Howdy Reader!

I found an old notebook last week from a conference I went to a few years back. Three pages of notes. Eleven pages of doodles. One extremely confident drawing of an armadillo wearing a cowboy hat.

I could not tell you what that session was about. I could not tell you who presented it, but I could describe that armadillo to a police sketch artist.

I paid to be at that conference. I flew there. I wore the lanyard. Somewhere in that room, a very qualified person was explaining something valuable while I was agonizing over the style choices for an armored mammal that tears up our flowerbeds.

Turns out this isn't a me problem (my wife has independently confirmed that plenty of other things are, and she keeps a list). Kids have been scribbling in the margins of their homework for at least 800 years, and we have proof, thanks to a kid named Onfim.

Onfim lived in Novgorod in the mid-1200s and was somewhere around six or seven years old. His assignment was practicing his Cyrillic letters on a piece of birch bark, and to his credit, he did some of it. He also drew himself as a wild beast, a sort of centaur with a curly tail. He drew a full battle scene with arrows flying and horses galloping and enemies getting trampled. And in one of them he cast himself as the hero on horseback and wrote his own name directly on the winner.

Six years old. Already understood personal branding better than I did at thirty-four. I spent most of my thirties describing myself as "a marketing professional" while this kid was out here going with "the horseman who slays."

Nobody has ever cared about Onfim's handwriting practice. That was the assignment. What survived eight centuries in the mud, got dug up in the 1950s, and ended up on Wikipedia is the stick figures in the margins. A medieval kid's doodles outlived entire kingdoms.

And there's a reason those margins existed at all. Most of medieval Europe was writing on parchment, which cost enough that you did not waste a corner of it illustrating yourself as a superhero. Novgorod happened to be surrounded by birch forests, so their writing material was free and lying around everywhere. Historians think that's part of why literacy there ran unusually high for the time. When the raw material is cheap, you can afford to do something fun with it. And the fun thing is where your personality lives.

Why am I telling you a story about an 800-year-old kid's craft project?
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Creative raw material has never been cheaper. The camera in your pocket beats what studios used to shoot national commercials on. Publishing costs nothing. Nobody has to approve it first.

So how come it seems like everything we make feels like homework? I think the tools got professional and we assumed that meant we had to be, too.

I have a folder on my desktop of Serious Projects with Serious Names. Seventeen subfolders, nine logos, four color palettes, zero episodes.

Meanwhile, the things people stop me about at conferences are the goofy ones I made years ago that they've dug up on YouTube or a funny story I shared in a live show. I'll be standing there, ready to discuss my carefully positioned flagship offering, when someone walks up and says, "Hey, you're the guy who made that claymation video thing." Yes. Yes, I am. Thanks for noticing.

An assignment gets you a grade. The margins get you remembered.
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So go make the thing nobody asked you for this week. It doesn't have to be good. Draw an armadillo. Give him a hat.

See ya around the interwebs!
-Jeff

P.S. If you want to watch two adults do the margin thing on purpose, Katie and I go live every Friday at 1 pm Central for The Maker's Table. She crochets, I carve, and in the entire history of the show, neither of us has ever produced a single item that somebody gave us as homework. Come hang out.