Fifteen minutes on a bench in Austria

I’m on a bench outside a hut halfway up a mountain in Austria. There’s a fresh beer in front of me the size of a small vase, foam still holding its shape. Ten meters down the path, Jorrit and Tijmen are dragging rocks into a shallow stream to build a dam. They’re three. The dam is not going well. Dad might have to help (he loves building dams).

But not yet. The sun is warm and there’s a book on my knee.

About as calm as it gets.

Everywhere except in my head. It never stops in there. It’s not loud, it’s not stress. It’s just thinking. All the time, about everything.

Anouk, sitting next to me, always tells me I live a lot in my head. She’s right. If I actually did all the stuff I think about, I’d have built cities by now.

But I don’t. Or I do, for three months, hard, and then I drop it just as fast.

I taught myself to embroider once and watched nothing but embroidery videos for three months. Then it was board games (hello BoardGameGeek!). Then it was GIS, because I wanted to 3D print my own neighborhood from LIDAR data. I know. Very sexy.

And then there’s the one idea that never even got its three months.

That one never got started at all. Three years it’s been sitting up there. On and off, mostly on.

I pick the book back up. Million Dollar Weekend by Noah Kagan. And my head is spinning again. Ideas for work. Ideas for our private life. And that same old one, back again.

Drawings. Simple ones. The kind that stick in your head long after you’ve read them. I’d been watching people do it for years on Twitter. Janis Ozolins , Ash Lamb , Roberto Ferraro , PJ Milani. Masters of visual simplicity. Never got to it myself.

Meanwhile Kagan isn’t polite about it. Just do it. Don’t wait. Don’t overthink. Start. Today.

So I pick up my phone. Open the Notes app. New file.

And I draw. I draw lines, colors, simple figures. I zoom in for the details, I zoom out for the bigger view. I do it all just with my fingers and my phone. It takes me about 5 minutes, but then I’m finished. My very first visual!

And it’s ugly as shit.

Objectively. Not the don’t be so hard on yourself kind. Truly ugly. But the idea is clear. So I redraw it in a better app, still on my phone, still on the bench.

Another ten minutes later it’s posted to a brand new Instagram account, randomly called Growth by Visuals.

Then I put the phone down and pick the beer back up.

Still foam on it.

Absolutely convinced this fad will pass again in a few months. Another thing I started and never saw through. I didn’t even tell Anouk.

That was two years ago today.

Those fifteen minutes on an Austrian mountain bench turned into a brand that now reaches over 10 million people a month. I’m still not really used to that.

Not that it all worked. I launched products into complete silence and started three different format newsletters here on Substack I couldn’t keep going. Fine.

But the part I’m happiest about barely shows up in the numbers. Hundreds of teachers bought my work for their classrooms. Kids sit in those rooms learning how to name what they feel, and what a growth mindset actually means, and they’ll never know my name.

Therapists and psychologists use my visuals in their sessions with clients.

Three printed books with my visuals in them, read by thousands.

And every other day a message arrives. Same thing underneath every time. One of these visuals turned up on a day they really needed it.

None of it was planned.

I just enjoyed doing it and nine months in, one visual took off way past the rest:

I made it exist first. I’m still trying to make it good two years later.

Thanks to everyone who’s been here for it.

Tomorrow night we drive back to Austria and the mountains for three weeks. Let’s see what it brings this time.

Talk soon,

Hidde

P.S. That first post is still online here!