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Explaining the world one sketch at a time
Site URL: sketchplanations.com/
Feed URL: sketchplanations.com/rss
Posts: 12
Followers: 3
Contentment: What you Have Relative to What you Want
https://sketchplanations.com/contentment
Published: January 11, 2026 12:00
Morgan Housel, in his book The Art of Spending Money, says that contentment is what you have relative to what you want.If you have money for a life full of comforts but envy a more glamorous one, you will make yourself unhappy. If you have a simple life…
SMART Goals
https://sketchplanations.com/smart-goals
Published: January 4, 2026 12:00
If you’ve heard of one framework to help with goal-setting, it could well be this one: SMART Goals.SMART is an acronym to keep in mind a few ideas for setting better goals, ones you’re more likely to make progress on and complete. I’ve lost track of when I…
Diagonal Billing (or Staggered Billing)
https://sketchplanations.com/diagonal-billing
Published: December 28, 2025 12:00
A solution for equal movie star billingThe 1974 disaster movie The Towering Inferno had the advantage of two huge stars: Steve McQueen and Paul Newman. Supposedly, neither of them wanted to be portrayed as second to the other. So the studio had a problem:…
Cream Tea: Cream First or Jam First?
https://sketchplanations.com/cream-tea-cream-or-jam-first
Published: December 21, 2025 12:00
The classic cream tea is a simple and delicious affair: a freshly baked scone, clotted cream, jam, and a pot of tea to share. But there’s something brewing, and it’s not just the tea. It’s a question that divides even the most peaceful tea room: should it…
10 Contradictory Traits of Creative People
https://sketchplanations.com/10-contradictory-traits-of-creative-people
Published: December 14, 2025 12:00
Creative people display contradictory personality traits. This finding has stuck with me since I read it over 20 years ago in psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention.Csikszentmihalyi drew…
Latitude and Longitude: How to Remember Which is Which
https://sketchplanations.com/latitude-longitude
Published: December 7, 2025 12:00
Latitude and longitude together give you your position on the globe. They are the two types of lines that wrap the planet on globes and our world maps. One set is the horizontal lines, and the other vertical, but for the longest time I struggled to…
Apples and Ideas
https://sketchplanations.com/apples-and-ideas
Published: November 30, 2025 12:00
"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples, then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."This quote, commonly attributed to…
Spectrum of Abstraction
https://sketchplanations.com/spectrum-of-abstraction
Published: November 23, 2025 12:00
A fundamental act of art is choosing what to leave in and what to leave out. These choices express a point of view and what you communicate.I’ve long been intrigued by iconography for exactly this reason. Icons strip things back to their essence so the…
The Newsletter Paradox: Your newsletter grows when you do nothing
https://sketchplanations.com/the-newsletter-paradox
Published: November 16, 2025 12:00
Here's a curious and unsettling paradox that you might experience if you choose to write a newsletter:When you do nothing, people join, and your list grows. When you send an email to your list, your list shrinks and people leave.It can seem that people…
Mirage: why do we see a pool of water?
https://sketchplanations.com/mirage
Published: November 9, 2025 12:00
Walking through a baking desert, you see a distant pool of water towards the horizon. An oasis to save the day, perhaps? No—just a mirage. But what causes it, and why does it look like a pool of water?I remember the satisfying Aha! moment I experienced…
Collective Nouns: Examples, meanings, and the best ones for animals
https://sketchplanations.com/collective-nouns
Published: November 2, 2025 12:00
A tower of giraffes.A murder of crows.A shiver of sharks.Some of the most delightful words in English are collective nouns.A collective noun is a word used to describe a group of individuals or things — most commonly groups of animals. The best capture…
Rich Pictures: Making Sense of Complex Problems
https://sketchplanations.com/rich-pictures
Published: October 26, 2025 12:00
Sometimes, when faced with a new challenge, you just don't know where to start. One good way to get going is with a rich picture.What is a Rich Picture?A rich picture diagram is a systems thinking tool used to make sense of complicated or unclear…