People ask me if sketchnoting is my passion. At the risk of losing business because we’ve bought into this myth that your work should be your all-consuming passion—no, actually, it isn’t. Or at least it isn’t my only passion, or even my strongest one.

What I’m really passionate about at this moment is learning. Sketchnotes are an excellent way for me to remember and share ideas. Bonus: I get to connect with speakers, authors, and fellow learners along the way. But the reason why I am focusing on building it as a business is because I want to learn more about marketing and sales. People tell me that my notes of conferences and events are awesome, so it makes sense to learn about marketing and sales in the process of selling something that people can appreciate and value. I sketched more than a dozen businesses I could be in, and this seems as good a place as any to start.

I’m curious about sketchnoting, but I’m even more curious about building businesses. I have a feeling that this must be weird. I think many programmers and artists shun business because it distracts from their work. I don’t see the business-work as all that different from the other things I enjoy – coding, drawing, cooking. I get to learn. I get to tweak. I get to hack. I get to debug. I get to play. I get anxious about accounting and paperwork, but even that is a learning sort of anxious.

People wonder how I can do so many different things. The truth is that it’s the same thing, again and again, and that’s what helps me learn. Find the unity of what you do and what you want to learn, and learning becomes easier.