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)

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.

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

• Highlighter: Sacha Chua
• Decorations: Luigi Mengato
• Toned text: Kazumi Koyama
• Contrasting text: Timothy J. Reynolds
• Accent text: Eva-Lotta Lamm
• Spacer: Makayla Lewis
• Areas: Per Axbom
• Glow: Katharina Bluhm
• Background: Eva-Lotta Lamm
• Flood: ItsLilpeanut
• Text and outlines: Heather Willems
• Colourful outlines and fills: Liisa Sorsa
• Everything: Lynne Cazaly
• Shade: Makayla Lewis
• Shaded cartoon: Hamish Macdonald

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).

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.

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!

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:

• The Stoic Art of Living
• A Guide to the Good Life
• The Obstacle is the Way
• Philosophy as a Way of Life

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!

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.

It occurred to me that Sketched Book is a fun thing to call a visual book summary / sketchnote. So: http://sketchedbooks.com =)

— Sacha Chua (@sachac) December 12, 2014

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.)

Mauro Toselli sent me a few questions for the Sketchnote Army blog, which has been running a series on featured sketchnoters. Naturally, I decided to sketch my answers. ;)

If you're curious, you can check out some of these relevant blog posts:

• Paper, Tablet, and Tablet PC: Comparing tools for sketchnoting
• My evolution as an artist, or why there's hope for you yet
• The Sketchnotes category on my blog
• The Visual Book Notes category on my blog
• Update: Developing thoughts further
• Making the most of paper notes: includes advantages of drawing on paper and drawing on the computer

Mastery (by Robert Greene) is a book about discovering your calling, creating your own apprenticeship, and building mastery. It lists different strategies you can take, although the strategy names are often esoteric – you'll need to read the stories in order to figure out what they mean. Anyway, if you do make it through the book, here's a one-page summary to help you remember parts of it.

There are other books on this topic that I like a little more. Cal Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You is more approachable. Still, Mastery was a decent reminder of the value of apprenticeship, and the stories were interesting. I particularly liked the anecdote about Michael Faraday (as in Faraday's law and Faraday cages), who apparently used sketchnotes to network with Humphry Davy. Faraday took copious, well-organized notes of Davy's lectures, and gave them to him as a gift. That started a mentoring relationship, and Faraday became Davy's lab assistant and amanuensis. Some interesting details can be found at Science Shorts and Academia.edu . I think that picking up yet another historical role model for awesome note-taking made reading Mastery worth it for me. =)

In March's meetup for Visual Thinkers Toronto, we listened to TED talks, practised sketchnoting/graphic recording, and compared our notes. Here's how I drew the talks:

From Bran Ferren – To create for the ages, let's combine art and engineering

From Jamie Oliver – Teach every child about food

I liked how one of the participants added extra pizzazz to the visual metaphors from the talks, exaggerating the words to make them even more memorable. For example, with Jamie Oliver's talk, he turned the part about labels into a quick sketch of a Can of Death. Other people drew with more colours

It was interesting to see different levels of abstraction for the same topic. Someone made a poster that focused on the key message of the talk. Most people captured 5-10 points or so. I drew with the most detail in our group, I think. I like it; that lets me retrieve more of the talk from memory. I liked how other people switched between different colours of markers. Someday I'll get the hang of doing that. In the meantime, highlighting seems to be fine.

Try sketchnoting those talks or other presentations you find online. I'd love to compare notes!