The Back of the Napkin (Expanded Edition): Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures

The art teacher will assign visual puzzles, dead ends disguised as useful exercises, as well as the creation of deeply personal narratives. The assignment doesn’t seem to have anything much to do with putting pencil to paper, yet on inspection it turns out to have everything to do with it.

Our brains actually think in images, not words. Copywriter Eugene Schwartz explains this in his book The Brilliance Breakthrough. It’s easier for your brain to decode a picture into words than it is to encode words into a picture. Therefore, communicating in images will increase the clarity of your message. It will also make your point more memorab

“Painting done” means fully walking through my expectations of what the completed task will look like, including when it will be done, what I’ll do with the information, how it will be used, the context, the consequences of not doing it, the costs—everything we can think of to paint a shared picture of the expectations. It’s one of the most powerfu