Goodbye, 2022

Hi, Friends.

Here's my last publication of the year.¹

I wanted to thank you (!) for being there and share a few highlights from 2022.

• I live streamed 37 times from my home recording studio
• I recorded all podcasts on video (and released 13 episodes)
• I wrote and sketched daily (and published 52 mini-essays)
• I published 330 posts (including the mini-essays above)
• I wrote more than 120,000 words

At the turn of 2019, I published Twelve Grapes—a short reflection on temporal landmarks and New Year's resolutions. Over the past years, my goal has been to stop overdoing things and ship better content faster, to reduce creative friction by streamlining and automating workflows where possible, and to delegate work to other creatives. I will always continue to improve and ideate new ways of doing things, but it's good to enjoy established workflows once you reach a good-enough point. (As Zach Kron and I discussed in a recent podcast conversation, it's good to stick to a set of tools when you reach control of the creative medium.) I'm pretty happy with where I got regarding live streaming, recording video tutorials, and podcasting (both remotely and in person).

A great acquisition was Elgato's Stream Deck XL. I've set up plenty of actions that significantly improve my streaming workflows, such as setting up my studio lights for recording, creating chapter markers, switching camera scenes, or configuring my computer and opening software required to record.

One of the goals to remove friction from my creative writing process during 2022 was to publish on Substack, in English without a required illustration. I did this on my blog instead², posting almost daily. And even though I didn't get to establish a clear newsletter strategy or publish every day, I published a lot more content than in 2021.

If you're thinking of starting a blog or a personal journal, I invite you to read One Word per Day. I agree with Seth Godin that "everyone should have a blog and write daily, in public." It's free and a great way to establish your tone before anyone cares about your writing.

I mentioned I wrote 120,000 words in 2022. As I said in Idea Generation Versus Execution, "I write daily in my diary without a specific goal in mind other than capturing memories, facts, and thoughts. Then, I conduct review sessions to highlight passages worth developing further and deep writing sessions where I focus on turning drafts into publishable essays." Much of what I write is for myself. But you'd be surprised at how many ideas that initially seem to go nowhere I end up using in my publications.

I want to highlight two things from the podcast. In 2022, I read three books and had a podcast conversation with their authors—Formulations by Andrew Witt, Native Places: Drawing as a Way to See by Frank Harmon, and Systems Upgrade by Leire Asensio Villoria and David Mah—and that I recorded five in-person conversations on camera, one of them already out with Zach Kron, and others with Ian Keough, Andy Payne, John Pierson, and Alex O'Connor coming out soon.

There are lots more that I'd like to share with you.

But I'll leave that for future posts.

If there's anything you've learned or enjoyed from my sketches and stories of 2022, I'd love for you to send me a note. Feel free to reply to this email if you're getting the newsletter, tweet @nonoesp, add a comment to this publication, or message me on Instagram or via this contact form.

Thanks so much for being there!

Goodbye, 2022.

Happy New Year!