Hi everyone. I’ve recently started a daily livestream. Each is short; 15 minutes each and there is a bit of a recipe to it.

I start by sharing a gem.

What is a gem?

A gem is a hard won piece of knowledge normally a result of overcoming some obstacle in life. These gems come in the form of quotes from people I have read about, often it’s something I have tested and found to be true in my own life.

After sharing the gem I dive right in and do an icon illustration. I have a hundred things I want to draw, and I draw one of them everyday. As I’m drawing, I think out loud, and that’s always interesting even to myself.

Now today’s podcast got cut short because of bad internet. So I decided to do it as a blogpost instead!

I’ll start by giving you the gem.

Jerry Seinfeld said in an interview with Tim Ferris that the brain is a simple. Like a puppy. If you give it a treat, it will do anything. It will really work for it!

Now Jerry is famously known for writing a joke everyday. In fact he says the most important part of what he does is writing.

This would thing about the brain being a puppy came up when Tim asked him how he would teach his daughter to write.

And what he said was set a timer, say 90 minutes. And sit down and write for 90 minutes and when the time is up you can stop. Stopping is the treat.

This is how timeboxing works, you set a time to do something, and you just do that until the time is up.

I draw in my sketchbook everyday for 30 minutes. It’s a time box. The fact that it’s 30 minutes is what gets me to do it everyday.

And here is a time lapse of me taking that hand from sketch to final illustration.

The internet is fixed, so I should be able to stream again tomorrow. I do it at 8.30am everyday Malaysian time right before my day job. That’s 8.30pm EST

This is the Livestream page

And I post the finished drawing on sketchbook.club