Why Doodling Might Be the Most Underrated Skill You Have
Somewhere between "pay attention" and "stop scribbling in your notebook," most of us learned that doodling was a distraction — something you did instead of thinking, not because of it. Artist Joe Whale would disagree. He spent years getting told off in class for filling the margins of his notebooks with drawings, before a local restaurant let him loose on an entire wall. What happened next — the internet noticing, then genuinely obsessing over his work — turned an old childhood habit into a career, and a bigger question: what actually happens when we let a thought turn into a line on paper, one stroke at a time?
The muscle nobody trains anymore
Here's the idea worth sitting with: imagination behaves less like a talent you either have or don't, and more like a muscle. Muscles get stronger with use and weaker with neglect. The more we outsource the generating part of creativity — asking an app to produce an image, a caption, a plot twist — the less practice our own brains get at doing that work themselves.
That doesn't mean AI tools are the enemy. It means there's a real cost to skipping the "figuring it out yourself" step every single time, because that step is where the muscle actually grows.
Why doodling specifically works
Doodling is a strange, low-stakes way to keep that muscle active. A few reasons it punches above its weight:
- No pressure to be "right." A blank page for a finished piece feels intimidating. A doodle in the corner of a notebook doesn't — which means your brain relaxes enough to actually experiment.
- It's built on iteration. One line suggests the next. You're not planning the whole image before you start; you're reacting to what's already there, decision by decision. That's the exact loop creative thinking runs on.
- It happens while you're doing something else. Doodling during a boring meeting or a long phone call isn't necessarily zoning out — for a lot of people, it's what lets their attention wander productively instead of shutting down entirely.
- It's cheap to start and cheap to abandon. No tutorial, no software, no "good" pen required. That low barrier is exactly what makes it repeatable, and repetition is what builds any skill.
A thought becoming a line
There's something worth noticing about watching someone draw live, one stroke at a time, instead of seeing a finished piece appear all at once: you get to see the process, not just the result. The false starts. The line that gets absorbed into something else entirely. The moment a random squiggle turns out to be exactly what the drawing needed.
That process — messy, undirected, occasionally wrong — is where the actual thinking happens. It's easy to forget that when we're constantly shown polished final images, whether from professional artists or from a generator that skips straight to "done."
Bringing it back to your own habits
You don't need to become an illustrator to benefit from any of this. A few low-effort ways to keep the muscle warm:
- Keep actual paper nearby — notebook, sticky note, whatever — somewhere you'd normally reach for your phone instead.
- Let yourself doodle badly on purpose. The goal isn't a good drawing; it's reps.
- Before asking an AI tool to generate an idea for you, spend two minutes sketching or brainstorming it yourself first, even roughly. Compare the two afterward if you want — you'll often be surprised which one feels more "yours."
- Treat doodling as thinking, not as a break from thinking. The two aren't opposites.
The takeaway
Imagination isn't something you either have or don't — it's something you use or lose. Doodling is one of the simplest, lowest-stakes ways to keep using it: no plan required, no correct answer, just a pen, a blank corner of a page, and the willingness to see where one line leads.
This article draws on themes from Joe Whale's TED Talk, "How Doodling Unlocks Your Imagination." You can watch the full talk on TED.com.