What blogging and drawing have in common

How many of you remem­ber the first draw­ing class you took? Do you remem­ber how you felt as you moved through the class? Sud­denly, the looked dif­fer­ent, details you never new existed seemed to take over your world. No longer was a tree just a tree, now it was a col­lec­tion of leaves on branches con­nected to larger branches until they got to the trunk, which was then con­nected to the ground. Doors, win­dows and even peo­ple started to show up differently…if you were any­thing like me the entire expe­ri­ence was a bit overwhelming…I remem­ber want­ing to go back to just see­ing blobs!

Soon see­ing the con­nec­tions within every­thing I looked at became sec­ond nature and it took me beyond just draw­ing it allowed me to see the world in a much deeper fash­ion than I would have had I not set out on the adven­ture in the first place. The expe­ri­ence of learn­ing to see was scary I felt the need to judge whether I was see­ing “right” and the more I tried to draw  using “right­ness” as my guide the less what I was draw­ing really looked like what it was and the less will­ing I was to step out of my “right­ness”. It was much eas­ier to say I didn’t know how to draw.

I expe­ri­enced this from dif­fer­ent point of view, while  in another life­time I was teach­ing draw­ing. My stu­dents expe­ri­enced the exact same fears and ten­dency to force their draw­ings into “right­ness”. Remem­ber­ing the upside down draw­ing exer­cise in Betty Edwards’  Draw­ing on the Right Side of the Brain I gave my class Xeroxes of some pretty com­plex images and instructed them to draw what they saw and not to turn the sheet “right side up”.  The col­lec­tive “ahhaaass” of wild eyed amaze­ment that filled the room at the end of the exer­cise was truly inspir­ing. That and other classes never saw the world the same way after the exer­cise … they had seen the error of “right­ness” and went on to draw and design with con­fi­dence know­ing that what they saw was their view of the world.

The Con­nec­tion and the Journey

Now this relates to Blog­ging …how? Well, today I was on a call with John Jantsch (Duck Tape Mar­ket­ing) and author Seth Godin when John asked Seth why he thought start­ing a blog was impor­tant. Seth’s answer was that it helps you see the world in a way you wouldn’t ordi­nar­ily see it and it didn’t mat­ter if any­one read what you wrote because the mere act of writ­ing was trans­for­ma­tive. He pointed out that soon we start to see things in our lives that we want to describe, explain or share, soon we see con­nec­tions where we had not. We start pay­ing atten­tion, start talk­ing with a depth we didn’t know we had. And we have a time in our lives memo­ri­al­ized so we can look back a year or two later and see how far we have come and be happy we took that first step.

Writ­ing like draw­ing is a jour­ney inward and out­ward, we learn about the false­ness of “right­ness” and our world becomes broader. We learn that what we see, what we think and how we talk all adds up to how we are in the world and most impor­tantly that we can grow and change and the world won’t come to an end! Once, we break through that bar­rier we see the world as lim­it­less because we know we are our own author and artist.

That is why or at least one of the most impor­tant rea­son I rec­om­mend that hav­ing a blog is the sin­gu­larly most impor­tant thing you can do to posi­tion your­self to thrive through the eco­nomic and social shifts that are occur­ring and will con­tinue to occur. The other impor­tant thing to do is just START! Don’t worry about whether you will be per­fect or if any­one will read because it doesn’t matter…if you do col­lect read­ers that’s great but in the end what you learn about your­self and how you see the world is worth more than all the read­ers in the world!