Recently I’ve finished my first sketchbook!

Of course it’s not the first one I have and not the first one I’ve drawn in (I have plenty of them), but the first I’ve finished. And that’s a big difference.

It took me a year and 8 months to fill. It took consistency - yes, but most of all it took a great mindset shift from being stiff-minded to relaxed-minded.

You see very beautiful and interesting sketchbooks on Pinterest or Substack, and you have some expectations for your own sketchbook even if you know you’re not great at drawing and are ready to learn. But you have a more serious enemy: you have to start something new on every page, and you don’t know what to do. Maybe you have some ideas, but then you don’t know how to start. For me it was a constant struggle, a barrier that kept me from doing at least something.

To be honest, I was desperate - what if I’m not a sketchbook person? What if I’m just not creative? And then I accidentally found a thing that worked.

I had an unproductive habit of spending a long time in bed in the morning, drinking coffee and scrolling through something with pics and letters - you know, like Pinterest or Substack. I knew I needed some time like this to calm my thoughts down, but not as much as I was spending. I felt I was consuming too much. So I decided to dedicate some of that time not to consuming, but to creating. Just like that - just “create”, no matter what, to keep some balance with “consume”. And that’s how I started using my sketchbook as a playground for creating no matter what.

It turned out that for me a sketchbook is neither a visual diary, nor a place for beautiful drawings, nor a place for learning how to draw. It’s for trying things - all kinds of things: writing, drawing, painting, collage, stupid things, purposeless things.

They say it’s hard to create something when there are no limits and no rules, but I didn’t set any rules inside the sketchbook. I have only one rule, and it’s external: I have half an hour before work to spend with my sketchbook, and I have to start something.

The main shift in mindset is not to wait for something to be beautiful, interesting, or even tolerable. You can start drawing or gluing or painting - the result is ugly - and it’s ok. You don’t have to fix it, you don’t have to finish it, you don’t even have to learn from it (although you learn anyway). If you don’t feel like creating something meaningful, you can doodle, write, or just draw lines - ugly lines.

And it suddenly started to work: the sketchbook looked ugly and weird, but gradually I learned to tolerate its (and my!) imperfection and started to create more things, and new pages became more interesting, even more beautiful - not always, and that’s ok.

And now I notice that it changed my approach to the rest of my work too (even my full-time job). It became easier to start new things, to experiment, to show my work to other people - and this is especially important - to correct mistakes and to create new versions of things. Mistakes really hurt when you’re afraid of imperfection. But nothing can hurt you when you have such an ugly sketchbook!