A Letter from Chris Suarez
TAKE OUT YOUR SKETCHBOOK
This week was the first week of school for many Oregon children including my daughter’s. My youngest is extremely excited for a few art classes she signed up for.
She has always loved art, but she started drawing in earnest about a month ago in a brand new sketchbook. By “in earnest” I mean I barely see her without her pencil and that sketchbook. This week she brought it to me, proud and excited to show me that she had filled every page of that book in just two weeks. She flipped through it with me page by page.
Now here was the real story. The comparison of the drawing on the first page with the drawing on the last page was shocking and almost comical. The style, the execution, the detail, the finish. The improvement was wildly noticeable.
I began thinking about this concept of improvement. So, I went back and found an older sketchbook - one that spanned about 12 months of her occasionally drawing - and to be honest, I couldn’t tell the difference in her drawing skill from the first page to the last page. I looked at another book and another. And certainly, there was a bit of an improvement from age seven to eight and age eight to nine. But the improvement was not nearly as noticeable or dramatic over those years as it was in just that single sketchbook that had spanned just the last two weeks.
What was the lesson? Time had certainly passed as she got older and continued sketching in her books, but she was inconsistent at best. As I flipped through the older books, there were plenty of drawings, but she wasn’t passionate about it. She wasn’t drawing every day. It didn’t keep her interest. She wasn’t attempting to get better. She was just showing up to draw occasionally. Dare I say, she drew in it when I told her I wanted her off a device and wanted her to spend time in her craft room.
As adults, in almost any job, we often put in the time. We spent the last 12 months showing up to the office. We opened our laptop each morning and double clicked on our email. We picked up the phone and we made some calls. We closed our laptop each evening and told ourselves we knocked it out. But we are not substantially better today than we were 3 months ago or 6 months ago or a year ago. We haven’t focused on improving. We just turned the page. We have been focused on just getting things done, showing up when someone asks us to, or maybe when we need to.
But there wasn’t a drive to get better.
Truth be told, my daughter wanted to get better at drawing because she has a very close friend that was an incredibly good artist. They were working on a project together and Lilly wanted to show up committed to the “cause”, to pull her weight on the “project”. And so she drew. In the morning. In the afternoon. In the evening. In the kitchen. On her bed. In the car. She drew.
She wanted to get better. She had a reason to get better. She committed to get better. And she worked on getting better every day. It wasn’t even just part of a routine or habit. It was a concerted effort. Now, she’s not an artist. And if she chooses to be one, she has a lot of work ahead of her. But being anything takes concerted effort, consistent work, and constant feedback.
Where in our business are we lacking that? Where in our business could we draw in our sketchbook more consistently?
Is it in our use of questions?
Is it in our presentation of value?
Is it in our understanding and interpretation of the market?
Is it in our scripts and conversations?
If not approached strategically, we could spend countless years passively and incrementally improving. It takes a real reason to want to improve quickly. Condensing the same activity, with high repetition, over a short period of time will lead to exponential growth.
Ub Iwerks drew Mickey Mouse some 700 times a day. Bob Ross painted “happy little trees” every day - on average 6 paintings a day - leading to over 30,000 paintings in his career. Michael Jordan would take 500 jumps shots each practice. Tom Brady throws a few thousand passes every off season.
I’ll take a page out of Lilly’s sketchbook for this lesson. Improvement doesn’t come simply with time on task over time. Real improvement comes down to highly focused and consistent practice over a condensed time period, with the ultimate goal of perfecting our craft in the near term!
Chris
