I’m talking about sketchbooks.
I’m not talking about sketchbooks.
Arnold Schwarzenegger did Transcendental Meditation for one year and reaped enormous benefits then he stopped.
Instead of meditating he incorporated what he learned into his daily life, during workouts for example. At least that’s what I gathered from listening to him answer questions about this on a podcast.
Seth Godin hardly finishes reading any books. He reads until he ‘gets the joke’ then he stops.
James Clear believes giving advice is not useful. Especially in a broad general setting like writing a newsletter or a book. The reason is that advice lacks context and might not work for everyone. “Questions,” he says are better, because anyone can use questions.
Mason Curry wrote a book about the daily rituals of writers and artists over the past 100 years. And what he found in common was that the only thing they had in common was a habit, but the habits themselves varied widely and contradicted each other.
I spent a week at Stanford University at a custom-designed crash course in entrepreneurship paid for by the Malaysian Government. And the thing that struck me the most was that in Silicon Valley there was a blueprint, framework, book or course, for basically any stage of a startup. There are templates to solve virtually any business problem. But you still need to do the work.
Francis Bacon, a prominent British painter known for his figurative works, used sketchbooks throughout his career but was known to be quite casual about them. He once said, "I don't use sketchbooks in the formal sense. I just draw things that interest me at the time."
No author, trainer, or coach follows their own plan perfectly. But some athletes follow the plans of their coaches.
Stephen King doesn’t write a plot for his stories. He writes six pages a day. And he tells himself the stories he’s working on before he sleeps. The good stuff sticks. Not writing things down is his way of filtering.
I‘ve taken a number of course on sketchbooks. In order to create a course one needs to formularise their practice. So it’s adoptable by the students. The things you learn from the classes are these formulas and specific exercises.
I once had a mentor who though me his system, I don’t remember the system or even the subject of the system, but I remember him saying this. “Have a system, if you don’t have a system use mine, but have a system”.
These are some of the things I think about when thinking about sketchbooks.
And here are some questions for you.
How can a sketchbook improve my creative practice?
Where can I find a list of resources to start tackling the blank page?
How could a sketchbook hurt my creative practice?
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