The Icon Map – a starter map. An Ed Emberley-hieroglyphs type map. If you can write the alphabet, this map is for you.
The Tolkien Map – A Double A map. The next level up. Takes a bit more skill with the pen, but not impossible to get there. Similar in style to you guessed it – J.R.R. Tolkien
JP suggests starting with a “key” first. This will help keep all of the icons on your map consistent.
Great game for a Sunday afternoon or waiting for your food at the Olive Garden
2. Do the most important thing first thing in the morning, and don’t check social media until you’ve done it. Because energy compounds, the first actions in the day matter a lot: the right actions get you into a positive spiral, the wrong actions get you into a negative spiral. The further into a negative spiral you get, the harder it is to get out. So if you start the morning by doing something you care about (e.g. writing a page of an essay), you are way more likely to have a good, productive and happy day overall, because you’ve gotten yourself into a positive spiral.
Moreover, even if you don’t subsequently do anything, you have at least done that one thing in the day; most people fail more from many days of zero output than they do from not maximizing output on any given day, so the key is to stay consistent. [1]
I’m pro social media and think it makes us smarter, but I think it’s a bad idea to check it first thing in the morning. A simple rule is just to check it after you’ve done your ‘first thing in the morning’. I don’t know why this works, but my folk-theoretic model is something like: you want to get rewards from doing a productive thing, not from doing an unproductive thing, and social media gives you rewards in a way that perniciously substitutes for the kinds of rewards you actually want. Once you have the ‘reward’, your drive to do things lessens, so by checking Twitter you kill your drive to do the more productive thing. (The analogy to sugar is apt: you want calories from the good stuff, not the sugary stuff.
8. Do a weekly review. Every Sunday, sit down for an hour with a text editor and review your week. What went well, what went poorly, and what you’re aiming for in the next coming week. I find this is a useful way to force myself to get out of ‘doing mode’ and into ‘reflection mode’, and often surfaces useful insights / things that I could be improving about my life. This goes into my plan for the next week, which sets off a set of slowly compounding improvements.
9. Synthesize things as you read. Just because you’ve read something, doesn’t mean you’ve understood it; your brain has to come up with its own encoding. Whatever understanding things is, it’s related to compression. Which implies that you want to read and then restate in your own words, so that your mind is forced to compress the thing. Ideally several times, in varying ways.
Once you’ve done this, you are much more likely to retain the thing, and to actually grasp it; and if you’re struggling with this exercise, then you don’t understand the thing and should go back and look at it again. (This is also a useful bullshit filter — try and restate someone’s claim in a different way, and see if it still holds up).
When I say ‘restate it in several different ways’, one useful way would be drawing it. Just draw a schematic representation of what you think is being said. Another would be to state it as though you’re writing an article for simple words Wikipedia.
10. Map out problems using logic trees. This is a classic problem-solving and brainstorming technique, also known as morphological analysis. It’ll be familiar to any consultant, as it’s 80% of their secret sauce.
Take a problem, say analyzing a business’s profits (as in consulting). Break it down into logically exhaustive possibilities, e.g. “revenue” and “costs”. Break down each branch further into its component parts, e.g. revenue becomes price * quantity. Follow this process recursively, each time breaking the tree down into components.
Now you have a full map of the possibilities and can start to answer questions like “how do we increase profits?” by listing out all available options. This often helps you spot options that other people will overlook.
You might consider this example simplistic and MBA-ish, but Ed Boyden uses this in a scientific/invention context, and demonstrates an example applied to climate/energy around minute 14 of this video.
I found this technique especially useful when tackling ambiguous problems in a startup. Questions that seem like “how do we grow faster?”, can be reduced to lower-level components that are easier to reason and brainstorm about, and because you’re making sure each ‘layer’ of the tree is mutually exhaustive, you’re not missing anything.
7. Write regularly, and learn to ‘think in writing’. This is true for literally everyone, regardless of whether you want to be a writer or not, whether you want to publish or not. Just have a Google Doc in which you add a page a day of whatever’s on your mind. This has a million benefits, but a simple one is just clearing your cache: if you don’t do this, your brain sort of gets clogged by all the things you have on your mind, whereas if you ‘empty’ your brain onto a page that creates room for new thoughts.
If you really want to be a clear thinker, you need to learn to ‘think in writing’. I like Holden Karnofsky’s guide to this.
“I knew very early that somehow I would sing and draw and paint my whole life.“
pp 20
“There’s a push and pull with the creative process. That’s why I learned never to give up, even if it feels as if it’s not happening the first time around. Keep going; keep plowing through it.“
pp 128
“I wasn’t in the Rat Pack. I was in New York; they were out there. I had my singing and painting.”
And every time I attempted it I failed — There was no correspondence. So my failure as an artist, what you can’t do, I think further propelled me into the art of writing. But now, drawing interests me because having accomplished — but because writing has become easy, to a great extent, the taking up drawing is an entry into what I can’t do. Is an entry into the art of the amateur. And therefore it is discovery — it doesn’t matter if I fail. It doesn’t matter if I am a you know a — type artist. What matters really is that I’m doing it everyday and I’m trying to do it as honestly as I can. And that’s creatively, you know? Not to be complacent about it, but to challenge one’s self.
– Amitava Kumar. From minute 37:07 – 39:27
From Amit Varma’s interview on the Seen and Unseen Podcast. Listen in full below:
Be sure to listen to the Seen and Unseen podcast. I have a feeling soon, it will explode with western audiences.
JEAN JULLIEN: Can you remember when I first started to draw?
SYLVIE JULLIEN: As far as I’m concerned, you’ve always drawn. You’ve been doing it ever since you were able to pick up a pencil. You didn’t “learn”
BRUNO JULLIEN: You drew all the time, even on tablecloths when we were out at restaurants. It was your way of expressing yourself, of describing the tiniest routine events. You did this in sketchbooks that you would carry around with you, the ones we would offer you regularly. It was a ritual.
JJ: Yes, you gave me my first sketchbook. When I was at school in Quimper (a city in northwest France), my teacher Jacques Vincent encouraged us to keep a journal. There wasn’t much in the way of rules; the idea was to get us to draw and draw and draw so that we developed a visual language. And what better way to do that than to look for inspiration in what is around you? I think that my practice of drawing every day and my interest in everyday life come from that exercise.
Jullien, Jean. Jean Jullien. New York: Phaidon Press Inc, 2022. (see page 35)
Having Jean Jullien’s parents share his drawing origin story is a wonderful approach. Our origin stories must look different to our parents, who if they were around, watched them manifest in real time.
The idea of keeping a drawing journal seems beneficial for developing your own visual language. Your own style.
We all know Wes Anderson. But Wes’s younger brother, — Eric Chase Anderson, is way underrated. He’s an illustrator, documentarian, and novelist. He also played the voice of Kristofferson in the Fantastic Mr. Fox.
In this excerpt from The Life Aquaticwith Steve Zissou Criterion Collection edition collectors pamphlet, Eric and Wes share their drawing origin stories and how Eric’s drawings influence Wes’s movies.
It begins with little drawings. Little drawings lead to the set and character details that show up on film:
WES ANDERSON: In a review of somebody else’s movie in the paper the other day, a critic referred to me as a miniaturist or something like that. I guess because I put in a lot of physical details, and I like cooking up extra ideas to add to the sets and costumes, and inventing an imaginary world. But what I’m more inspired by is something that happened to me or someone in my life who had a strong effect on me, or a novel, short story, play, or a movie where the characters moved me, or where I was swept up in it. I do like little drawings, however. We do have stuff in the movies that is tiny, you know? A Swiss Army Knife, a punctuality award pin, something written in the margin of a book.
CRITERION: What’s a little thing in The Life Aquatic?
WA: The Kentucky Zissou fly.
Here they describe how their father’s work notebooks act as inspiration and source material:
ERIC CHASE ANDERSON: Which is one of two pieces of artwork I did for The Life Aquatic. The second is when they get to the bottom of the ocean and Bill Murray takes out a notebook and looks at it.
WA: This notebook is not exactly a crucial element of the story, or a crucial element of anything at all, but it’s personal because to me it’s really inspired by our father’s work notebooks.
ECA: Oh, yeah, right. Exactly.
WA: The way he organizes his stuff is very much, like, this points to that, and the little note indicates this over here, with lots of arrows. His brain is kind of graphic.
ECA: The source material is deeply embedded in our minds.
The Anderson brother’s drawing origin story:
C: Who started drawing first?
WA: Well, I started drawing first, because I had a four-year jump. I’m older.
ECA: I didn’t start drawing until I was in my midtwenties.
C: Really?
ECA: Yeah. I wasn’t necessarily good at it. I had to draw once in college. I had to design a poster for a play I directed. It looks just like my drawings now, except it was a cutout of an ant—like an old Saul Bass cutout—and I labeled the legs of the ant with things from the movie: mystery, car crash, dead brother.
WA: I had three types of drawings that I would obsessively draw. One was trees. Giant trees that people lived in, with people doing motorcycle jumps on one branch, a swimming pool built on another branch, elevators in the trunk, and a helipad.
C: Tree cities?
WA: Tree cities, basically. Then I had imaginary mansions. Then I had giant drum sets that would fill five pages taped together, with a guy in the middle and about two thousand drums.
This is obvious, but drawings make excellent gifts:
ECA: I made a Christmas present for Wes that was a map of this famous country house where I house-sat in Virginia. I didn’t know much about paints. It was something I was doing without really thinking about it. I gave it to Wes, and a year went by. The next Christmas, I made a couple more maps: a house map of where we grew up, with different things that we had experienced as kids, like escape routes from the second floor, you know, a loose floorboard, or where a pencil sharpener was, a strange angle in the bathroom. Wes and I had been collaborating on a Christmas present for my sister, which was a map of a minivan. We talked about it, and we both came up with the text that each of the four kids would have in relation to the van, Then overnight, Christmas Eve, I drew it. It was a good Christmas present.
WA: It was the process of him segueing from the maps being something that represent a space to telling stories—although even the first one that you did had an element of that.
ECA: Wes had an idea that I should make a map for the people at St. John’s, where we shot Rushmore. I sent it to Wes, but I didn’t package it well. It arrived spindled via FedEx, with a hole punched through it. He said, “It’s really good, but I think there’s a couple of changes you can make, and you can do it one more time.” That was fine, because the next time I did it, many more of the ideas were in much better shape to be presentable. Wes liked it so much he said, “There’s no way I’m giving it to St. John’s.”
WA: I made a good dupe for them.
And the process of how Eric’s drawings will influence Wes’s movie’s directly:
C: So, turning to The Royal Tenenbaums—now the drawings precede the making of the film.
ECA: I made wall paper for Richie’s room. First, I made drawings at home really small. Then those went to a warehouse, I think in Queens, where they used blueprint machines to blow up each little tiny drawing. Then they used a stencil to punch through and leave a charcoal line. Then they finished the outlines with a Sharpie.
WA: What it’s supposed to be is, the walls were painted on by Richie Tenenbaum, and they’re his record of the family’s memories. So for Tenebaums, Eric made, one, a set of drawings of all the sets I asked him to do; two, Richie’s drawings on his walls; three, a series of portraits of his sister; and four, the DVD itself— which has, I think, the best cover.
ECA: I have a memory of sitting in a coffee shop in Houston. I was there with Wes, and he was figuring out how to tell the beginning of The Royal Tenenbaums through a tour of the house and how to introduce all this information. He was thinking out loud, and I was kind of following him. It might have been one of those Christmastimes when mapmaking was in the air. I remember him saying, “It’s a map, but it’s not a map on paper. It’s a map in movie style. We have eight minutes of movie map.”
C: How much of this material comes from your shared experiences?
WA: Well, there’s always some inspiration from real life or from my personal experience. Some characters are inspired by a couple of my friends rolled together, and some come from two lines of a play I saw, and some come out of nowhere. There are a few drawings on Richie’s walls, for instance—an image of an archaeological excavation with the mother—which refer to our own past. There’s one thing on Richie’s wall that I didn’t suggest—an image of a day a tiger escaped from the zoo near their house. Well, that’s not in the movie or referred to anywhere. That was something Eric made up. Only now, at this moment, I realize, we should have added that into the movie. That would have been good for that beginning-of-the-movie section where it refers to different things in the family’s history. You can hear Alec Baldwin say . . .
ECA: “One day, a Bengal tiger walked down Archer Avenue.” The kids would be inside the basement, looking out the window through the burglar bars.
WA: What would be the thing he would say after that? There would be a cut to the front page, a tiger in the snow — we would have to make up the newspaper — “The Morning Sun reported that it was killed after eating three dogs and a Siamese.”
ECA: But the drawings sometimes have little bits of echoes of stories that we liked as kids — even if they didn’t really happen to us — because we all traded books and things. Imaginary events can be shared experiences too.
WA: That’s good. That’s what books and movies are. Imaginary events can be shared experiences too.
I find Eric Chase Anderson is similar to the late Jason Polan, in that whenever you see his illustrations, it compels you to pick up a pencil and draw.
I find it really useful to write and draw while talking with someone, composing conversation summaries on pieces of paper or pages of notepads. I often use plenty of color annotation to highlight salient points. At the end of the conversation, I digitally photograph the piece of paper so that I capture the entire flow of the conversation and the thoughts that emerged. The person I’ve conversed with usually gets to keep the original piece of paper, and the digital photograph is uploaded to my computer for keyword tagging and archiving. This way I can call up all the images, sketches, ideas, references, and action items from a brief note that I took during a five-minute meeting at a coffee shop years ago-at a touch, on my laptop. With 10-megapixel cameras costing just over $100, you can easily capture a dozen full pages in a single shot, in just a second.
Cowen, Tyler. The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy. New York: Plume, 2010 (see page 97)
Ed Boyden’s note taking practice seems both exhausting and exhilarating. Tedious and satisfying. He’s not only writing notes, but drawing them as well.
It’s taken him far though. He’s gone from blogger for the Technology Review to the Professor in the Departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Media Arts and Sciences, and Biological Engineering, and an HHMI investigator at MIT.
For someone who understands so much about the brain, is Boyden’s drawing function of his note-taking deliberate? A tool to help him remember and synthesize information?
I have sketched my house at Easton Pierse and marked with a cross my grandfather’s chamber where I was born. If it had been my fate to be wealthy man I would have rebuilt my house in the grandest of styles. I would have added formal gardens in the Italian mode of the kind I have seen at Sir John Danvers’s house in Chelsea and at his house in Lavington. It was Sir John who first taught us in England the way of Italian gardens. I would have erected a fountain like the one that I saw in Mr Bushell’s grotto at Enstone: Neptune standing on a scallop shell, his trident aimed at a rotating duck, perpetually chased by a spaniel. I would have carved my initials on a low curved bridge across the stream. I would have remade my beloved home in the shape of the most beautiful houses and gardens I have visited in my unsettled life, tumbling up and down in the world. But fate has taken on a different path and the house of my dreams is mere fantasy: a pretty sketch on paper.
We should take these excerpts with some reservation. These aren’t John Aubrey’s copied diaries, but rather an original format historian Ruth Scurr uses to deploy John Aubrey’s biography.
John Aubrey is a man who knew what he wanted. We see this in the detailed descriptions of the gardens and fountains he dreamed of constructing:
I would have added formal gardens in the Italian mode of the kind I have seen at Sir John Danvers’s house in Chelsea and at his house in Lavington. It was Sir John who first taught us in England the way of Italian gardens. I would have erected a fountain like the one that I saw in Mr Bushell’s grotto at Enstone: Neptune standing on a scallop shell, his trident aimed at a rotating duck, perpetually chased by a spaniel. I would have carved my initials on a low curved bridge across the stream. I would have remade my beloved home in the shape of the most beautiful houses and gardens I have visited in my unsettled life, tumbling up and down in the world.
John Aubrey was a man who embraced his fate. He accepts his fate twice in one paragraph. This was probably a more common character trait in the 1600s. In the modern west we’re taught to battle against our fate. We’re told anything is possible. That if we’re passionate, put our minds to it, we can bend our fate to be anything – yeah, yada, yeah. So when you hear someone admit their fate was not to be a wealthy man, and they accept that, it catches the ear.
If it had been my fate to be wealthy man I would have rebuilt my house in the grandest of styles.
and
But fate has taken on a different path and the house of my dreams is mere fantasy: a pretty sketch on paper.
John Aubrey sketched! It’s not surprising. Photography was still two hundred years away, so people captured images by drawing. They preserved memories by drawing. They dreamed with their drawings:
I have sketched my house at Easton Pierse and marked with a cross my grandfather’s chamber where I was born.
and
But fate has taken on a different path and the house of my dreams is mere fantasy: a pretty sketch on paper.
I was really not a good drawer. I wasn’t the worst in the class, but I was by no means ever the best in the class, whatever class. Even in the little architecture school there were five or six people who could draw better than me. They could certainly draw trees and birds and you know, all that stuff. I was a rather painful drawer.
– Peter Cook
Inspiring to learn architect Peter Cook was not the best artist in his classes growing up. He toiled to improve his drawing. He called himself a “painful” drawer.
“I’m still not fluent. If you were watching me drawing then, I’m using a straight edge. I’m using aides. I’ve got lots of tricks of the trade by now.”
– Peter Cook
Fascinating how Peter describes drawing like a language. He uses the word “fluent”.
He still believes he’s not “fluent”. But Peter is open to using tools to overcome his artistic limitations.
Whenever it’s bad weather, I draw at home and lend a hand to raise my little boys. They will never know what we are doing to give them everything they need.
Floodlights and Goalposts 