Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Find Your Flow (Day 1): Omega Red pt. 1 (of I think 2)

Again, following along while watching one of Jim Lee’s streams. I’m guessing this isn’t the best way to practice, but it’s fun. (And it being fun means I’ll actually practice, which might be more important in the long run.)

I’ll try to post each day here with some thoughts as I go along. First thought: I don’t think this one will come out as well as the Magneto one, but that’s okay. Just getting some reps in.

Finding my flow (in 30 minutes each day)

Will you finish this post?

Will I even finish writing and hit “publish”1 on it?

If you’re reading this, the answer of course is yes. But in a lot of cases lately I haven’t been finishing up creative projects. I want to work on finishing that.

As a step toward improving that, I signed up for Karen Abend’s “Find Your Flow” program. I’m going to try to focus on it for this month. It’s 30 days of making and sharing creative work. Here’s what I’m aiming to do. (It’s outlined in the card above.)

Minimum (30 mins): Make something on the iPad with the Pencil

For 30 minutes each day, I’ll set a timer and then put that plastic nib to glass. Things I’m likely to make:

  • Sketches (Procreate or Apple Notes)
  • Storyboards, lettered quotes, or mind maps (GoodNotes)
  • Animated doodles (Keynote)

It’ll be a good reminder of just how much you can create with 30 minutes.

I’ve been an iPad and Pencil enthusiast for a while. I use it just about every day, so I thought it’d be good to increase the focus on this.

I also want to start drawing more. I drew Magneto a couple weeks ago. (Following along and trying to copy Jim Lee’s strokes in one of his Twitch streams.) It was the first time in a long time that I just sat down and drew for more than, say, 15 minutes.

I remembered how much I enjoy drawing. So I thought it’d be good to try to get back into that practice.

My first instinct was to try and do it for an hour, but I know that there will just be some days that I don’t hit that.

Medium (30 mins + 15 mins): Make a video

With an additional 15 minutes, I’ll have time to set up the recording and then create the time-lapse in ScreenFlow. I’ll share the timelapse in the FB group instead of the static image. I’ll also share the video on Instagram.

I expect to be able to do this about twice a week.

Maximum (30 mins + 15 mins + 30 mins): Make a blog post

Once a week, I’ll have an additional 30 minutes to write a blog post about my progress. I’m considering making it a round up of whatever I made that week. Still thinking through this. I guess it’d look something like this post, but with more drawings and things.

Anyway, that’s the plan. I’ll keep you updated here.

And I’m glad you finished this post.

Notes on “The Power of Starting Something Stupid”

I hope you don’t think it was dumb to start reading this.But hold on, you might find some power in it.You’ll definitely find some power in reading The Power of Starting Something Stupid by Richie Norton. Here were some takeaways.

  • No time? No experience? No money? No problem! I’m with this with the caveat that you’re not currently living paycheck to paycheck. That can definitely be a problem. Time-wise, I always think back to how the creator of del.iciou.us built it in 15-30 minute blocks of time that he had free from day to day. One chunk at a time. As experience goes, you’ll probably need it to get some specific job at some specific company. But if you’re starting up something on your own, there’s plenty to learn by doing. After all, you have to at least learn enough to move from “don’t know what you don’t know” to “know what you don’t know”.
  • What if you were 80? Richie Norton talks about Jeff Bezos’s approach to prioritizing. When you’re trying to start out and create things, you’re going to have plenty of ideas that you think are worth pursuing. You’ll pick one, work on it for a few weeks, then start questioning if one of those other ones was better to focus on. So you start working on that one, work on it for a few weeks, then start questioning and on and on. Instead, try thinking about when you’re 80 and looking back on this time in your life. Which of those activities would you think “Hey that was a great use of time”? It’s probably the right one to pursue. It’s at least another tool in your decision-making toolbox.
  • Digital vs. film photography—both are good, both are bad. One of my favorite sections involved describing two different photographers. One of them switched entirely to digital when the jury was still out and it looked like it might just be a passing trend. (Imagine if you triple downed on 3D movies after seeing Avatar.) The other one has stuck to film photography even now. Both of them are successful. Richie Norton credits it to their sticking to their authentic selves. If the photographer who truly loved film switched to digital and was half-hearted in it then he might not succeed. And the same is true if the digital pioneer just half-heartedly stuck to film.

Anyway, those are just a few takeaways from the book. I enjoyed it. I originally picked it up after seeing Benjamin Hardy recommend it (along with a few others) as something to listen to in the morning for continual motivation.I’m trying to figure out my own stack of books to use for that. So far it’s probably something like… Essentialism, Barking Up the Wrong Tree, The Slight Edge, and… actually this sounds like a different post. So stay tuned for that.

In the meantime, go work on something stupid. It’s worth it.

A case against flow

You enjoy flow states.

So do I. So does everybody. It’s a great state to be in to be. “The Zone” might be one of the best places you can get into. And you can get into it at a desk.

But it might not lead to the best quality work. At least not all the time. I’m currently reading Robert Martin’s Clean Coder. My general thought was that programmers want to get into flow states as much as possible. I was surprised to see that it might not be the case. From Clean Coder:

Here’s a little hint from someone whose been there and back: Avoid the Zone. This state of consciousness is not really hyper-productive and is certainly not infallible. It’s really just a mild meditative state in which certain rational faculties are diminished in favor of a sense of speed.

I was surprised by this, because programmers (I’m generalizing) hate meetings and love getting focused blocks of time. That’s probably still true, and the difference here is what I pictured as a good use of that focused block of time.

It’s great to hear another perspective. Uncle Bob’s forgotten more about programming than I’ll learn in my lifetime. I’ve programmed on an off through my life, professionally and not. I’ve consistently found programming to be one of the most effective ways to get into flow.

In Deep Work, Cal Newport writes about finding focused blocks of time. As expected, flow comes up:

This, ultimately, is the lesson to come away with from our brief foray into the world of experimental psychology: To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction.

Flow is satisfying, but it might not be the end-all, be-all if the output is writing good code.

In Clean Coder, Robert Martin points to pair programming as one of the best ways to keep quality high. And it’s almost as anti-flow as you can get. But he isn’t entirely anti-flow. From Clean Coder:

Well, that’s not quite true. There are times when the Zone is exactly where you want to be. When you are practicing. But we’ll talk about that in another chapter.

I haven’t got to that other chapter yet. So I’m interested in getting to that part to see what his take is on flow and practice.

Coming into this, my understanding is that it’s the opposite: practice is when you shouldn’t be in flow. Practice should be hard. You shouldn’t be entering the zone when you’re practicing. You should be failing, getting feedback to know how to fix the error, then trying again. Over and over.

I’m disappointed to find out that, hey, that might feel good but it doesn’t lead to the best results. But it does make more sense as I’m writing this and thinking more about it.

If you’re playing basketball, you can get in flow by playing pick-up games at your YMCA all the time. But you won’t get as good as if you drilled and worked with a coach in a non-flow setting.

Anyway, I’ll continue sharing thoughts about this in a future post—aka I need to actually get to that other chapter first.

Life Lessons from Watching Videos of Jim Lee Drawing

Over the weekend, I watched a bunch of videos with Jim Lee drawing. He streams on Twitch (jimlee channel).

I enjoy comics but in no way can I say I’ve been keeping up with them beyond watching the movies. I probably stumbled on Jim Lee videos as recommendations after watching various MCU theory videos. Then I watched, and watched, and watched. And I’m pretty eager to keep watching more.

Not that I want to become an artist, but I’ve been enjoying drawing lately. I enjoy that their art is part of a process. They draw scenes in bigger stories.

I’ve been seeing a lot of good lessons watching interviews with different comics artists. (Oh yeah! Now I’m remembering that a lot of these interview recommendations were probably kicked off by watching a Todd McFarlane interview with Complex.)

Oh yeah, one of the biggest lessons seems to just be applying a blue collar mentality to the creative field. If you’re paid to do this, you’re not sitting around waiting for inspiration. You’ve got to get your 22 pages out that month.

I made that video above to talk about a few other lessons from Jim Lee:

  • Draw from your elbow—in one of his tutorial videos at a conference, he says “draw from your elbow”. Meaning that early on, focus on the overall layout and not the details. That resonates a lot with some of the design and writing I’ve been thinking about lately. I easily get caught up in details that don’t matter (yet).
  • Need some ink? Break your pen—in one of his streams, he starts out saying he only has a pen so he won’t be able to do big solid blocks of black. It’ll be a lot of cross hatching. Eventually he decides to just take the cartridge out and squeeze ink onto the paper to start fingerpainting.
  • Draw glass well—there’s a series of videos from the 90s where Stan Lee interviews different artists and then they show their process while Stan asks questions. (Another thing: Stan Lee does a great job asking questions that the viewer is probably thinking. I’m guessing he already knows the answer to some of them.) Anyway at one point Stan Lee says that Jim Lee is known for his glass. I’m not sure if that was just a joke or not, but Jim goes on to explain that the best artists care about the small things. Their passion goes through all the layers so that they care to draw a broken window right. To remember to put broken glass pieces on the ground.

How you do anything is how you do everything. So draw with your elbow and finish with good pieces of broken glass.

As mentioned, Jim Lee continues to share his process on Twitch. It’s pretty amazing that the internet makes it possible to watch Jim Lee making Kirby Krackles in the 90s and then again 25 years later.

I tried following along in Procreate while watching one of the streams where he draws Magneto.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BjBJy3AgSM3/

This is probably one step above tracing, but I’m pretty happy with it!