Your doodles in the margin say more about you than your neat notes ever will.

Neat notes are a record of what someone else said. The margins are where your own attention went when nobody was watching, which makes them a better map of what you actually find interesting. Nothing in a doodle was done to be graded. That is precisely why the same shapes, creatures and patterns keep appearing, and why they are worth looking at.

Go back through an old notebook and collect the doodles onto one page. Look for the thing you draw without deciding to. Then make something deliberate out of it this week, because you have been practising it for years without noticing.