Discovering Truth and Beauty and Sharing it with others

This post is sketch 900 of Sketchplanations, according to my numbering. To mark that, I've been reflecting and wanted to share what I've learned from over a decade of this project.

It's my longest post, but I created a version you can listen to, or even watch 🙈, if you prefer. And if you don't want to listen, watch or read a long article, I hope you can just enjoy the sketch of Brenda Ueland's lovely wisdom.

Listen/watch reflections on a decade of Sketchplanations on YouTube

Still here? Let's go:

After the first year of one-a-day, I've done one sketch a week, 52 a year, for over a decade without missing. I've tried to stick to James Clear's "Never miss twice" rule by first not missing once.

With a few years of experience in creating and sharing under my belt, I wanted to share some thoughts about this project, about sharing your work, and about creative freedom.

I watched a talk by Jack Conte a few weeks ago . Jack is the founder of Patreon but was first—and still is—a passionate, talented musician full of energy and drive. The whole talk is interesting—he called it the Death of the Follower. But what drove me to create this was some of what he said towards the end, kind of his "advice to creatives."

I want to talk about two things: The why and what of creating, and second, what sort of project a creative project should be.

I've been lucky in so many ways with this project:

It was accidental, so I wasn't staking my future or my ego on it.

It was a side project—until this year—so I wasn't staking my paycheck and whether we could pay the mortgage and support our family on it.

And I stumbled on a simple formula that's given me great permission, licence, and scope to explore everything that interests me.

Without getting too grandiose about it, my conjured up tag line of "explaining the world one sketch at a time" is a huge mission, one that never really ends. But it also allows me to cover whatever aspects of our fascinating world that I want, in the way that I want.

Cartoonists also have a tremendous scope to create, but they usually have to make people laugh. Fortunately for me, I don't have to do that each time. I can cover serious things, or sensitive things, or fun things, or complex things in whichever way I want.

I'm also lucky that my drawings don't have to be good. Sometimes, I look back on older ones and cringe, but usually, I don't cringe at what I'm sharing, only my drawing of it.

Just a year or so into this project, when I complained to a good friend about not being the best artist, he simply replied, "Yes, but it's the content." It really stuck with me, and it's grown on me over time. The drawings may not be as slick as other artists. Still, the content and topics I tackle are hopefully valuable, or at least interesting, in themselves. So people, I think, forgive me when I don't get it quite right and it's a bit cheesy, or my people are a bit janky.

Part of the luck in my formula is that it's become a unique collection in style and approach. The more I've created, the more unique it becomes.

I am regularly asked how I choose and find topics to include. I only recently found the answer that really nails it.

On my website, I've joked, "Sooner or later, everything I know will be on Sketchplanations." And in some ways, that's true—at least for the useful stuff I know.

At first, sketches were a combination of serendipity in what happened to me that was interesting this week and a process of trawling through my experience and memory for the things I've found interesting and helpful over the years. And they were also what I found myself using or thinking about regularly.

Over the years, I've trained myself constantly to be on the lookout for topics. Sometimes I see, or read, or remember something that I instantly know I'll sketch at some point. I add it to my list, and those that I'm excited about and have the clearest view on are those I tackle the next week.

But that doesn't really address the question of what makes it into the list and what doesn't. What ties these together? The answer I found most profoundly hit when I read a wonderfully opinionated book, "If you Want to Write ," by Brenda Ueland. Brenda says: 

And what is the purpose of existence… but to discover truth and beauty and…share it with others.

— Brenda Ueland

And it was suddenly clear to me. What makes it into the list is when I've found something that to me was a truth, an insight, an aha, a new piece of knowledge, something beautiful or fascinating that I realised. I had to feel I'd discovered something. Sketchplanations has given me the wonderful vehicle to act on the impulse to share it with so many others.

I usually consider myself knowledgeable about most sketches but an expert in few. But like the age-old realisation that the teacher learns more than the students, I can tell you that there's nothing like spending a day or more a week diving into a topic, thinking how to visualise it, spending several hours sketching it and then writing about it to cement them in my own brain. I'm no doubt the one who's benefited the most from this project.

It's not too long in a conversation with me before I might struggle not to interrupt with a "There's a sketch for that."

And this diverse collection of 900 sketches therefore, in many ways, reflects everything I find interesting and helpful or beautiful in the world, and so is a reflection of me. In that sense it's really rather personal.

Which brings me to the second aspect of what I want to share here.

I'm very lucky that many people provide suggestions for sketches they'd like to see. I've worked in design and user experience for many years. Having direct feedback of what your audience would like to see is extremely valuable. I've tackled some of them, but too few.

I find that I'm not a very good judge of sketches that will turn out to be popular—at least in the short run.

I send out new sketches each week in my newsletter. It's funny that even though I send out 10s of 1,000s of emails each month there's relatively little feedback of what people think about each new sketch.

I started posting sketches on social channels many years ago to allow more people to discover them and make it easier for people to share them.

And I post sketches on my website, so that people can find them in the future and get the answers they want when they're searching for something or looking for something to use in their own projects.

Posting on social media is interesting as, with likes, comments, shares and follower numbers I seemed to have much more feedback about whether what I did was interesting to people or not. Certainly as compared to the newsletter where there's no lightweight, low commitment way, save writing me a direct email, to let me know if it was helpful. I love receiving them by the way.

Once you start getting feedback on what seems to be popular however, you have a double-edged sword. For example, what if there's some truth or beauty that I want to share that is unlikely to be popular? Or what if there are things that will be popular that I don't find to be a truth or beauty that speaks to me or makes me want to share it.

If I was a business I think the answer is fairly clear—you create the content that your audience wants to see so people come to your site and buy your wares.

But what if a project reflects you personally? And what if it's an amateur project, created for the love of it rather than the $ of it?

I have tackled some sketches of topics that people asked for and that sometimes people have paid me for. What I found is that very quickly it begins to feel like a job. It's fine to do, but they're not always something that excites me.

For me, who fortunately for so long wasn't depending on it for my primary income, I found it very quickly took the joy out of the task. Why would I use my spare time—and often time from my family—to execute something that I wasn't excited about and didn't find joy in and didn't find a little spark or fire in sharing with others?

Don't get me wrong. Reaching more people with my work is great. I came round to marketing when I kept hearing "Wow, I just discovered your site. I love it!" 7 years after I'd been working on it. These people could have been following from the beginning if I'd just reached them earlier.

That was part of the impetus to create a physical book and hopefully reach a new set of people in a different way. This same feeling also drives me to work on making the website better—as the saying goes: "Business without marketing is like winking at a girl in the dark." What's the point of having good content if people can't find it? It seems a shame.

Well, one way I could reach more people, I think of, as "feeding the machine."

What I should do is find topics that have high search volume, topics that are topical or current, topics that draw a lot of engagement, topics that may be easy to grasp or share with others, and I should and do those. I should check search queries, watch what others are doing, and look for the content I post that creates the most interactions and create more content to match.

Simple messages without nuance or complexity are easy to share and take in and hit repost. But I can't bring myself to do it.

The things I keep wanting to share are my version of what Brenda called the "purpose of existence"—discovering truth and beauty and sharing it with others.

So I've resisted too much of feeding the machine. I'm sure it's cost me. I'm sure there are a million ways I could grow my followers faster, get more subscribers, get more content engagement, exploit new channels, write traffic heavy content. But I don't want to do those if it means I can't share the truths and beauty that I find valuable.

So, at sketch 900, I'm sharing these reflections as the struggles of a creator trying to understand the point and value of their project.

And to say that I plan to keep this project idiosyncratic, unexpected, and personal. Or, in some ways, a reflection of me. This will at least keep it unique.

I know that you won't find it all speaks to you—you're not me after all. But for the times when I do get it right, when you can see the truth or beauty that I'm trying to share, even if it's just you and me who appreciate it, I hope that will keep it worth it.

Jack Conte talks passionately and knowledgeably about the importance of building deep connections with small numbers of true fans . He built Patreon , through which I've benefited so much. And a deep personal thank you to everyone who is now supporting and has supported me in the past. And I've decided I'd rather, slowly, create a deeper, more personal connection with the people, perhaps like you, who have enjoyed my project, by sharing the truth or beauty that I want to share than to feed the machine and create what the machine says is needed.

Selfishly, I hope that this will also keep it interesting for me even if it may not do the rounds of the internet as well.

Thanks everyone who's visited, enjoyed, talked about, listened to the podcast or shared my work over the years. So many of you have been generous in sharing and singing the praises of this little project.

There is of course still so much more to explain about this world. Maybe 900 is a lot of topics sketched—or maybe, I'm just getting started.

Thanks for being part of the journey. See you at 1,000.

And...

If you made it this far, it'd be amazing if you considered helping to get to 1,000 by supporting me at any amount on Patreon 🙏