Why You Should Ditch the Keyboard and Pick Up a Pencil Now and Then
By: Donald M. Rattner
Tags: Creativity, Innovation, Design, Psychology, Self Improvement

Our love affair with all things digital has brought many great inventions into the world. But in our enthusiasm for computerized products and services we could be losing sight of an extraordinarly powerful tool for teasing out the kind of creative insights that fueled the technology revolution in the first place —namely, the hand-drawn doodle, sketch, or snippet.

There are two arguments for incorporating this tool into your creative arsenal: one, research shows that ideas can flow from hand to mind as fluidly as from mind to hand, and two, visual thinking comes more naturally to us than language-based cognition.

The nice thing is, you don’t have to be Leonardo da Vinci to wield a pencil or its modern equivalent to positive effect. In fact, the person who invented one of the most popular products on earth had no formal training in drawing, yet was able to harness pencil and paper to propel his invention from concept to market. Here is his story.

A Milkshake, An Inventor, and An Idea

Sometime in the 1930s a man sat with his young daughter inside a San Francisco soda fountain called the Varsity Sweet Shop. He watched as the counterman set down a milkshake in front of her, two paper straws poking up from the tall glass containing the frothy liquid. The girl beamed happily up at the treat.

But there was a problem: how to drink it? The tops of the straws stood well above the little girl’s head. She could try elevating her diminutive frame by placing her hands on the counter and raising herself up, but it would be difficult to sustain the pose for too long.

She could grasp the glass with two hands and lower it down to her lap, but it was heavy and uncomfortably cold to the touch. She could bend the straws downward, but the sharp crease resulting would choke off the supply of air and liquid, defeating their purpose. She could ask her father to find a few telephone books to lift her up, except that she might fall off the precarious prop.

In business school, professors call situations of this kind a pain point. A pain point is the moment when someone encounters an obstacle preventing him or her from realizing a goal. Fortunes large and small have been built by people keen enough to discern a pain point afflicting a potential customer base, and then to devise a solution customers were willing to pay for.

Such a person was the girl’s father. His name was Joseph B. Friedman. Friedman was a born inventor; he conceptualized his first product, a lighted pencil, at age fourteen. He was awarded the first of nine eventual US patents at twenty-two.

Fig. 2: Concept sketch for a flexible straw, by Joseph B. Friedman. 1930s. Joseph B. Friedman Papers, 1915–2000, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

Leaving the fountain parlor that day, Friedman went home and played around with an idea bubbling in his head. An inveterate scribbler, he pulled out a piece of paper and pencil, and began to rough out an idea for a straw that would bend over the lip of the glass (Fig. 2).

He also cobbled together a makeshift prototype out of a couple of straws he’d taken from the sweet shop. From these efforts came his concept for the Flex-Straw, the now ubiquitous drinking tube with the ridged section that allows for bending without crimping.

It would take Friedman another decade to manufacture and ship his first order. The Flex-Straw proved such a hit with the market — hospitals especially — that twenty years later he could sell his rights to the invention to a large corporation for a considerable sum.

The story of Joseph Friedman, a young girl, and a milkshake represents a classic case of opportunity meeting preparation. Integral to that story is the role of Friedman’s initial sketch, undoubtedly one of many he produced in the process of inventing a bendable straw. Together these sketches performed four critical functions in fueling his imagination:

1: Idea capture

Ideas can be fleeting. Putting down his initial thoughts rapidly lessened the risk of Friedman’s forgetting them because of the brain’s limited capacity for retaining short-term memories.

2: Idea development

Few ideas are born fully hatched, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Most require considerable refinement in progressing from concept to executable product. In Friedman’s case, his early scratchings would have been followed up with increasingly detailed and precise delineations, culminating in the mechanically drafted documents submitted for his patent application and for machine tooling.

Back of envelope sketches by Joseph B. Friedman. Joseph B. Friedman Papers, 1915–2000, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

3: Idea visualization

Externalizing ideas does several useful things. It gives creatives something they can show others to get critical feedback. It builds a memory warehouse they can consult in the future. And it gives them a powerful tool for convincing others to buy into a creative idea.

Friedman, for instance, was able to raise venture capital for his scheme by showing prospective investors a solution to a tangible problem. Writers do something similar by submitting queries and proposals to literary agents and publishers. Imagine either trying to achieve their ends merely by waving their arms around or talking a good story. Those are the methods of the huckster, not the visionary.

4: Brain and body conditioning

Writing and drawing not only advance a project, they also bolster mental and physical states generally. Numerous investigations indicate that recurring motions of the hand energize regions of the brain associated with creativity and long-term neurological health.

Video produced by my colleague in creativity Chris Dunmire of Creativity Portal.

How to Do It

Develop the skill

Like riding a bicycle, drawing is a skill that anyone can learn. Abundant resources exist to help you get started. Sunni Brown’s The Doodle Revolution, Dan Roam’s The Back of the Napkin, and Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain are just three volumes that come to mind. Online and classroom-based courses are valuable sources of instruction too.

Fig. 3: Notebook of Joseph L. Friedman. 1958. Joseph B. Friedman Papers, 1915–2000, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

Be prepared

Keep the tools for writing and drawing close at hand. Small notebooks and a smartphone outfitted with a stylus are universal favorites, since they can be slipped into a pocket for quick access. A journal on your nightstand and waterproof paper in the shower are excellent substitutes for locations in the home where pockets are commonly in short supply.

Fixed surfaces, whether wall-mounted drawing boards or walls treated with special paints or adhesive panels, are better suited for places where collaboration, instruction, information sharing, and large-scale diagramming or picture-making occur.

Make it a habit

Author and design hacker David Kadavy writes 100 words every day immediately on waking up, exploiting the fertile creative period in between waking and sleep. Julia Cameron’s bestselling book The Artist’s Way ups the ante to about 750 words in her famous Morning Pages dictate. Complement routinized brain dumps throughout the day with other modes of writing or drawing, be they long-form, spontaneous scribbling, sketching, mind mapping, journaling, or quick captures of brain bursts.

Bonus Fun Fact

Did you know that the earliest known straws date from around 3000 BCE? And that for centuries they’d been fashioned by hand in various materials, from gold to grass reeds, until a fellow named Marvin Chester Stone patented the first industrially-produced paper version in 1888?

Neither did I, until I began wading through the history of the drinking tube while researching my book on creativity in home environments.

My point? That real-life creativity is far more likely to take the form of a tweak than a leap, to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, like Friedman’s Flex-Straw. But that’s okay, because it means that it lies within the power of nearly everyone to make the world a little better one small step at a time.