War’ by Steven Pressfield. I great book on how resistance stops us from doing what we want to do.

Odysseus almost got home years before his actual homecoming. Ithaca was in sight, close enough that the sailors could see the smoke of their families fires on shore. Odysseus was so certain he was safe, he actually lay down for a snooze. It was then that his men, believing there was gold in an ox-hide sack among their commander’s possessions, snatched this prize and cut it open. The bag contained the adverse Winds, which King Aeolus had bottled up for Odysseus when the wanderer had touched earlier at his blessed isle. The winds burst forth now in one mad blow, driving Odysseus’ ships back across every league of ocean they had with such difficult traversed, making him endure further trials and sufferings before, at last and alone, he reached home for good.

The danger is when he finish line is in sight. At this point, the Resistance knows we’re about to beat it. It hits the panic button. It marshals one last assault and slams us with everything it’s got.

The professional must be alert for this counterattack, Be wary at the end.

Don’t open that bag of wind!

What’s next:

I put out a daily cartoon newsletter with a whole menagerie of characters along with some occasional cartooning tips. Add your name and mail to the orange box below and I’ll wing a copy your way.

PS. I highly recommend picking up a copy of ‘The War of Art’ by Steven Pressfield.

Pareidolia - Seeing Faces Where There Aren’t Any

Hank Dwipely was fixing lunch for himself one day, when he was shocked to see that the face of Elvis had appeared on his toasted cheese sandwich.

Hank realised simultaneously that this might be a both a message from the King, and also a lucrative financial opportunity. Unfortunately for Hank, while he was onthe phone negotiating to sell the sandwich to a museum of curios, his dog, Dwayne, snuck up and wolfed down the sandwich taking with it any possible message from Elvis along the chance of $20,000.

Did Elvis appear on a toasted cheese sandwich, or John Lennon on a freshly cleaned window?

Probably not, but people see faces everywhere, even non-human objects can look like faces. Have a look at the front of some cars to check that one out. This is known as Pareidolia.

What we're going cover is:

• What it is

• Why people see it

• How you can use it

Faces Everywhere

Pareidolia, basically means seeing faces where there are no actual faces to be seen. Even a few simple lines that cause us to see a face.

We’ve all done this, seeing faces in a cloud or a machine. Designers even take this into account when designing machines and appliances.

Front view of the Mazda Miata/MX-5

The Face on Mars

One of the most famous examples is the ‘Face on Mars’ taking by the Viking 1 Orbiter in 1976. Many people took this as a sign that there must have been an ancient society on Mars.

Here’s one definitetion of pareidolia:

“It’s the marginal perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist.” - World English Dictionary

So where does this come from?

This is basically a survival mechanism.

Babies absolutely have to be able to do this otherwise they won’t survive very long at all unless they can recognise and then respond to a human face.

We also need to recognise less-than caring faces, which brings us onto…

How to avoid being lunch

Back in Stone Age times, we needed to detect the sabre-tooth tiger lurking in the bushes and then run away at high speed if we wanted to live and produce another generation.

You’re way more likely to survive if you recognise it’s a predator and then get out.

This phenomenon can also be a product of people’s own expectations.

“Being able to see Jesus’s face in toast is telling you more about what’s happening with your expectations and how you’re interpreting the world based on your expectations, rather than anything necessarily in the toast.”

-neuroscientist Sophie Scott, of University College London.

Once you see the face, it’s almost impossible to not see it.

What do you see?

The Rorschach ink blot test uses pareidolia to try and gain understanding into someone’s mental state.

So how does this apply to drawing cartoons?

As you can see from these examples, even a few simply lines and dots can give the impression of a face. It’s the idea of a face that we connect to, regardless of whether it’s a real face or not.

This tells us that we don’t have to draw complex faces to get with our reader and to help get out idea across - we will instantly connect to anything that resembles a face.

Over to you:

Instead of trying to draw a particularly lifelike face, what is the bare minimum of detail that you need to get across to your reader?

An interesting exercise to try, is to first draw a more complex face, then draw it again with less detail, then again, and so on, until the final drawing has only the essential lines left.

What we covered:

• What it is

• Why people see it

• How you can use iT

Next Step:

I put out a daily cartoon newsletter, with contains a variety of characters as well as occasional cartooning tips.

Add your name and mail below, and I’ll wing a copy your way.

How To Build A Drawing Habit

Yuki really liked drawing, but what she didn’t like the fact that she never seemed to get around to draw, somehow something always seemed to get in the way.

She used to draw a lot and over the last couple of years had made a couple of attempts to get back into some sort of regular drawing routine. She found that she could summon up the enthusiasm to start, but it always seemed to fizzle out a week or two later. It was just like her friend Sue who always a diet or going to the gym, but never sticking to either of them. She never used to understand how Sue could always be starting and stopping, but now she was finding it was exactly the same for herself and drawing.

Intro

It’s better to get into the routine of drawing a little something everyday, rather than hope to draw something elaborate but never actually get around to it

Here’s what we’re going to cover:

• Link to an existing activity

• Cartoon it simple

• Start really small

Link to an existing activity

One of the biggest problems with starting a new habit, or restarting an old one, is actually remembering to do it.

Think of all the times that either yourself or someone else has tried to start a new fitness campaign or diet, only to have it falter a few days later.

However, there are a number of habits that you already do automatically without even thinking about them. Some examples could include brushing your teeth, getting on the train in the morning or taking a break at work.

The trick is to link the new habit you want to do, in this case drawing, with one of your established existing habits.

You won’t even have to think about making a routine of your new drawing habit, as by linking it to an existing activity, you will instantly create a routine.

Here are a few suggestions:

-As soon as you get on the train in the morning, pull out your sketch book and do a quick doodle.

-After washing the dishes in the evening, sit down for two minutes for a quick sketch.

Over to you:

Think of one existing habit that you could start to connect to your new drawing habit

Cartoon It Simple

We sometimes take a bit of an ‘all-or-nothing’ approach - we’ve either got to do something good or not at all. In this case, unless we have a chance of drawing a densely picture, then it’s hardly worth bothering in the first place.

You may not think doing a quick doodle is worth it, I mean what’s the point? - it’s only a quick doodle.

But the point is not about the quick doodle - it’s about establishing a habit.

It’s better to do simple sketch every single day, rather than to wait until one day sometime in the future when you finally have more time and space - a day that might not actually come.

Over to you:

Instead of trying to draw something complex, what simple sketch could you try?

Start really small

B J Fogg, a behaviour scientist of at Stanford University has a program called Tiny Habits which helps people to start a habit one baby step at a time.

For example, if you wanted to get into the habit of flossing, he would recommend you to floss just one tooth and then stop.

It sounds ridiculous flossing one tooth only.

But if you floss one tooth or draw one face, then you’re more likely to do some more once you’ve got started.

Over to you:

Pick up a pen write now and draw a simple face, any old face will do.

Done it?

You’ve now drawn one more thing than you had a minute ago.

Here’s what we covered:

• Link to an existing activity

• Cartoon it simple

• Start really small

One more thing

To give you a chance of doing all of the above, it helps to have a drawing pad or tablet to hand, so probably the best way to get started on building your drawing habit right now is to put one in your pocket or bag right now.

What’s next

I publish a cartoon newsletter everyday with occasional cartooning tips. Add your name and mail in the orange box below and I’ll wing a copy your way.

Ideas For Cat Cartoons

In ‘Why Cats Paint - A History Of Feline Aesthetics’ authors Heather Busch and Burton Silver looked into why some cats apparently are willing to daub their paws in paint and make their mark upon a canvas.

The book was somewhat tonque in cheek, although a few people have taken it seriously. One slight red flag to some readers was, how on earth are supposed to clean the paint off the paws afterwards, as dipping them in water is probably not going to be an option unless are willing or risk losing several layers of skin.

In this article we’re going to look at how you can generate some ideas for cat cartoons.

Whenever you see the phrase; ‘over to you’, that’s your cue to try and think up some ideas for yourself.

Here’s what we’re doing to cover:

• What do cats do?

• Antagonists

• Cat personalities

• Cat videos

• Cats commenting on the human condition

What do cats do?

You mean other than eat and sleep? Well, not much else most of the time.....

Okay, but what else do they do?

• Catch things

• Play (when interested)

• Sit on owner’s lap

• Find warm places to sit/sleep

• Remind owner it’s food time

• Scratch things

• Clean themselves

Let’s take the first example ‘catch things’. So what might they try to catch? Mice and birds are the usual candidates. How could you turn the situation around?

Here are a few things to ponder:

• What about a giant mouse?

• A mouse with attitude?

• A team of mice

• A big bird

Think of examples from cartoons where the prey has turned the table (think Tom and Jerry or Sylvester and Tweety Pie)

Over to you:

Take one of the categories for what cats do. Now look to turn the situation around and make it more unusual.

Antagonists

Who acts as an antagonist to a cat? Dogs are the usual suspects. However, it could be another cat. A friend of mine’s mother used to have a macaw parrot which both he and the family cat were afraid of.

In the case of Tom and Jerry, Jerry the mouse turns into an antagonist.

Over to you:

How does an antagonist make a cat’s life more difficult?

Now think about how a cat come overcome the antagonist.

Can you think of a non-traditional animal or character that could act as an antagonist?

Cat personalities

Cat characteristics can vary from breed to breed. It’s a lot more pronounced in dogs, but there are still differences between say a Maine Coon Cat and a Siamese.

Over to you:

Spend ten minutes looking up four or five cat breeds. What quirks of each breed might lend themselves to a cartoon?

Cat videos

A-ha! An official excuse to watch cat videos! Videos of all kinds can a great source of ideas. Just make sure to set a timer before you start watching so as not to spend so much time that you never get around to drawing.

Over to you:

Watch a couple of cat videos and see what ideas you can get from them. Don’t forget that timer!

Cats commenting on the human condition

Cats have always known that they are the true bosses and that humans are only there to act as their servants. What else do you think cats might have to say on the human condition?

Over to you:

What do you think cats might have to say on the following:

• Dating

• Recycling

• Smart phones

• Work

• Fashion

What about dogs?

I get it, not everyone likes cats. Basically, if you substitute the word ‘cat’ for ‘dog’ then it should work equally well.

Here’s what we covered:

• What do cats do?

• Antagonists

• Cat personalities

• Cat videos

• Cats commenting on the human condition

What next?

I put out a daily Cartoon Newsletter which features a variety of cartoons and occasional cartooning tips as well. Enter your name and email in the orange box below and I’ll wing you a copy.

Illustrated Booknotes - Atomic Habits

Every month I put together a series of Illustrated Booknotes on books that I’ve read and are useful to me.

This month we’re looking at Atomic Habits by James Clear, one of the best guides on habit change there is.

I highly recommend you pick up your own copy of ‘Atomic Habits’

How to use these booknotes

The book will give you a roadmap to follow when working through habits.

For these booknotes, I would recommend taking one or two points that stick with you, and then trying to put them into practice. As with anything, unless you try it out for yourself, reading alone won’t take you anywhere.

These booknotes are listed in the order I read them. I selected them because they resonated with me.

And now, the booknotes…

Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up the potential required to unleash a major change.

Habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance. In the early and middle stages of any quest, there is often a Valley of Disappointment. You expect to make progress in a linear fashion and it’s frustrating how ineffective changes can seem during the first days, weeks, and even months. It doesn’t feel like you are going anywhere. It’s a hallmark of any compounding process: the most powerful outcomes are delayed.

This is one of the core reasons why it is so hard to build habits that last. People make a few small changes, fail to see a tangible result, and decide to stop. You think, “I’ve been running every day for a month, so why can’t I see any change in my body? Once this kind of thinking takes over, it’s east to let good habits fall by the wayside. Bit in order to make meaningful a difference, habits need to persist long enough to break through this plateau - what I call the Plateau of Latent Potential.

Your work was not wasted; it is just being stored. All the action happens at thirty-two degrees.

When you you finally break though the Plateau of Latent Potential, people will call it an overnight success. The outside world only sees the most dramatic event rather than all that preceded it. But out know that it’s the work you did long ago - when it seemed that you weren’t making any progress that makes the jump today possible.

Forget about goals, focus on systems instead

The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment.. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

Changing our habits os challenging for two reasons: 1. We try to change the wrong thing and 2. We try to change our habits in the wrong way.

The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity. It’s one thing to say I’m the type of person who wants this. It’s something very different to say I’m the type of person who is this.

Many people walk through life in a cognitive slumber, blindly following the norms attached to their identity.

The more you repeat a behaviour , the more you reinforce the identity associated with that behaviour. In fact, the word identity was originally derived from the Latin words essentials, which means being, and identified, which means repeatedly. Your identity is literally your “repeated beingness.”

Each habit not only gets results but also teachers you something far more important: to trust yourself. You stat to believe you can actually accomplish these things. When the votes mount up and the evidence begins to change, the story you tell yourself begins to change as well. Of course, it works the opposite way, too. Every time you choose to perform a bad habit, it’s a vote for that identity.

You good news is that you don’t need to be perfect. In any election, there are going to be votes for both sides. You don’t need a unanimous vote to win an election; you just need a majority. It doesn’t matter if you cast a few votes for a bad behaviour or an unproductive habit. Your goal is simply to win the majority of the time.

True question is: “Are you becoming the type of person you want to become?” The first step is not what or how, but who. You need to know who. You want to be. Otherwise, your quest for change is like a boat without a rudder.

You have the power to change your beliefs about yourself. Your identity is not set in stone, You have a choice in every moment. You can choose the identity you want to enforce today with the habits you choose today.

Ultimately, your habits matter because they help you become the type of person you wish to be. They are the channel through which you develop your deepest beliefs about yourself. Quite literally, you become your habits.

If a habit remains mindless, you can’t expect to improve it. As the psychologist Carl Jung said. “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

One of our greatest challenges in changing habits is maintaining awareness of what we are actually doing.

If you’re still having trouble determining how to rate a particular habit, here is a question I like to use: “Does this behaviour help me become the type of person I wish to be? Does this habit cast a vote for or against my desired identity? Habits that reinforce your desired identity are usually good. Habits that conflict with your desired identity are usually good.

The best way to start a new habit

An implementation intention - a plan you make beforehand about when and where to act. That is, how you intend to implement a particular habit.

When situation X arises, I will perform response Y

Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity. It is not always obvious when and where to take action. Some people spend their entire lives waiting for the time to be right to make an improvement.

When your dreams are vague, it’s easy to rationalise little exceptions all day long and never get around to the specific things you need to do to succeed.

The habit stacking formula is:

“After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].”

Habit stacking allows you to create a set of simple riles that guide your future behaviour. It’s like you always have a game plan for which action should come next.

Motivation is overrated; Environment often matters more

Environment design allows you to take back control and become the architect of your life. Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.

Instead of summoning a new dose of willpower whenever you want to do the right thing, your energy would be better spent optimising your environment. This is the secret to self-control. Make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible.

Your brain has far more neural circuitry allocated for wanting rewards than for liking them.

We need to make our habits attractive because it is the expectation of a rewarding experience that motivates us to act in the first place.

The more attractive an opportunity is, the more likely it is to become habit-forming.

We imitate the habits of three groups in particular:

The close

The many

The powerful

We soak up the qualities and practices of those around us.

One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where your desired behaviour is the normal behaviour. New habits seem achievable when you see others doing them everyday.

Surround yourself with people who have the habits you want to have yourself. You’ll rise together.

Action, on the other hand, is the type of behavior that will deliver an outcome.

If motion doesn’t lead to results, why do we do it? So,times we do it because we actually need to plan or learn more. But more often than not, we do it because motion allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure. Most of us are experts at avoiding criticism. It doesn’t feel good to fail or to be judged publicly, so we tend to avoid situations where that might happen. And that’s the biggest reason why you slip into option rather than taking action: you want to delay failure.

It’s easy to be in motion and convince yourself that you’re still making progress. You think, “I’ve got conversations going with four potential clients right now. This is good. We’re moving in the right direction.”

Motion feels like you’re getting things done. But really, you’re just preparing to get something done. When preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something. You don’t want to be merely planing. You want to be practicing.

How can we design a world where it’s easy to do what’s right? Redesign your life so the actions. That matter the most are also the actions that are easiest to do.

The truth is, a habit must be established before it can be improved.

The more you ritualise the beginning of a process, the more likely it becomes that you can slip into the state of deep focus that is required to do great things.

If you show up at the gym five days in a row - even if it’s just for two minutes - you are casting votes for your new identity. You’re not worried about getting in shape. You’re focused on becoming the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts. You’re taking the smallest action that confirms the type of person you want to be.

A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future.

Ulysses pact.

Named after Ulysses, the hero of The Odyssey, who told his sailors to tie home to the mast of the ship so that he could hear the enchanting song of the Sirens but wouldn’t be able to steer the ship toward them and crash on the rocks. Ulysses realized the benefits of locking in your future actions while your mind is in the right place rather than waiting to see where your desires take you in the moment.

By utilizing commitment devices, strategic one-time decisions, and technology, you can crate an environment of inevitability - a space where good habits are not just an outcome you hope for but an outcome that is virtually guaranteed.

The ending of any experience is vital because we tend to remember it more than other phases. You want the ending of your habit to be satisfying.

It can be challenging to stick with habits like “no alcohol this month” because nothing happens when you skip happy hour drinks. It can be hard to feel satisfied when there is no action in the first place. All you’re doing is resisting temptation, and there isn’t much satisfying about that.

When the consequences are severe, people learn quickly.

We repeat bad habits because they serve us in some way, and that makes them hard to abandon. The best way I know to overcome this predicament is to increase the speed of the punishment associated with the behaviour. There can’t be a gap between the action and the consequences.

As soon as actions incur an immediate consequence, behaviour begins to change.

People get so caught up in the fact that they have limits that they rarely exert the effort required to get close to them.

Until you work as hard as those you admire, don’t explain away their success as luck.

The Goldilocks Rule

The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right.

Mastery requires practice. But the more you practice something, the more boring and routine it becomes. Once the beginner gains have been made and we learn what to expect, our interest starts to fade.

The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom.

We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us. The outcome becomes expected. And as our habits become ordinary, we start derailing out progress to seek novelty. Perhaps this is why we get caught up in a never-ending cycle, jumping from one workout to the next, one diet to the next one business idea to the next. As soon as we experience the slightest drop in motivation, we begin seeking a new strategy - even if the old one was still working.

“Men desire novelty to such an extent that those who are doing well wish for a change as much as those who are doing badly.” - Machiavelli

No habit will stay interesting forever. At some point, everyone faces the same challenge on the journey of self-improvement: you have to fall in love with boredom.

The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.

Habits create the foundation for mastery. In chess, it is only after the basic movements of the pieces have become automatic that a player can focus on the next level of the game. Each chunk of information that is memorised opens up the mental space for more effortful thinking. This is true for any endeavor. When you know the simple movements so well that you can perform them without thinking, you are free to pay attention to more advanced details.

If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don’t want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change.

Now for the interesting question: If you completely ignored your goals and focused on your system, would you still succeed? For example, if you were a coach and you ignored your goal to win a championship and focused only on what your team does at practice each day, would you still get results?

In the words of three-time Super Bowl winner Bill Walsh, “The score takes care of itself.”

Jerry Seinfeld uses a habit tracker to stick with his streak of writing jokes. He explains that his goal is simply to “never break the chain” of writing jokes every day. In other words, he is not focused on how good or bad a particular joke is or how inspired he feels. He is simply focused on showing up and adding to his streak.

HABITS + DELIBERATE PRACTICE = MASTERY

If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don’t want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change.

What’s next:

I put out a daily cartoon newsletter with a wide variety of cartoons and characters, along with occasional cartooning tips.

Add your name and mail to the orange box below and I’ll wing a copy your way.

Exterior Backgrounds

You may well have heard of Extreme Ironing, the adventure “sport”, where advocates try to combine their zest for action along with a nicely-pressed shirt.

I don’t know whether anyone has yet tried “Extreme Sketching”, but there’s not need to head to exotic locales or to risk life and limb when it comes to drawing backgrounds. In fact, you may not even have to add too much detail at all to set the scene for your cartoon.

Here’s what we’re going to cover:

1. The minimal detail possible

2. Think symbols and caricatures rather than exact images

3. Using photos

The Minimum Detail Possible

You don’t need to have great technical drawing skills to create backgrounds. All you have to do is to convey to your reader the minimum of detail required to set the scene.

So instead of spending time creating a row of buildings, all you have to do is to give the impression of a row of buildings.

If you do want to add more detail, then you could add the hint of details, or some colour to give more of a sense of depth.

Think Symbols And Caricatures Rather Than Exact Images

We all have various symbols in our heads that we associate with different places and meanings. So instead of daring a bank, you could just draw a simple building with a dollar sign on it.

The same goes for a hospital, just add a Red Cross.

Using Photos

One quick trick you could try is to use your own photos as backgrounds. Here’s a random one I took while on a trip to Sweden.

Back to the ironing board…

Time to put down the pen for a while, and iron a shirt for tomorrow. I wonder where might be a good location to do so…

Here’s what we covered:

• The minimal detail required

• Think symbols and stereotypes rather than exact images

• Using photos

What’s next:

I put out a Daily Cartoon Newsletter which features occasional cartooning tips and lots of odd characters. Enter your detail in the orange box below, and I’ll wing a copy your way.

Illustrated Booknotes - Deep Work

Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive abilities to their limit. These efforts crate new value, Improve Your skill, and are hard to replicate.

Deep Work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity. We now know from decades of research in both psychology and neuroscience that the state of mental strain that accompanies deep work is also necessary to improve your abilities.

Jung - Deep work, though a burden to prioritize, was crucial for his goal of changing the world.

Peter Higgs, a theoretical physicist who performs his work in such disconnected isolation that journalists couldn’t find him after it was announced he had won the Nobel prize.

Neal Stephenson - “If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can. Write novels. If I instead get interrupted a lot, what replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time...there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons.”

Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style takes, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not crate much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.

“What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” admitted journalist Nicholas Carr.

Our work culture’s shift towards the shallow (whether you think it’s philosophically good or bad) is exposing s massive economic and personal opportunity for the few who recognize the potential of resisting this trend and prioritizing depth.

Two reasons why deep work is valuable:

1. To remain valuable in our economy, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task require deep work. If you don’t cultivate this ability, you’re likely to fall behind as technology advances.

2. The second reason that deep work is valuable is because the impacts of the digital network revolution cut both ways. If you can create something useful, its reachable audience is essentially limitless - which greatly magnifies your reward. On the other hand, if what you’re producing is mediocre, then you’re in trouble, as it’s too easy for your audience to find a better alternative online.

To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of procuring - a task that requires depth.

Deep work is so important that we might consider it, to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker, “the superpower of the 21st century.”

The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.

Ruthlessly cull the shallow and painstakingly cultivate the intensity of the depth.

To cultivate an ability to produce real value in an increasingly distracted world; and to recognize a truth embraced by the most productive and important personalities of generations past.

A deep life is a good life.

There’s a premium to being the best. Therefore, if you’re in a marketplace where the consumer has access to all performers, and everyone’s q value is clear, the consumer will choose the very best. Even if the talent advantage of the best is small compared to the next rung down on the skill ladder, the superstars still win the bulk of the market.

Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy

The ability to quickly master hard things

The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

Because technologies change rapidly, this process of mastering hard things never ends: You must be able to do it quickly, again and again.

If you can’t learn, you can’t thrive.

If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive - no matter how skilled or talented you are.

Deep Work helps you quickly learn hard things

“Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converting rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea.”

-Antonin-Dalmatia Sertillanges, a Dominican friar and Professor of moral philosophy. Author of “The Intellectual Life”

“Men of genius themselves were great only by bringing all their power to bear on the point on which they had decided to show their full measure.” - Sertillanges

Deliberate practice - K. Anders Ericsson.

The core components of deliberate practice are usually identified as follows:

Your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master;

You receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it’s most productive.

Deliberate practice cannot exist alongside distraction, and that it instead requires uninterrupted concentration.

“Diffused attention is almost antithetical to the focused attention required by deliberate practice.” - Ericsson.

To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work.

If you’re comfortable going deep, you’ll be comfortable mastering the increasingly complex systems and skills needed to thrive in our economy. If you instead remain one of the many for whom depth is uncomfortable and distraction ubiquitous, you shouldn’t expect these systems and skills to come easily to you.

Deep work helps you produce at an elite level

Adam Grant (professor at Wharton school if business) thinks a lot about the mechanics of producing at an elite level.

Batch hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches.

Law of productivity:

High-quality work produced = (time spent) x (intensity of focus)

To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.

Unless your talent and skills absolutely dwarf those of your competition, the deep workers among them will outproduce you.

The Principle Of Least Resistance: In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviours to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviours that are easiest in the moment.

Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.

Even a small slip in concentration can ruin hours of effort

This connection between deep work a good life is familiar and widely accepted when considering the world of craftsmen. “The satisfaction of manifesting oneself concretely inthe world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy,” explains Matthew Crawford.

A deep life if is not just economically lucrative, but also a life well lived.

Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioural economics to family counselling, similarly suggest that the skilful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.

Sine qua non = an essential condition; a thing that is absolutely necessary.

Our brains construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to.

Such concentration hijacks your attention apparatus, preventing you from noticing the many smaller and less pleasant things that unavoidably and persistently populate our lives.

When you lose focus, your mind tends to fix on what could be wrong with your life instead of what’s right.

A workday driven by the shallows, from a neurological perspective, is likely to be a draining and upsetting day, even if most of the shallow things that capture your attention seem harmless or fun.

“The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” - Csikszentmihalyi - author of ‘Flow’

The more flow experiences that occur in a given week, the higher the subject’s life satisfaction. Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed in something challenging.

Deep work is an activity well suited to generate a flow state.

Decades of research stemming from Csikszentmihalyi’s original ESM experiments validate that the act of going deep orders the consciousness in a way that makes life workwhile.

To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction.

The craftsman has stumbled onto something crucial in a post-Enlightenment world: a source of meaning sited outside the individual.

Deep work is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy at the same time that it also is becoming increasingly rare (for somewhat arbitrary reasons). This represents a classic market mismatch: If you cultivate this skill, you’ll thrive professionally.

Whether you approach the activity of going deep from the perspective of neuroscience, psychology, or lofty philosophy, these paths all seem to lead back to a connection between depth and meaning. It’s as if our species has evolved into one that flourishes in depth and wallows in shallowness, becoming what we might call Homo sapiens deepensis.

A deep life is a good life - always worth repeating!

The Eudaimonia machine is a building.

Takes its name from the Ancient Greek concept of Eudaimonia (a state in which you’re achieving your full human potential).

“The goal of the machine,” architect David Dewaine explained, “is to create a setting where the users can get into a state of deep human flourishing - creating work that’s at the absolute extent of their personal abilities.” It is, in other words, a space designed for the sole purpose of enabling the deepest possible deep work.

...a work environment (and culture) designed to help us extract as much value as possible from our brains.

You’re a disciple of depth in a shallow world.

One of the main obstacles to going deep: the urge to turn your attention toward something more superficial. Most people recognize that this urge can complicate efforts to concentrate on hard things, but most underestimate its regularity and strength.

People fight desires all day long.

Desire turned out to be the norm, not the exception. - Baumeister

Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it’s instead like a muscle that tires.

The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.

Some of these strategies will deploy simple heuristics to hijack your brain’s motivation center while others are designed to recharge your willpower reserves at the fastest possible rate.

Decide On Your Depth Philosophy

The famed computer scientist Donald Knute cares about deep work. As he explains on his website: “What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.”

A doctoral candidate named Brian Chappel, who is a father with a full-time job, also values dep work, as it’s the only way he can make progress on his dissertation given his limited time. Chappell told me that his first encounter with the idea of deep work was an “emotional moment.:

The Monastic Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling

This philosophy attempts to maximise deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimising shallow obligations. Practitioners of the monastic philosophy tend to have a well-defined and highly valued professional goal that they’re pursuing, and the bulk of their professional success comes from doing this one thing exceptionally well. It’s this clarity that helps them eliminate the thicket of shallow concerns that tend to trip up those whose value proposition in the working world is more varied.

“I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.” - Donald Knuth

*apply above to my courses

What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. - Donald Knuth, computer scientist

The productivity equation is a non-linear one, in other words. This accounts for why I am a bad correspondent and why I very rarely accept speaking engagements. If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. But as those chunks get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly. - Neal Stephenson

*apply to cartoons - DON’T INTERRUPT TIME-CHUNKS

The Bimodal Philosophy Of Deep Work Scheduling

This philosophy asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else. During the deep time, the bimodal worker will act monastically - seeking intense and uninterrupted concentration. During the shallow time, such focus is not prioritised.

The minimum unit of time for deep work in this philosophy tends to be at least one full day.

These efforts were aimed at increasing the intensity of Jung’s deep work to a level that would allow him to succeed in intellectual combat with Freud and his many supporters.

Jung would lock himself every morning into a minimally appointed room to write without interruption. He would then meditate and walk in the woods to clearly his thinking in preparation for the next day’s writing.

The Rhythmic Philosophy Of Deep Work Scheduling

The rhythmic philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit. The goal, in other words, is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you’re going to go deep.

Another common way to implement the rhythmic philosophy is to replace the visual aid of the chain method with a set starting time that you use everyday for deep work. In much the same way that maintaining visual indicators of your work progress can reduce the barrier entry for going deep, eliminating even the simplest scheduling decisions, such as when during the day to do the work, also reduces this barrier.

The way to be a better comic is to create better jokes, and the way to create better jokes is to write everyday. - Jerry Seinfeld

Your only job next is not to break the chain.

Deep work needs to happen in ninety minute chunks.

“Who’s to say that I can’t be that prolific?” He concluded. “Why not me?”

The Journalistic Philosophy Of Deep Work Scheduling

You fit deep Work whenever you can into your schedule.

Journalists are trained to shift into writing mode on a moment’s notice, as is required by the deadline-driven nature of their profession.

Ritualise

An often-overlooked observation about those who use their minds to create valuable things is that they’re rarely haphazard in their work habits.

The Pulitzer Prize-wining biographer Robert Caro: “every inch of Caro’s office is governed by rules. Where he places his books, how he stacks his notebooks, what he puts on his wall, even what he wears to the office. Everything is specified by a routine that has varied little over Caro’s long career. “I trained myself to be organized.

*I should this.

“Great creative minds think like artists but work like accountants.” - David Brooks

Great minds like Caro and Darwin didn’t deploy rituals to be weird; they did so because success in their work depended on their ability to go dee, again and again - there’s no way to win a Pulitzer Prize of conceive a grand theory without pushing your brain to its limit.

How you’ll work once you start to work. Your ritual needs rules and processes to keep your efforts structured.

How you’ll support your work. Your ritual needs to ensure your brain gets the support it needs to keep operating at a high level of depth.

“It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.” - Nietzsche

To work deeply is a big deal and should not be undertaken lightly. Surrounding such efforts with a complicated (and perhaps to the outside world, quite strange) ritual accepts this reality - providing your mind with the structure and commitment it needs to slip into the state of focus where you can begin to create things that matter.

Make grand gestures. The concept is simple: By leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, coupled perhaps with a significant investment of effort or money, all dedicated toward supporting a deep work task, you increase the perceived importance of the task. This boost in importance reduces your mind’s instinct to procrastinate and delivers an injection of motivation and energy.

It’s not just the change of environment or seeking of quiet that enables more depth. The dominant force is the psychology of committing so seriously to the task at hand. To put your self in an exotic location to focus on a writing project, or to take a week off from work just to think, or to lock yourself in a hotel room until you complete an important invention: These gestures push your deep goal to a level of mental priority that helps. Unlock the needs mental resources. Sometimes to go deep, you must first go big.

Expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter.

For some types of problems, working with someone else at the proverbial shared whiteboard can push you deeper than if you were working alone. The presence of the other party waiting for your next insight - be it someone physically in the same room or collaborating with you virtually - can short-circuit the natural instinct to avoid depth.

Distraction is a destroyer of depth

The four. disciplines of execution

Discipline #1: Focus on the Wildly Important

“The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.”

Execution should be aimed at a small number of wildly important goals.

Have a specific goal that would return tangible and substantial professional benefits will generate a steadier stream of enthusiasm.

“If you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say ‘no’ to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say ‘yes’ to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.” - David Brooks, The Art of Focus

Once you’ve identified a widely important goal, you need to measure your success.

There are two types of metrics: lag measures and lead measures. Lag measures describe the thing you’re ultimately trying to improve. For example, if your goal is to increase customer satisfaction in your bakery, then the relevant lag measure is your customer satisfaction scores. The problem with lag measures is that they come too late to change your behavior: When you receive them the performance that drove them is already in the past. Lead measures on the other had, measure the new behaviours that will drive success on the lag measures. In the bakery example, a good lead measure might be the number of customers who receive free samples. This is a number you can directly inches by giving out more samples.

*This is similar to ‘go for no’

For an individual focused on deep work it’s easy to identify the relevant lead measure: time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal.

When I shifted to tracking deep work hours, suddenly these measures became relevant to my day-to=day: Every hour extra of deep work was immediately reflected in my tally.

To maximise the motivation generated by this scoreboard, whenever I reached an important milestone. In an academic paper (e.g. solving a key proof), I would circle the tally mark corresponding to the hour where I finished the result. This served two purposes. First, it allowed me to connect, at a visceral level, accumulated deep work hours and tangible results. Second, it helped calibrate my expectations for how many hours of deep work were needed per result. This reality (which was larger than I first assumed) helped spur me to squeeze more such hours into each week.

Discipline #4 Create A Cadence Of Accountability

Downtime aids insights

Downtime helps recharge the energy needed to work deeply

Spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate

To concentrate requires directed attention. This resource is finite: If you exhaust it, you’ll struggle to concentrate. Walking on a busy street requires you to use directed attention, as you must navigate complicated tasks like figuring out when to cross a street to not get run over, or when to manoeuvre around the slow group of tourists blocking the sidewalk. After just fifty minutes of this focused navigation, the subject’s store of directed attention was low.

Walking through nature exposes you to inherently fascinating stimuli. When w asking through nature, you’re freed from having to direct your attention, as there are few challenges to navigate, and experience enough interesting stimuli to keep you r mind sufficiently occupied to avoid the need to actively aim your attention. This state allows your recited attention resources time to replenish. After fifty minutes of such replenishment, the subjects enjoyed a boost in their concentration.

The work that evening downtime replaces is usually not that important.

Only the confidence that you’re done with work until. The next day can convince your brain to downshift to the level where it can begin to recharge for the next day to follow.

Deep work and deliberate practice overlap substantially.

Use a shutdown ritual.

*make my own shutdown ritual

Your mind is released from its duty to keep track of these obligations at every moment - your shutdown ritual has taken over that responsibility.

Rule # 2 - Embrace Boredom

Push your understanding close to your cognitive limit

You cannot consider yourself as fulfilling your daily obligation unless you have stretched to the reaches of your mental capacity.

“I’ve recently bee making more highly creative insights in my business life...I’m convinced it’s related to this daily mental practice. This consistent stain has built my mental muscle over years and years. This was not the goal when I started, but it is the effect.” - Adam Marlin

The creative insights that Adam Marlin now experiences in his professional life, in other words, have little to do with a onetime decision to think deeper, and much to do with a commitment to training this ability every morning.

Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction. Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you’ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom.

People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand...they’re pretty much mental wrecks. - Clifford Nass, Stanford Professor

Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction, Nass discovered, it’s hard to shake the addiction even when you want to concentrate. If every moment of potential boredom in your life - say, having to wait fine minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives - is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been retired to a point where, like the “mental wrecks” in Nass’s Terach, it’s not ready for deep work - even if your regularly schedule time to practice this concentration

Training for deep work must address two goals: improving your ability to concentrate and overcoming your desire for distraction.

Don’t take breaks from distraction. Instead take breaks from focus.

If you spend just one day a week revisiting distraction, you’re unlikely to diminish your brain’s craving for these stimuli, as most of your time is still spent giving into it.

Schedule in advance when you’ll use the internet, then avoid it outside of these times. Until you arrive at that time, absolutely not network connectivity is allowed - no matter how tempting.

The idea motivating this strategy is that the use of a distracting service does not, by itself, reduce your brain’s ability to focus. It’s instead the constant switching from low stimuli/high-value activities to high-stimuli/low-value activities, at the slightest hint of boredom or cognitive challenge, that teacher your mind to never tolerate an absence of novelty. This constant switching can be understood analogously as weakening the metal muscles responsible for organizing the May sources vying for your attention. By segregating internet use (and therefore segregating distractions) you’re minimising the number of times you give in to distraction, and by doing so you let these attention-selecting muscles strengthen.

For example, if you’ve scheduled your next internet block thirty minutes form the current moment, and you’re beginning to feel bored and crave distraction, the next thirty minutes of resistance become a session of concentration callisthenics.

Give yourself plenty of opportunities in the vending to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom.

It simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it’s incredibly valuable.

Roosevelt Dashes

Identify a deep task that’s high on your priority list. Estimate how long you’d normally put aside for an obligation of this type, then give yourself a hard deadline that drastically reduces this time. If possible, commit publicly to the deadline.

At this point, there should be only one possible way to get the deep task done in time: working with great intensity. Attack the task with every free neuron until it gives way under your unwavering barrage of concentration.

Roosevelt dashes leverage artificial deadlines to help you systematically increase the level you can regularly achieve - providing, in some sense, interval training for the attention centers of your brain. An additional benefit is that these dates are incompatible with distraction - there’s not way you can give in to distraction and still make your deadlines.

After a few months of copying this strategy, your understanding of what it means to focus will Kelly be transformed as you reach levels of intensity stronger than anything you’ve experienced before.

Meditate Productively

The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally - walking, jogging, driving, showering - and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem. As in mindfulness meditation, you must continue to being your attention back to the problem at hand when it wanders or stalls.

Suggestion #1: Be wary of distractions and looping

When you notice your attention slipping away from the problem at hand, gently remind yourself that you can return to that thought later, then redirect your attention back.

Aa

When faced with a hard problem, your mind, as it was evolved to do, will attempt to avoid excess expenditure of energy when possible. One way it might attempt to sidestep this expenditure is by avoiding diving deeper into the problem by instead looping over and over gain on what you already know about it. When you notice it, remark to yourself that you seem to be in a loop, then redirect your attention toward the next step.

Suggestion #2 Structure your deep thinking

Start with a careful review of the relevant variables for solving the problem and then storing these values in your working memory. For example, if you’re working on the outline for a book chapter, the relevant variables might be the main points you want to make in the chapter.

Once the relevant variables are identified, define the specific next-step question you need to answer using these variables. In the book chapter examples, this next-step question might be. “How am I going to effectively open this chapter?”

With the relevant variables stored and the next=step question identified, you now have a specific target for your attention.

Assuming you’re able to solve your next-step question, the final step of this structured approach to deep thinking is to consolidate your gains by reviewing clearly the answer you identified. At this point, you can push yourself to the next level of depth by staring the process over.

This cycle of reviewing and storing variables, identifying and tackling the next-step question, then consolidating your gains is like an intense workout routine for your concentration ability. It will help you get more out of your productive meditation sessions and accelerate the pace at which you improve your ability to go deep.

Memorize a deck of cards.

One of the biggest differences between memory athletes and the rest of us is in a cognitive ability that’s not a direct measure of memory at all but of attention.

The ability in question is called “attentional control” and it measures the subject’s’ ability to maintain their focus on essential information.

A side effect of memory training, in other words, is an improvement in your general ability to concentrate.

Never attempt rote memorization.

We’re not wired to quickly internalize abstract information. We are, however, really good at remembering scenes

*apply this to cartoons - how do I make it memorable? Colours? Expressions? Forms? Etc

Your mind can quickly retina lots of detailed information - if it’s stored in the right way.

Proceeding through the steps described earlier (on how to memorise a deck of cards) requires that you focus your attention, again an again, on a clear target. Like a muscle responding to weights, this will strengthen your general ability to concentrate - allowing you to go deeper with more ease.

Your ability to concentrate is only as strong as your commitment to train it.

Aa

Rule #3 quit social media

If you’re interested in developing a deep work habit, you must fight to get there.

The craftsman approach to tool selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.

The law of the vital few (Pareto principle) In many settings, 80 percent of a given effect is due to just 20 percent of the possible causes.

All activities, regardless of their importance, consume your same limited store of time and attention. If you service low-impact activities, therefore, you’re taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities, It’s a Seno-sum game. And because your time returns substantially more rewards when invested in high-impact activities than when invested in low-impact activities, the more of it you sorry to the later, the lower your overall benefit.

Once the repacking was done, Nicodemus then spent the next week going though his normal routine. If he needed something that was packed, he would unpack it and put it back where it used to go. At the end of the week, he noticed that the vast majority of his stuff remained untouched in its boxes. So he got rid of it.

If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you’ll end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed, than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semiconscious and unstructured web surfing.

Drain the shallows

“How can we afford to put our business on hold for a month to ‘mess around’ with new ideas? Fried asked rhetorically. “How can we afford not to?”

Schedule every minute of your day

Quantify the depth of every activity

An advantage of scheduling your day is that you can determine how much time you’re actually spending in shallow activities.

Finish your work by five thirty

All Radhika Nagpul’s tactics shared was a commitment to ruthlessly capping the shallow while protecting the deep efforts - that is, original research - that ultimately determined her professional fate.

A commitment to fixed-schedule productivity, however, shifts you into a scarcity mind-set. Suddenly any obligation beyond your deepest efforts is suspect and seen as potentially disruptive.

Bill Gates worked with such intensity for such lengths during this two-month stretch that he would often collapse into sleep on his keyboard in the middle of writing a line of code. He would then sleep for an hour or two, wake up, and pick up right where he left off - an ability that a still-impressed Paul Allen describes as a “prodigious feat of concentration.”

The ability to concentration is a skill that gets valuable things done.

I bought a $50 high-end grid-lined lab notebook to work on mathematical proofs, believing that is expense would induce more care in my thinking.

This year I was relentless - most every day of most every week I was pushing my mind to grapple with results of consequence, regardless of whether or not a specific deadline was near. I solved proofs on subway rides an

d while shovelling snow. When my son napped on the weekend, I would pace the. Yard thinking, and when stuck in traffic I would methodically work though problems that were stymieing me.

As this year progressed, I became a deep work machine - and the result of this transformation caught me off guard.

Deep work is way more powerful than most people understand.

To leave the distracted masses to join the focused few, I’m arguing, is a transformative experience.

If you’re willing to sidestep these comforts and fears, and instead struggle to deploy your mind to its fullest capacity. to create things that matter, then you’ll discover, as others have before you, that depth generates a life rich with productivity and meaning.

I’ll live the focused life, because it’s the best kind there is.

Using Constraints In Cartoons

It all started with a rock pool in Taiwan. You know how when you follow YouTube suggestions and you end up watching something completely different five or six clicks later?

Well, that’s how I ended up viewing a Taiwanese women exploring a rock pool and discovering the sea creatures left behind by the tide.

Why are constraints a good idea?

Constraints force you to narrow your focus and think. Without constraints acting as blinkers, then it;s often all too easy to get distracted by the multiple possibilities open in fron of you - and the result is that you may end up not getting much done.

It’s similar to in supermarkets where if consumers have 101 different jams to choices from, they get overwhelmed by the choice in front of them and simply refuse to make one. Where’s if they only had a few flavours, then they;re more likely to make a decision and move on.

Let’s look at a couple of examples where cartoonists have decided to apply a constraint to their subject matter.

The Bus

The bus, drawn and written by Paul Kirchner, ran in Heavy Metal magainze from 1979 - 1985. The strips were always pretty surreal, and always, always featured a bus - and this didn’t merely consist of a bus lurking somewhere in the background. As you can see from the sample above, the strip got pretty surreal at times.

Greyhounds

Freelance cartoonist, Rich Skipworth, concentrates mainly on Greyhounds.

He has to come up with not just dog traits in general, but ones specific to Greyhounds.

When you think of Greyhounds you think of speed and their lithe shape. That’s good for a few cartoons, but after you’ve exhausted those what do you do?

Well, you get creative.

So how come rock pools?

Here’s one way of picturing it. Think 0f all the creatures in the sea, whether swimming in it or on the seabed. Now think of all the ships, boats, and people travelling on the water, even the water itself. There’s a lot of different elements.

Let’s narrow it down a bit and imagine a bay, perhaps with a beach as well, with people playing on it. There’s not as many elements as with the sea example, but still quite a few.

Now let’s restrict things even further to the mini-ecosystem that is a rock pool. Suddenly there are far fewer elements to play with.

You could narrow it down even further, say to the contents of a bucket, or a rubber boot.

Let’s dip back into the tidal pool and use this as a subject matter.

What are some possible objects that you could find in a rock pool?

Here are a few, I’m sure you can come up with some more, particularly if you think along more bizarre lines.

How about the pool dipper herself?

What props associated with her might produce some potential gags?

While playing around with ideas about rock pools, it reminded me of The Perishers cartoon strip, which used to appear in The Daily Mirror in Britain. The strip was about a bunch of kids and a dog. Every year they would go off and camp at the seaside, where Boot the dog would go and stick his head in a rock pool to see what the crabs where doing. Every year the strip would return to this theme.

So instead of a dog being mistaken for something else, I imagined one of the pool dipper’s rubber gloves getting a similar treatment.

How could this relate to your own cartoon?

Pick a topic that you cartoon about. For example, if your cartoons are about office life, then narrow it down to the cubicle, then to the desk.

What’s on the desk that you could make a gag from?

A calendar? A computer? Could you look at any of these in more depth?

Try doing a mindmap on any of these and see where it leads.

Let’s look at an example and look at Gerald the Goat, who is a character in a strip I draw.

This mind map starts off fairly broad, so let choose one of the topics that came up and go into it in more detail.

This narrowing focus helps to identify some topics that you might overlook.

Over To You:

So try setting up some constraints on your own cartoons and idea generation, and see where it leads.

Leading The Viewer’s Eye

In a cartoon, you have to help your reader to get the gag or the main point.

In fact it is your responsibility as a cartoonist to do so, unless of course you are happy for folks to say “I don’t get that” a lot.

And you only have a very short time in which to help your reader get the point. A few folks will be happy to puzzle over something trying to figure out what it’s all about, but most will move on very quickly. Not only that, but next time around they might not even bother looking in the first place if they think it’s going to take some effort.

It’s good to make them do some of the work, but don’t make their job too hard.

In this article we are going to look at some handy hints and tricks you can use to guide/lead their eye where you want it to go in your picture

We’ll cover the following points:

• Using elements in the cartoon to point to the object of attention

• Using colour to catch the attention

• Some cartoons that don’t work - and how to improve them

It’s useful to be able to guide the reader’s eye towards a main detail of the cartoon, especially if it isn’t immediately obvious at at first glance. This is a trick that has been used by artists for a long time.

Let’s look at how I helped guide the reader’s eye in the picture below.

1. The tree branch points towards Nessie.

2. The mountains in the far background form a ‘V’ shape, guiding the eye to what’s beneath.

3. The red spots on Nessie help catch the eye.

4. The fishing rod, catch net handle (5) and dog (6) all point towards Nessie.

Using elements to points towards the main detail

Let’s look at another cartoon usingthis technique.

In this one I wanted to draw attention to the boy in the background, whose yacht has just been ‘retrieved’ by the dog. Both the brown of the path by the river, and the sail of the yacht point back towards him.

Using spot colour

Using spot colour is anothe really good way to catch your reader’s attention.

For this one I wanted to draw the reader’s attention to the dog pouring water into the boot. The simplest and quickest way to do so was to colour the boots bright red. Spot colour is a quick way to catch the reader’s eye.

This is a picture I drew for a ‘word-of-the-day’ challenge. The word featured was ‘charging’, and the idea of using an electric eel came into my mind. I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to include the eel in the picture, until I found an iPad charger that one of my students had left laying around the classroom. It was then that I made the connection to have the eel recharge the phone.

I wanted to connect the eel and the fisher together. One way I did this was to have the red of the belly of the fish connecting with the red of the fisher’s boots.

Use bright colour against a dark background

The contrast of bright colour against a dark background will really help to grab attention. This one would have been more effective is I had made the rock face even darker and dulled down the the bright blue of the sky and the purple mountains inthe background.

The river in the valley below points towards Gerald (the goat) and his trajectory is towards the flowers that are his target.

The beak of the pelican points towards the oncoming storm clouds. This one might work better if I had toned down some of the colour on the boat and the fisher, so as not to distract the eye.

Improving cartoons

Let’s look at a few examples that I think don’t really work.

White catches the eye, however in this picture the white is on the woman’s blouse and I want my attention to go on the picture on the fridge. Her bright red gloves are also a distraction.

Here’s a revised version. In this one I’ve made the door of the fridge white and replaced her white blouse with a blue one. I also swapped her bright red gloves for softer pink ones.

Make sure that bright colours don’t distract your viewer’s attention away from where you want it to go.

Let’s look at an example.

In this fishing pic two of the pelicans are pointing towards the exceedingly small fish she’s just caught. However, the fish is grey and so easily merges into the background. Not only that, but the bright colours of her fishing gear: the yellow Mac, orange sweater, and bright green boots, also distract the eye.

I’ve now swapped out the grey fish for an orange one, and given her a more drab fishing outfit.

For this one, although all the characters are looking at the same spot, I thought I would add a little more direction.

I changed the position of her gloves so that they’re also angling towards the focal point. I almost added a few bubbles on the surface of the water.

Summary

Let’s go over the points we looked at in this article.

-use elements in the cartoon to point towards the object of attention

-don’t let bright colour distract attention to a non-essential element

I hope that has been of help. Let me know if you have any questions.

Cheers!

Mind Maps

Do you ever find yourself stuck for thinking up ideas for cartoons?

What if there was a simple exercise you could do to help you come up with ideas of your own.

Mind maps is one solution to the frustration of being stuck thinking of good idea

If you have a favourite character that you like drawing, you can use it as the basis of a mindmap. We’ll also look at using mindmaps for specific situations you want to think up ideas for.

If you don’t have a regular character that you draw, you can either invent one or choose a generic character, such as ‘the hungry dog.’

Whenever you see the prompt over to you, that’s your cue to pick up pen and paper or ipad or drawing tablet and try these ideas out for yourself. It’s far to effective to try them out as you go along.

What is a mind map?

A mind map is a diagram used to visually organize information. It shows relationships between the difference pieces of information.

Herre’s a mind map I put together to generate some ideas for Gerald the Goat.

Here’s a cartoon that was generated by the above mindmap.

Over to you: do a mind map featuring one of your own characters

Extra: draw a cartoon based on one of the ideas that come up.

Narrowing focus mind map

Now we’re going to narrow in expand on one idea you came up with for Monday’s mind map.

I’m going to choose one idea and do a further mind map based on it. First, here is the mind map that appeared previously.

And here is a new mind map narrowing the focus down.

Here’s a cartoon that came from it.

Over to you: try your own mind map to narrow the focus down.

Next we’ll apply the same mind mapping idea to a specific situation.

It can be very useful to revisit a previous situation and apply some new techniques to get different ideas out of it. I was trying to think up some ideas for the theme ‘owner and pet’ that I’d worked with previously. I decided to return to it and create a mind map.

Below is a quick sketch for a cartooon that came from it.

Now we’re going to apply the same mind mapping idea to your own situation. Sometimes ideas and inspiration can be found right under our noses - we just have to realize to take a look.

This exercise will open you to the possibility that there could be ideas wherever you are.

Here is an example from my life. I work as a teacher, so I have chosen ‘classroom’ as the topic of my mind map.

Here’s a cartoon based on one of the ideas:

I could have also chosen ‘teacher’s room’, ‘staff meeting’, ‘student’, ‘sports ground’, ‘teaching conference’ etc as possible topics.

Over to you:: choose a situation from your own life and make a mind map about it.

Here are a few suggestions: at your office, commuting on the train, at home with kids, relaxing in the garden, in the supermarket etc.

Think specifically of your office, commute etc. rather than a generic one. This will help to focus your attention on your own unique situation.

Extra: draw a cartoon based on one of the ideas that come up.

*note: you could also try this exercise when you are in different locations, such as in a cafe, cueing at the supermarket, on the train etc.

Original situation mind map

Finally, choose a completely different topic to mindmap, absolutely anything okay, but something different from what you’ve tried already.

As rainy season is coming up soon here in Japan, I thought I’d do a mind map based on that. Here’s the mindmap:

Here are a few quick doodles from the mind map.

And a completed cartoon.

I hope this article on mind maps has been useful for you.

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Inspired by Vallotten

During the summer I met up with a friend in London and went to see an exhibition of Félix Vallotton at the Royal Academy. I was particularly struck by the humourous illustrations he produced by woodblock printing.

Vallotten was Swiss-born, but established himself in Paris. In 1891 he took up woodblack printing, and quickly became a master of the art. His illustrations made fun of bourgeois Paris life, as well as depicting the daily hustle and bustle of the city.

I thought I would simplify some of my own cartoons by restricting myself to black and white only, and by using large areas of black to catch the eye.

The rabbit cartoon above was the first I tried using this techinque.

This one features the great Latvian chess Grandmaster, and former world chess champion, Mikhail Tal. I actually omitted the chess board from the pic as I wanted to make it easier to see the chess pieces. However, seeing as the chess board would instantly help set the context, maybe this was a mistake and I should re-do the illustration.

In it’s original form, this cartoon featured in an article about cheesy business stock images and how they could be made more interesting - in this case by inserting a monster into the scene. As the original pic was monchrome anyway, it didn’t take long to modify the cartoon.

I wanted to include an ocean liner in at least one cartoon, so that I could feature the large area of black of the ship’s hull. As you can tell from the previous cartoon, I am rather fond of giant squid, and so I thought it would be the ideal creature to help give the ship a quick clean and polish.

Having already used the liner once, I was toying around with the idea of something being written on the hull, and so this idea featuring a whale popped into mind.

Over the last couple of years I have drawn a series of fishing cartoons, primarily to practice drawing water and natural landscape. This was a interesting one to reduce down from the highly colourful original to black and white.

Illustrated Booknotes - The 25th Hour

Every month I read a book as part of a book circle I’m a member of and then put together a series of Illustrated booknotes.

This month it’s the turn of ‘The 25th Hour - Supercharging Productivity: Secrets From 300 Successful Entrepreneurs.

Also every month, I choose a different creature to help illustrate the booknotes. You might be wondering why I chose to feature toads this time around. This came about because of the ‘Rule 0f Three’ which you can see down below.

The rule of three uses the analogy of having a glass, three large rocks, representing your mot important task which you’re supposed to do first/fit in the glass first, and then a bunch of less important tasks which you’re supposed to do after that/fill up the glass with.

I was trying to think of a creature that was roughly rock shaped or could fit easily into a glass. I first thought of hamsters, and then wa gong to go for frogs when I realised that I’d already ready used frogs to illustrate ‘The Gifts Of Imperfection’ by Brenee Brown booknotes. Well, toads look like frogs, and so toads it was.

On to the booknotes.

I found this very good to help put things into perspective.

Work completed = time spent X intensity of concentration X speed of execution

To become super-productive you must:

-get organized: allocate enough time to do each job properly

-concentrate: give each task the focus it requires

Accelerate: get through each task as quickly and efficiently as possible

The rule of three

The jar represents your day, and the rocks, pebbles, and sand are jobs you need to get done. The rocks represent the most important talks, the pebbles your secondary priorities, and the grains of sand all those small, little to-doos that don’t provide much value. If we concentrate first on the little task, there wont be enough space left in the day to take care of the big ones.

Your first priority on any given day is to figure out what our big rocks are, and begin with those. This was by far and large the most widely-cited tip we re chives from the entrepreneurs we spoke to. They told us that before they start work each morning, they try to momentarily forget about what’s urgent and focus instead on identifying the three most important task to compete by the end of the day. And then they block out the time to do them.

Every morning, ask yourself the question, “what three things do I absolutely need to do today?” Or “What are the three things I need to achieve to feel satisfied with my day’s work?”

If a task on your to-do list will take you at least two minutes to complete, do it immediately.

You might be surprised to find that most of our daily ranks actually take less than two minutes to complete. By doing these talks straight away, we can dramatically reduce the number of items on our list and escape the psychological burden of an endless to-do.

The Zeigarnik Effect

An unfinished task takes up a lot more space in the brain that a finished one does.

Systematically nothing down each task on a to-do list frees up the mind.

Writing down each task also increases the likelihood of actually getting it done. The process of writing something down forces us to engage with it directly and sets us on the path towards completing it.

People who wrote down. their goals achieved on average 40% more of their goals.

Anytime you find yourself grinding away at a long, repetitive, or boring task, you should ask yourself how you might tweak the way you work to avoid having to do it again in the future.

Don’t simply stay on autopilot and continue doing what you’ve always done.

Don’t waste time in unimportant yet time-consuming takes instead of training someone else to do them.

If a week goes by and you haven’t made any tweaks to the way you work, you’re probably not examining your habits with a critical enough eye. It’s crucial to embrace the idea of continual improvement and place this investment mindset in the heart of your routine.

It’s the snowball effect of these small improvements that will eventually make the difference. If every week, you can make a change that saves just 1% of your time, then by the end of the year, a week’s work will take you just 24 hours in total. By adopting this approach, you also stand to benefit from what economists call the Ratchet Effect, where each improvement creates so much value that a return to old wats seems almost inconceivable. To stay motivated, remind yourself that the greater your initial investments, the greater the future payoff.

The fundamental secret to supercharged productivity: implement a series of gradual improvements that eventually add up to an enormous difference.

Whether it occurs now or down the road, every industry will eventually have to reckon with some kind of disruption.

The frequency illusion

You’ve probably noticed the way something that’s been on your mind suddenly seems to pop up all around you. Or how the moment we pick up a new term. Everyone seems to be using it. Or how the second we decide to buy a new home, the world is suddenly full of real-estate agents. This is what behavioural psychologists refer to as “The Frequency Illusion”. All the signs were already there, but they were filtered out by our brain in order to keep us focused on the task at hand. Having your goals in mind primes you to be on the lookout for any information or opportunities that may benefit you.

“Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” - Mark Twain.

Always start with the hardest task first. Take advantage of the fact that you tend to have the most energy first thing in the morning and get the hardest job out of the way first. If you start sorting emails and reading newsletters, you’re liable to procrastinate - and you’ll be forced to make up for it later in the day. If you can get the key task finished first, the rest of your day will fall into place.

Pick up your own copy

I hope that you have found these Illustrated Booknotes to be useful. The book is an easy read, and I recommend picking up your own copy to go into the points in more depth.

The Fastest Ice Cream Cart On The Coast

This cartoon came as a result of a Zoom group call I was doing in a coffee shop this morning.

Because of the background music going on in the cafe, someone asked whether there was an ice cream truck driving by somewhere which sparked off this idea.

How To Draw When You Can’t Draw

Do you think that you can’t draw?

You’re not alone.

Lots of people feel that they can’t draw.

And the idea of drawing in front of people and then having them look at your cartoons?

That’s scary.

People have a fear of public speaking, and having to stand up and draw in front of people is very similar to that.

*add note about overcoming fear of public speaking but instead being put off by drawing.

It would be a bit like a rabbit caught in the headlights...people looking at you.

But what if your idea about not being able to draw wasn’t all that it seemed...

And what if the idea of drawing in front of others wasn’t so glaringly scary...

Perhaps it might be easier to draw than you can imagine.

And the on-coming traffic can’t actually run you over.

Okay...but what’s with the rabbits?

Let’s stay with the bunnies for a moment.

What is a rabbit in pictorial form?

It might look like...

this... ...or this... ...or this...

Or it could simply look like this:

Both of these are instantly recognisable as rabbits...

...but there’s a world of difference in the artistic ability to draw each one.

And I think that pretty much anyone reading this is able to draw the simple rabbit doodle above.

Fine...but I don’t what to draw basic bunnies...

Good point. I won’t ‘rabbit on’ for too much longer, however, before we move on, let’s return to the images showing the rabbit showing three different emotional states and how they can be simplified.

The point is, that you don’t have to have artistic ability to get an idea across.

You can get an idea across just as effectively using a simple doodle as a detailed drawing - and a lot quicker.

We already have a whole bunch of icons that tells us how certain objects or states should look. Here are a few examples:

And again, I think that anyone reading this can draw any of the above icons/symbols

One point to remember when being concerned about what other people think about your drawing ability, is the simple fact that ask many people think that they can’t draw, nearly everyone in your audience will be in the same shoes as yourself.

So if your audience is composed of many folks who think they can’t draw, then they can hardly object or make fun of one more person who thinks they can’t draw. They will definitely emphasize. You are perhaps more likely to connect with them if you use simple doodles, that they too might be able to do.

That’s easier said than done...how can I start doing it?

Good question, but first of all a very important point:

Don't worry about making mstakes !

It's not an art class at the end of the day, and your audience will soon get used to your pics whatever you may think of them.

As well as being a very useful aid to your writing, presentation, or whatever other purpose you want to use them for, drawing simple pictures can be a lot of fun as well.

So experiment and have a little joy with it.

Coming Next:

Getting started with basic drawing