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!

I don't sketchnote every book I read or receive, but sometimes it's good to take some time to think about a book even if I don't agree with everything in it.

This sketch (like practically everything else on my blog) is available under the Creative Commons Attribution License, so feel free to download, share, remix or reuse it. =)

From the title (“Conscious” and “Millionaire,” oh dear), to the name-dropping of quantum physics as a way of justifying a “Law of Attraction,” to the membership site that will be $97/month ($9.97/month if you sign up early), this book clearly belongs to a genre of books I tend to avoid. Those kinds of books are great for a lot of people who need inspiration and push. I'm happy for them. Me, I prefer my business advice delivered with a different approach. But I agree with many things in this book, and I'm looking forward to going through the reflection exercises in depth.

I like how Conscious Millionaire focuses on building a business for profit and purpose. I've been thinking about this because of my experiment with semi-retirement. People want to pay me for things like sketchnotes, book notes, visual coaching, consulting, programming, writing, sharing, illustration… It would be easy to say yes, but that often distracts me from the things I want to explore. One way I compromise is through buying back all the time that I spend earning. My experiments with delegation are paying off. In many cases, these systems let me do more than I could do on my own. And in the rest of my discretionary time, I really like this casual, minimal-commitment, flow-based life. I work on whatever I want to whenever I want to, and I still get stuff done.

My expenses are covered by savings and investments, and I live generally unambitious sort of life. Or a differently-ambitious one, at least–I wanted freedom, so I got it. I actively avoid the hedonic treadmill of consumption. I'm not particularly interested in business for the sake of earning more. I am, however, interested in building systems for leverage so that I can make the world a little better. I think of building businesses as taking the kinds of results that people want from me and packaging the processes so that other people can benefit: customers, team members, other stakeholders, and so on. That would be worth spending time on.

So that's what I'm getting out of this book: thinking about building businesses like those would be like, visualizing larger scales, and moving towards those visions with conscious, focused actions.

Before I dig into those reflections, there's a section in here about people who don't charge enough for their services. I want to explore that a little further.

Unfortunately, some amazingly talented and good-hearted people erroneously think they should not charge when they use their passion, purpose, and strengths to help others. … It results from thinking or believing that it is wrong to charge money whenever your actions express your purpose.

I have no qualms about charging high rates for my consulting. For everything else–especially things that can scale up over years, like books–I like using a free/pay-what-you-want strategy. It always pleasantly boggles me when people happily pay $15 for something they could get for free. Don't worry, it's all part of my evil plan. Mwahahaha. It means ideas spread and tribes grow. I figure that if people like all the free awesomeness, we can harness that good karma for something. In the meantime, I'm learning a lot from people in the process of sharing, and I love the feeling of interacting based on abundance instead of transactions.

Besides, the bottleneck for my scaling up isn't time, or even money. If I earned a hundred times as much from online publishing, or scaled up my consulting to have a higher rate or more hours, what would change? I would probably delegate more so that I could help more people create opportunities for themselves. I can already do that with what I have. So I think the real bottleneck is understanding: learning more about what people need, learning more about what I want to share. You can't throw money at that bottleneck. You can only get through by paying attention.

And that, I guess, is why Conscious Millionare might be worth reading. It's peppered with lots of reflection topics and practical advice. If the community and the coaching takes off, that might be worthwhile as a way to compare notes with other people. Like all self-help books, you gotta get out and push. The one-page summary I put together (see the top of this post) might be handy for remembering key points, but you'll get even further if you do the work. I'm looking forward to starting with those three-year visualizations, and then we'll see where this goes from there. If you pick this up, tell me what you think too.

• Affiliate links (some commission): Conscious Millionaire, paperback – Kindle (seems to be $2.99 at the moment)
• Non-affiliate links: Conscious Millionaire, paperback – Kindle

Disclaimer: I received a review copy from the author, who is an actual millionaire from things that are not books about how to become a millionaire. He started with a trucking company, so that's a point in his favour.