I’ve got a stack of filled Moleskine notebooks with zero labeling on them. I can’t tell what’s inside any one of them without flipping through, so in this series I’m cracking them open one at a time, seeing what ideas I’ve forgotten (and which I still remember), and adding a table of contents to the cover before I put each one back on the shelf.
This particular notebook turned out to be two notebooks in one. It started as a home for my reading notes back in 2015, sat untouched for a few years, and then came back out in 2018 as a visual journal. Watching those two eras sit side by side was the most interesting part of the whole tour.
Notes on Zen Habits
The opening pages are my notes on Zen Habits by Leo Babauta, a book that lives right at the intersection of mindfulness and habit formation.
A few ideas from those pages still hold up:
- Positive vs. negative feedback loops. I’d rather build a habit around the intrinsic reward of the work itself than around the sting of a missed checkbox. Let the task be its own reward and the loop takes care of itself.
- Watch your movie. What story are you telling yourself about what’s happening right now, and is it actually helping? (Mine at the time was “I’m already a mistake-free illustrator,” which mostly just added pressure.)
- Treat urges like clouds. When the pull toward a distraction shows up, sit with it and watch it drift through instead of acting on it right away.
- Minimum viable habit. What’s the smallest possible step to get moving? For a runner, just lace up your shoes. For a visual thinker, just draw one circle and go from there.
Visual Journal
By 2018 the same notebook became a place for daily sketches and a running record of what I was reading. Whenever I finished a book, I’d sketch the cover and pull out a single quote from books like East of Eden, A Sense of Where You Are, We Are Okay, Levels of the Game, and more. Seeing them all together made me wish I reviewed those captures more often, because their significance has faded over the years.
I also wish that I had kept up with that habit of sketching out a book cover or title whenever I finished it. That would end up being a nice record to look back on. Perhaps I need a Moleskine just for that?
Mixed in with the book sketches is the texture of ordinary life: the neighbor’s cat on the porch, my morning coffee routine, a French vocabulary drill, and the day I sliced my thumb while making lunch and learned the lesson don’t force it, not with your tools and not with your process.
A handful of bigger ideas also surfaced across those pages:
- Choose a brick and get great at hitting it. Get specific about the one thing you want to be great at, then aim at that brick every time you pick up your pen.
- The disciplined pursuit of less (from Essentialism): every yes is equal to many nos, so choose your yeses wisely.
- Values over thoughts. A negative thought is just a thought. You get to decide whether it or your values drive your next action.
The Takeaway
The through-line of this tour is simple: the ideas you capture are only as useful as your ability to find them again. That’s why I’m dating my pages more consistently now and why these notebooks are finally getting a table of contents. This one earned four entries: Zen Habits, Visual Journaling, Reading Record, and Single-Idea Sketchnotes.
If you’d like to make visual thinking more of a daily habit, the simplest place to start is a single notebook you return to often. And if you want more support building the skill, there’s a whole library of courses waiting for you.
Those courses will help you build your skills from the ground up and then apply them to work that you care about.
Appendix: Everything in this notebook
For the curious (and the completists), here’s a fuller index of what turned up on these pages.
Books sketched or referenced
- Zen Habits by Leo Babauta — mastering the art of change
- East of Eden by John Steinbeck — the “thou mayest” quote
- A Sense of Where You Are by John McPhee — on Bill Bradley at Princeton
- The Inexplicable Logic of My Life by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
- We Are Okay by Nina LaCour
- Levels of the Game by John McPhee — Arthur Ashe’s match
- Deep Work by Cal Newport — the deep work hypothesis
- Essentialism by Greg McKeown — the disciplined pursuit of less
- Slow Productivity by Cal Newport — referenced via John McPhee’s writing process
- An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green — mentioned in passing
- Invisible Creatures by Andy J. Pizza — added to the wish list
Ideas and concepts captured
- Positive and negative feedback loops around a habit
- Mindfulness practices: turn the spotlight, the mirror of self-reflection, watching your “movie”
- Process over product (“grow a plant — focus on the inputs”)
- Urge surfing — treating urges like passing clouds
- Habit sprints and the “don’t miss two days” rule
- Minimum viable habit and minimum viable preparation
- Work despite discomfort; be like water flowing around obstacles
- “Change what normal is” — gradual progress
- “Choose a brick and get great at hitting it” (from Colin and Samir, back in their Lacrosse Network days)
- How you develop wisdom — pairing confidence with productive doubt
- Feedback-loop timescales: a tweet vs. a video vs. a novel (from Hank Green / Vlogbrothers)
- Values over thoughts (from a Good Life Project episode with Ellen Hendriksen)
- The power of side quests (from Andy J. Pizza’s Creative Pep Talk)
- “Every yes is equal to many nos” and doing the hardest thing first (from Essentialism)
- Developing your voice — the dips are inevitable
- The trust battery — trust as something filled or drained by each action
Everyday-life and travel sketches
- My daily drawing setup: index cards and a refillable Pentel EnerGel pen
- The neighbor’s cat that visited our porch
- Coffee routines — iced coffee in the fridge, the three-mug morning, and the no-coffee-after-noon rule
- The window AC unit in our attic bedroom
- The Philz Coffee logo, from a family reunion in California
- A favorite Portland bakery in the Montavilla neighborhood
- French vocabulary practice via Duolingo
- The view from our rental’s front porch
- A camper/RV “adventure mobile” daydream (now more of a truck-camper dream)
- The license plate of my old van, from my year of van life
- A minimalist pegboard of go-to materials in my home office
- The cheese-slicer mishap that became “don’t force it”
- My weekly video-making process, mapped out Monday through Thursday