Did you ever get in trouble in school for doodling on your homework or class notes? Hopefully, your teacher did not deter you from continuing to doodle because doodling is an amazing way to stimulate ideas and bring your experiences, impressions, and insights to life. Many of the million dollar ideas are in fact, originally doodled on napkins!
Great ideas like the Harry Potter book series, the Discovery channel’s Shark Week were originally sketched on napkins.[1] And the founding of Southwest Airlines was also originated on the back of a cocktail napkin:[2]
While you don’t need a fancy sketchpad to get the job done, carrying around your own basic sketchpad can be a great way to let your creativity flow whenever you have a great idea.
Doodling calms your emotion and makes you open up to more refreshing thoughts.
Credit: CakeSpy
Since doodling is expressive, creative, and spontaneous, your mind and emotions become highly focused. Doodling changes your state of mind and emotions, while helping you make new connections. The process is somewhat similar to journaling or meditation, but using your visual sense instead.
Jesse Prinz, a philosophy professor at City University of New York Graduate Center who studies doodling in the context of research on art said,[3]
“Doodling is an enjoyable activity, and that positive emotion makes us more creative by opening us up to more exploratory avenues of thought. If you spend half an hour doing something creative, when someone gives you a problem you will think about it in fresh ways.”
Since doodling distracts people from consciously thinking about a problem, it allows for a “subconscious incubation of the solution” like how sleeping works.
People who don’t experience great benefits from journaling or meditation may find that doodling is a better fit for them. We each have preferred ways of synthesizing information. For people who tend to think more visually, doodling can supercharge their creative process while soothing stressful emotions.
You don’t need to be good at drawing to doodle, anyone can do it.
Credit: Craftsy
Many of us were discouraged from drawing at some point in our lives because we were told that we just weren’t good enough artists or that drawing wasn’t an important activity. We may have even been scolded for doodling in class, when the act of doodling actually helped us stay focused! While nearly all children naturally draw and create, many adults struggle to reconnect with this spontaneous desire to draw and doodle.
The good news is that doodling is open to everyone. Doodling expert Sunni Brown who wrote the book The Doodle Revolution, emphasizes that,[4]
a person’s “perceived skill has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the learning experience for the doodler.”
Doodling is less about artistic quality than it is about the act of creating and expressing.
With that in mind, don’t worry about the artistic quality of your doodles. Instead, focus on enjoying the experience of doodling. In that joyful and spontaneous state, you will be amazed at the new, creative ideas that come to your mind.
Doodles really can be anything, from signatures to abstract patterns and cartoons. Just grab a pen and doodle on the napkin or your notebook when you’re feeling kind of stuck.
And who knows, one of those doodling sessions may just lead you to the next million dollar idea.
Featured photo credit: REUTERS/Alessia Pierdomenico via google.com.hk
