What grabbed your attention first — the image above or the big chunk of text below?
Odds are, the image grabbed your eye first. It's probably the main reason you're reading the text in the first place!So go back to the image for a minute.Really look at it. READ it.
Now, read the paragraph below:
Visual thinking makes complex information simple, brings clarity to confusing communication, makes the common unique, turns the passive into the active and apathy into interest. With visual thinking, the clumsy becomes elegant, the impersonal becomes personal, the dry becomes juicy, "Yes, but..." is replaced with "Yes, and...", trial and error turns to trial and learn, the cold becomes warm, and the separate become unified.
That paragraph and the accompanying image say the same thing!Most people find the information easier to absorb through the image than the paragraph.They're able to absorb that information faster and remember it longer. And, it's a lot more fun!
Check out One Squiggly Line'sAbout Visual Thinking page to learn more.
Creativity & Visual Thinking: Love is Powerful!
Do you know what love feels like?
Does it make your heart skip several beats? Does it make you feel nervous? Excited? Content? Happy? Calm?
Love feels different for everyone - we each have our own love language. It’s our goal to identify how we respond and react to love.
In order to do so, we must become more familiar with ourselves.
This doesn’t just apply to romantic relationships. This applies to all aspects of our lives - our jobs, our friends, ourselves, as well as our significant others.
It’s important to fall in love with our lives, or at least certain aspects of them, as our lives are too short for mediocracy. Our lives are too short for mediocre careers, hobbies and relationships.
We must not settle for something that doesn’t stir our heart. We must try and live our lives in accordance with our passions.
In order to find love, we must know what we’re passionate about.
This all takes takes time, experience, and even failure. We must not be afraid of encountering new experiences, as every new and unfamiliar experience is valuable in helping us learn more about ourselves.
How are you going to learn more about yourself and your love language? What experiences do you want to have this year? What areas do you want to grow in?
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Visual Thinking: Adopting New Perspectives
I took an Uber home today and the driver dropped me off at a location near my apartment that I’m not used to getting dropped off at. Initially I was a bit frustrated because I had to walk a couple yards further than normal.
But, as I was walking, I started to appreciate it because it gave me a new perspective that I needed at the time. It was mid-week, and I had been going through my same routine without too much thought - wake up, go to work, go home, etc. This small instance changed my mindset for a moment and bumped me out of my normal routine. The scenery had changed, and I saw my apartment from a new perspective which I hadn’t seen before.
This brought me back to when I first moved here. To my mindset, and to the excitement I had. I felt different, as if I adopted a new pair of lenses. My day felt different from the other ones, and it got me thinking that I need to break more patterns.
So I decided to go to the gym. I also sat on the bench at my apartment, peacefully enjoying nature. And I prayed for the first time in awhile.
I decided to break up my usual routine, and instead fill it with new perspectives.
It was refreshing.
I didn’t feel so robotic. I felt alive.
It’s important to change our routines from time to time. New perspectives bring forth creative thinking patterns.
If we stay on the same path everyday, chances are we’ll tend to have the same thoughts as we’ve always had. If we don’t evaluate our lives on a regular basis, we can easily fall into the trap of forming habits that are not conducive to a creative life.
We must evaluate and edit our lives on a frequent basis.
“The only thing you sometimes have control over is perspective. You don't have control over your situation. But you have a choice about how you view it.”
-Chris Pine
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Visual Thinking - The Artist's Mindset: An excerpt
“Art is not limited to what one can create with their hands - that is far from art. Art is taking an idea, an experience, an encounter or a thought, and making it somehow visible. This visible form can come in the way one dresses, sings, writes, shops, speaks, or listens to music.”
-Meredith Illig
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Creativity & Visual Thinking: Go for Quantity!
Creativity demands quantity. Creativity comes from being exposed to a lot of different stimuli. It comes from having a lot of different experiences. It’s being able to draw from each of these experiences, and the unique reservoir associated with it. When we have a lot of different experiences, we can continue to build upon new and old ideas with the wisdom we’ve gained.
In order to come up with a great idea, we need to have large quantity of ideas to pick and choose from, and experiment with. It’s easy to pick the first ideas that come to our mind, and it’s oftentimes the case that we stop after the first few ideas and fail to go further.
We need to open our minds to more ideas. We can’t stop at our first ideas. Our first ideas are typically generic, and already thought of before. The more ideas we come up with, and the more we suspend our judgement, the more novel our ideas are. We must stretch our minds to think further, and to suspend any judgement.
This is particularly helpful with brainstorming - of trying to come up with a good idea, whether for a work project or a personal project.
The creative mind is the mind that doesn’t stop at the first idea.
Visual thinking is a simple way to increase the amount of knowledge that sticks in your brain. And the more knowledge you have, the more building block you have to create with.
Contact me to bring the power of visuals to your next meeting, events, or project.
Creativity: We All Have It — Reignite Yours!
Think back to when you were a kid. Do you remember your personality? Do you remember any quirks you had?
And if you can’t remember that far back, think about the little kids you know, whether family, friends, or even strangers.
They all have one thing in common - they’re at the the most creative stage in their life.
Children are at a stage where they haven’t been conditioned to many routines and norms. They are completely themselves - unfiltered and raw.
...Always asking why
...Not caring too much of what others think about their appearance or their actions
...Saying whatever comes to mind
...Not holding back any ounce of laughter
As we grow older, eventually we don’t question as much
Eventually the routines of life become mainstream
Eventually our imagination grows stale
We hold back our laughter more and more
And eventually we lose the perspective of what could be in exchange for what is
Creativity gets taught out of us
Our teachers telling us to write in 12 pt. Arial font.
Our parents not having enough patience to answer all of our why’s.
Our own inflicted judgements
We become afraid of failure. Of messing up. Of saying the wrong thing. Of being judged.
To the point where we’ve lost ourselves in exchange for a mask that society has handed us.
We have unlearned creativity.
We all have the ability to be creative, but it's our job to learn it again.
Visual thinking is a great way to jumpstart your creativity, whether personally or professionally, alone or with a group. Simply watching someone else create something can inspire creative thinking and actions. Contact me to bring the power of visuals to your next event, meeting, or project and reclaim your creativity!
Visual Thinking: Get it! Grab it! Go for it!
While visual thinking makes things simple, it certainly does not dumb them down. Part of the simplicity comes from removing unnecessary parts, leaving behind only what you need to work with. That allows you to really see exactly what it is you do have to work with. This often leads to that, "Oh, now I get it!" moment when everything finally seems to fall into place and make sense.
Once you can see things more clearly, you are able to make better decisions. Sometimes, things become so obvious it doesn't even really feel like you're making a decision at all. The right choice just jumps right at you. Or if you do need to think about it for a minute, it's much easier for you to grab it and run with it.
Check out One Squiggly Line's About Visual Thinking page to learn more.
Visual Thinking & Creativity: Use something in a new way
There's a myth out there that highly creative people just sit around and wait for inspiration to strike. Like a great big lightening bolt from the sky. Or a soft whisper from a mystical muse.
Truth is, creativity is not quite so passive. It is an active process. And there's a science to it, not just an art. There are even formulas, methods, and procedures for generating ideas and, equally importantly, evaluating them. One way to get a new idea or find a creative solution is to use something in a new way.
Sometimes, I take stacks of business cards with me, like if I'm working at a conference or event. Regular rubber bands seemed to rip several of the cards, which meant I had fewer to give out. So, I looked around and found something different to hold my business cards together — stretchy ribbon hair ties. Not only do they hold my business cards together, they look better, too!
When it comes to creativity, the best ideas can be inside the box, not outside of it. You just need to use them in a new way.
Visual Thinking & Visual Notes: Live Graphic Recording
Hand-drawn visuals are far friendlier than standardized fonts and stock photos. And hand-drawn visuals are even more inviting when created live, right there where everyone can see.
The drawing above was created during the opening remarks at the Women in Cyber Security conference the end of March. It was then displayed near registration to welcome late-comers. Not a high resolution file shown here, just taken with my iPhone in the moment.
To see the whole set of visual notes from the Women in Cyber Security conference, check out this Flickr album.
Visual Thinking & Creativity; Visualize it richly & colorfully
Visualizing things richly and colorfully leads to more creative thinking. You probably visualize things more than you realize, without really thinking about it. So you already have some visual thinking skills. But how do you become better at visualizing things on purpose?
Try this:
Go to a hardware store or someplace that sells paint. First, pick a paint sample color card that matches your shirt. That's a warm-up, starting with something very concrete and right in front of you — your shirt.
Then, look for a paint sample color card that matches something at home. It could be a different shirt, a piece of furniture, your walls. Whatever you choose, you will need to picture it very clearly in your mind so you can "see" the color.
Paint sample cards are usually free, so you can take home the ones you think are the closest and see how well you did. The more you practice, the better you get!
Check out One Squiggly Line's About Visual Thinking page to learn more.