Bookworm · Mike Schmitz and Cory Hixson

238: Sketch Your Mind by Zsolt Viczian

December 19, 2025·1 hr 36 min·5 clips

A visual on the front of a note card, detailed text on the back, changed how he thinks about Zettelkasten entirely.

1. Bookworm hosts Mike and Cory review 'Sketch Your Mind: Nurture a Playful and Creative Brain' by Zsolt Viczian, an eleven-chapter, manifesto-and-epilogue book on visual thinking and note-taking. 2. Viczian is the developer of the Excalidraw plugin, and Cory says binge-watching his YouTube videos over the prior two weeks derailed his own follow-up items. 3. The core question the hosts probe is whether Viczian's 'visual zettelkasten' framework, sketched hybrid notes replacing purely text-based systems, actually works for both of them. 4. Before the book, Mike admits failing most of his follow-up items after a heavy Black Friday and Cyber Monday email push built with Kit automation across five different offers. 5. Cory also reports failing his follow-ups, citing an unaddressed 'Sunday six-ish' planning session with his wife Katie and unresolved morning transitions with his kids. 6. Cory reveals he paused writing his own PKM book after 15 to 20 thousand words, following a call with consultant Charlotte that surfaced his 'PKM stack' as his real signature framework. 7. The hosts note Viczian wrote the entire book in six weeks ahead of the PKM Summit in the Netherlands, using AI as what he describes as a conversation partner during the writing process. 8. Chapter one introduces '4D PKM,' contrasting 1D sequential notes, 2D methods like Tiago Forte's PARA, 3D interconnected notes and graph views, and 4D spatially sketched note networks. 9. Mike agrees with visual thinking in theory but says the book's specific integration method, picture on one side and text mapped on a canvas, never fully sat right with him. 10. Chapter two, 'Lego,' introduces the Lego duck exercise: giving someone seven bricks and asking them to build a duck, showing how constraints unlock creative combination of 'atomic' visual notes. 11. Mike connects the Lego framing to his own 'creativity flywheel' process taught in his Practical PKM Hybrid Cohort and to his icon-library habit inside GoodNotes. 12. Mike also cites Mike Rohde's 'Sketchnote Workbook' for its exercise of drawing a personal icon library once so icons can be reused across future sketchnotes. 13. Chapter three, 'Notes Reimagined,' introduces hybrid notes, a visual on the front of a card and detailed Markdown text on the back, which Cory calls possibly the book's most important idea. 14. Mike agrees the hybrid-note concept is powerful but says implementing the flip mechanic requires Excalidraw specifically, since Obsidian has no native way to flip a note over. 15. Mike compares committing to this Excalidraw-dependent system to his repeated failed attempts at strict Zettelkasten as described in Bob Doto's 'A System for Writing.' 16. Cory counters that Excalidraw has almost 5 million downloads and is updated every few days, making it one of Obsidian's most durable community plugins. 17. Chapter four lays out a seven-step visualization process, and the hosts single out its core claim that a strong visual concept must both transform thinking and connect ideas. 18. The tone throughout is a warm, sometimes disagreeing two-host debate, with Cory enthusiastically embracing the system and Mike voicing structured, specific reservations. 19. Best suited for Obsidian users, PKM enthusiasts, and sketchnoters curious about combining visual thinking with Zettelkasten-style note systems. 20. Less suited for listeners with no interest in note-taking software, Zettelkasten debates, or visual-thinking methodology.

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