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Sketched Book: Take Charge of Your Talent: Three Keys to Thriving in Your Career, Organization, and Life – Don Maruska, Jay Perry (2013)

Posted: - Modified: | career, visual-book-notes

Don Maruska and Jay Perry’s Take Charge of Your Talent: Three Keys to Thriving in Your Career, Organization, and Life (2013) has plenty of tips for developing your skills and taking charge of your career. I’ve sketched the key points of the book below to make it easier to remember and share. Click on the image for a larger version that you can print if you want.

2014-12-25 Sketched Book - Take Charge of Your Talent - Three Keys to Thriving in Your Career, Organization, and Life - Don Maruska and Jay Perry

I liked the chapter on reflecting on your talents through a structured conversation with someone who can reflect back not only your words but also your feelings and hopes. Sometimes we don’t see the patterns in our thoughts until someone points it out to us. The questions are also good for personal reflection, and I’m looking forward to using them in my planning.

Sometimes people ask me to help them figure out what they want to do. Other books I’ve read about coaching tend to be pretty high-level, but this one gives concrete advice, including some notes anticipating potential responses or difficulties.

I also liked the chapters on creating tangible assets and sharing them with other people. That’s been a great learning- and career-booster for me, and I hope other people will try it out as well.

Among other things, the book also suggests listing at least one hundred resources (people, places, things, skills, …). Forced-length lists are great for creativity because you dig deeper than your surface answers, often coming across surprises. When you review your list, think about ways that you could make even better use of those resources. The book also suggests taking a look at your top 10 resources and working towards 100% use of them, which will be an interesting challenge. The third related exercise is to combine different resources so that you can break through obstacles or come up with interesting mash-ups – forced association, another great creativity technique. I like this reminder to apply creativity so that you can recognize and make the most of your resources, which allows you to MacGyver your way to growth.

Want the book? You can buy it from Amazon (affiliate link) or check out their website at .

Like this sketch? Check out sketchedbooks.com for more. Feel free to share – it’s under the Creative Commons Attribution License, like the rest of my blog.

Enjoy!

Visualizing the internal citation network of my blog

Posted: - Modified: | visual, wordpress

I’m curious about the internal citation of my blog. Which thoughts have been developed over a long chain of posts? Which posts do I often link to? Where are there big jumps in time? Where have I combined threads?

2014-12-03 Internal citation network

I’ll probably need to build my own data extractor so that it can:

  • ignore weekly and monthly reviews, since I link to everything in those,
  • reconcile short and long permalinks, redirection, and sneak previews,
  • and maybe even index my sketches and look at follow-ups

and I’ll probably want to create something that I could eventually plot as an SVG or imagemap using Graphviz, or maybe analyze using Gephi.

It would be super-interesting to create some kind of output that I could fold into my blog outline or into individual posts. I would need a static dump for that one, I think.

How would I build something like this? One time, I used Ruby to analyze the text of my blog. That might work. I might be able to pull out all the link hrefs, do lookups…

As of Dec 3, 2014, there are 87 posts in 2014 that link to previous posts, out of 259 non-review posts (so roughly 34%). I used this SQL query to get that:

SELECT post_title FROM wp_posts WHERE post_content LIKE ‘%<a href=”https://sachachua.com/blog/20%’ AND post_date >= ‘2014-01-01’ AND post_title NOT LIKE ‘%review:%’ AND post_state=’publish’;

Hmm. I might even be able to do some preliminary explorations with Emacs and text processing instead of writing a script to analyze this, if I focus on 2014 and ignore the special cases (short permalinks, redirection, and sneak previews), just to see what the data looks like. Rough technical notes:

perl -i -p -e s/href/\nhref/gi 2014-manip.html
grep http://sachachua.com/blog/20 2013-manip.html > list-2013
perl -i -p -e "s/(<\/a>(<\/h2>)?).*/$1/gi" list-2013
(defun sacha/misc-clean-up-reviews ()
  (interactive)
  (while (re-search-forward "\\(Monthly\\|Weekly\\) review: .*</h2>" nil t)
    (let ((start (line-beginning-position)))
      (re-search-forward "</h2>")
      (delete-region start (line-beginning-position))
      (goto-char (line-beginning-position)))))

(defun sacha/org-tabulate-links ()
  (interactive)
  (goto-char (point-min))
  (let (main-link edges nodes)
    (while (not (eobp))
      (if (looking-at "^href=\"\\(.*?\\)\".*?</a></h2>")
          ;; Main entry
          (progn
            (setq nodes (cons (match-string 1) nodes))
            (setq main-link (match-string 1)))
        (if (looking-at "^href=\"\\(.*?\\)\"")
            (setq edges (cons (concat 
                               main-link  ;; from
                               "\t"
                               (match-string 1)   ;; to 
                               ) edges))))
      (forward-line 1))
    (kill-new (mapconcat 'identity edges "\n"))))

Ooooh. Pretty. Gephi visualization of the edge list formed by links, using the Yifan Hu layout. That big thread in the middle, that’s the one about taskmasters and choice and productivity, which is indeed the core theme running through this year of the experiment. The cluster on the right is a year in review. We see lots of little links too.

Internal links for entries posted in 2014

Internal links for entries posted in 2014

Now I’m curious about what happens when we add the posts and links from 2013 and 2012, too. I’ve colour-coded this by year, with It ties together posts on sketchnoting, blogging, choice, learning, writing, plans… Neat.

blog-graph

 

What does this say? It says that even though I write about lots of different things, there are connections between the different topics, and the biggest tangle in the middle has more than 320 nodes. I have lots of blog posts that build on an idea for three or four posts, sometimes spanning several years, even if I don’t think about it in advance. There are 90 such clumps, and it might be good to revisit some of these 2- and 3-post chains to see if I can link them up even further.

Also, it could be interesting to do this analysis with tags, not just year. Hmm… Also, I should dust off my data structures and algorithms, and make my own connected-component analyzer so that I can get a list of the clumps of topics. Good ideas to save for another day!

Sketched Book: Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action – Simon Sinek

Posted: - Modified: | purpose, visual-book-notes

Do you talk about what you do and how you do it? Or do you start with why you do the things you do and why this matters? In Start With Why (2009), Simon Sinek writes about how great companies have a clear purpose and identity that inspires employees and earns customer loyalty. Here’s my sketch of the key points from the book so that they’re easier to review or share. Click on the image to view or download a high-resolution version that you can print.

What are my whys?

  • Visual thinking
    • My selfish reason for visual thinking is because I want to be able to learn, think, and remember more effectively, so that I can live a better life.
    • My altruistic reason for sharing visual thinking is because there are lots of people who enjoy learning from drawings more than text or audio or video. I want to share how I’m learning, but more than that, I want to inspire people to take these techniques and use them for their own. From the resources I share, people can see that you don’t need to draw particularly well in order to use doodling as a way to explore the world or untangle your thoughts.
  • Emacs
    • My selfish reason for Emacs is because I have fun tweaking my editing environment and doing so helps me work better. It tickles my brain. In addition, helping the Emacs community thrive contributes to the longevity of Emacs, which means it will keep growing, which means I probably won’t have to switch to some other tool in the future. (Planning-ahead Sacha plans ahead!)
    • My altruistic reason for Emacs is because I think something incredible happens when you take control of your tools, shaping them to fit your needs, expanding your imagination along the way. I want to help people become intermediate users and power users because I’m curious about what they’ll build for themselves and what they can share with other people. Also, the Emacs community has awesome people. =)
  • Experimenting
    • My selfish reason for experimenting (lifestyle, semi-retirement, business, ideas, etc.) is so that I can figure out what works well for me.
    • My altruistic reason for sharing my experiments is to encourage other people to question their assumptions, look for ways to test their hypotheses, and gradually shape a life that fits them well. Come to think of it, it’s similar to why I like helping people personalize Emacs. If I can help people explore the possibilities in their life, we might come across interesting ideas along the way.

What are your whys? Why do you do what you do, and why does that matter?

Sketched Book: The Inner Game of Work – W. Timothy Gallwey

Posted: - Modified: | visual-book-notes

So I was reading through J. B. Rainsberger's site because I liked his blog post on Productivity for the Depressed, which I mentioned in my post on learning slack. His about page had this nugget that made me stop and think. He wrote:

I have found over the years that many companies request training when they need coaching, and request coaching when they need training. Tim Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Work makes the distinction very well:

  • training focuses on increasing capacity
  • coaching focuses on reducing interference
  • performance is capacity minus interference.

Reducing interference. Huh.

I've been curious about coaching. I haven't quite made the jump because I'm a cheapskate who's accustomed to introspection and who's flexible about motivation. I figured I might as well see how far I can get exploring on my own, yeah?

But I know there are times I get in my own way, and I know that I probably don't know even half of the times that happens. Interference.

So here's what W. Timothy Gallwey's The Inner Game of Work says:

I like this book. The author shares many examples of how paying attention to tiny details can help you learn more effectively, and how a coach's role isn't to provide answers but rather to help draw the student's awareness to the right things and encourage them to trust in their own learning process. The book is useful not only for individual change but also for group change.

The Self 1 / Self 2 distinction resonated with how I've been thinking about motivation. It reminds me a little of the driver (Self 1) / elephant (Self 2) metaphor used in Chip and Dan Heath's Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard. The answer to internal conflict isn't “try harder,” it's to understand better and give yourself the time and attention you need.

I'm paying closer attention to the skills I want to develop. I'm practising more deliberately and with more focus. And when my Self 1 pipes up with “Shouldn't you be doing something else instead?” or “Let's go find someone with all the answers who can tell us what to do!”, I tell it, “It's okay. Self 2's got this. We're learning how to learn, and everything is going to be okay.”

This still leaves me uncertain about getting an actual coach instead of asking myself questions from books. Since I can see big areas for improvement even on my own, I figure I'd go for the low-hanging fruit and keep going until I hit diminishing returns. Maybe someday. In the meantime, this book has given me a few things to think about.

If you're curious, you can check out more reviews of this book on Amazon: The Inner Game of Work: Focus, Learning, Pleasure, and Mobility (affiliate link)

Exploring sketchnote colour styles

Posted: - Modified: | drawing, sketches, visual

I'm working on expanding my sketchnote colour vocabulary. I want to go beyond tweaking colour schemes and the occasional coloured sketch (both from Jan 2014). Since comparing different examples is a great way to develop opinions (July 2014), I figured I'd review the Evernote clippings I'd tagged with technique:colour in order to roughly classify them by type of technique.

2014-12-01 Colouring inspiration guide - drawing

2014-12-01 Colouring inspiration guide – drawing

Here's the list of links to the sketches themselves:

I thought about the different styles, and I picked five to practise with: decorations, accent text, toned text, background, and flood. I took this black-and-white sketchnote draft I made of The Inner Game of Work (W. Timothy Gallwey, 2000; Amazon affiliate link).

2014-12-01 The Inner Game of Work - base

and I coloured it in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro with liberal use of layers. Here are the results:

Of the styles I tried, I think I like the toned text one the most. It feels the most put-together while still being different from my usual highlighting style. I should play around with this a bit more to see whether blue/red makes a difference here, though.

2014-12-01 The Inner Game of Work - W. Timothy Gallwey

2014-12-01 The Inner Game of Work – W. Timothy Gallwey

This is also a handy way to practise nonjudgmental awareness, as suggested by the book. =) If I pay attention to how other people do things and how I do things, I can't help but learn more along the way.

I hope other people find this useful!

Sketched Book: The Stoic Art of Living: Inner Resilience and Outer Results – Tom Morris

| philosophy, visual-book-notes

Tom Morris' The Stoic Art of Living: Inner Resilience and Outer Results (2004) collects easy-to-read quotes from Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. The author glues the quotes together with commentary, providing context and suggestions for interpretation.

I like the author's quotes from ancient philosophers, as other translations can feel stuffy. It's a decent overview of interesting thoughts, and you can follow the ideas to their sources. The book can feel a little light, though. There's something about the succession of quotes and topics that makes me feel like I'm bobbing up and down on a surface.

For comparison, I feel that William Braxton Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life (2009) goes into greater depth for fewer concepts. Ryan Holiday's The Obstacle is the Way reads more like a modern self-help book inspired by Stoicism, without as many quotes as this book.

If you've read a lot about Stoicism (and especially from the three philosophers featured here), you probably won't find a lot of new ideas here. However, you might pick up some good phrasings and ways to think about those ideas. As Pierre Hadot wrote in Philosophy as a Way of Life: “Ancient philosophy was designed to be memorized, so that it could be ‘at hand' when we are confronted with tumultuous situations.” Maybe you'll find the quotes in this book easy to hang on to. Enjoy!

If you want, you can check out the books on Amazon:

I get a small commission if you buy the books through those links, but getting them from the library is totally okay too. =) Have fun!

Sketched Book: Just F*cking Ship – Amy Hoy, Alex Hillman

Posted: - Modified: | entrepreneurship, productivity, visual-book-notes

Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman wrote, published, and launched Just Fucking Ship in 24 hours, using a Trello board and an outline to quickly whip up this short reminder to stop procrastinating and get something out the door. They're halfway through editing it and will post updates through Gumroad, so if you buy the book, you can watch it evolve.

I've sketched the key points of the book below to make it easier to remember and share. Click on the image to view or download a high-resolution version that you can print or reuse.

The principle I'm focusing on is #7: Start with atoms. I'm comfortable with making small pieces now: an outline, a blog post, a sketch. I'm working on getting better at assembling those pieces into molecules, and eventually I'll be able to turn those molecules into rocketships. Eventually. But in the meantime, I can push more things out there.

I've been sorting out my EPUB/MOBI workflow by putting stuff up on Gumroad, like the Emacs Chat transcript collection. (Incomplete, but that's what updates are for.) This will help me Ship More Stuff.

Today I noticed an opportunity for wordplay. The domain was available, so I jumped on it. Shipped.

Ship. Get your stuff out there, incomplete and in progress, because you'll learn more from the feedback than you will from stewing on it by yourself. And if it flops? Don't worry. You'll do another one, and another one, and another one, and you'll learn.

Want the e-book? You can buy it at Just Fucking Ship (Amy Hoy, Alex Hillman; 2004). You'll get a PDF and updates. (Amusingly, no physical shipping involved.)

Like this sketch? Check out sketchedbooks.com for more. For your convenience, this post can be found at sketchedbooks.com/jfs. Feel free to share – it's under the Creative Commons Attribution License, like the rest of my blog.

(Incidentally, I've quoted Amy Hoy before – see my post on Learning slack for another reflection on writing, productivity, and motivation.)