What if you could see the world through the eyes of one of your favorite authors?
How helpful would that be as you encounter challenges big and small throughout your day?
“I wonder what Rick Rubin would have to say about this creative challenge I’m facing?”
“I wonder what BrenĂ© Brown would say about these emotions that I’m having?”
“I wonder what Annie Duke would have to say about the decisions I’m considering?”
“I wonder what Amanda Ripley would have to say about the conversation I’m about to have with my neighbor, who happens to be on the opposite side of the political spectrum as me?”
I’m currently reading Ripley’s book High Conflict, and one of my goals as I read it is to turn it into a lens of sorts, so that by the time I’m done reading and processing the book, I can look at a situation that I’m going through in my life through the lens of that author and that particular piece of work.
I want to be able to view whatever experience I’m going through not just from my own perspective, but from that author’s perspective, and even have a bit of a conversation in my mind with them.

If all I do is read a book, even if I underline my favorite parts and make some notes in the margins, that’s not enough to create those glasses. My brain just doesn’t work that way. There’s more processing required, and there’s more of a creative effort required.
Typically, it’s a three-stage process.
In the first stage, I read and I underline and I make notes in the margins. I happen to enjoy marking up books in that way, interacting with the author while I’m reading. But if that’s all that I do, it only takes a couple of weeks after reading for those ideas to float away, for it to be harder and harder to view my current situation through the main ideas of the book.
In the second stage, I go back through the book, look at my underlines and margin notes and capture some chapter highlights. What are the key ideas and stories from each chapter? I try to capture those chapter highlights on just a single page, so that I can then lay out each of those one-page chapter summaries and have a view of the book in its entirety.

That allows me to tackle the final task of refinement, which is the creation of a one-page visual summary. I try to identify an overarching model of some sort, a drawing or a diagram, to anchor the most important ideas from each chapter that I’ve decided that I would like to apply to my life.
Throughout that process there’s an increasing distillation of the ideas, a boiling down to the essence of the book, so that rather than having to flip through the pages and review your underlines, you’ve got a one-page visual summary that you can literally bring in front of you to look at. Ideally, over time, you can just picture that visual summary in your mind and have that imagined conversation with the author as you’re processing a situation in your life.
So what you’re doing with those glasses is creating a one-pager that represents your personalized processing of that book to help you move from ideas to action, so that this book can inform your world view not just for a few weeks, but in the months and years to come.

If you would like to see some examples of what those one pagers can look like, I’ve made a lot of them on my YouTube channel over the years, and I’ve collected them into a playlist of Visual Book Summaries that I encourage you to check out.
And if you’d like to go through this process yourself in community while we read a couple of good books together, then come join us within the Sketch Instinct program. Throughout 2025 I’m hosting a quarterly book club where each quarter, there’s a couple of books that you can choose from to read with us and sketch with us.
For the first quarter we’re reading The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek and Hidden Potential by Adam Grant. You can choose to read one or both of those, and we’ll be gathering each month to discuss the nitty gritty of the creation of your glasses while we also reflect on the key ideas from the books and talk about how you’re going to apply them to your life.
If that sounds interesting to you, I encourage you to join us. It was the desire to remember more from the books that I was reading that first pulled me into the world of visual thinking. I’ve found that reading and processing good books together is one of the best projects that a community can take on as a way of practicing and applying your visual thinking skills.
There is effort involved in the process, but I think it’s worth it, because I think the more perspectives we’re able to bring to any situation that we’re facing, the better we’ll be able to handle that situation.
So come join us to build out your own glasses as you build your visual thinking skills and tap into your full potential as a maker of marks and a maker of meaning.
Cheers,
-Doug