When and why I stopped using a mindmap

How good intention in school kills creativity.

Mindmap is a glorified note-taking/ brainstorming tool that gains its popularity in my school 10+ years ago. The teacher in schools taught us what a mindmap looks like, how it works, and how it helps expand your thoughts around a centrepiece.

It was all fun and game, you can write very few words, draw pictures, and throw in colours to have better readability.

Nostalgic Mindmap example! Image credited to mindmapunleashed.com

Then…Mindmap Drawing Competition happened, to encourage students to adopt the tools. But…How do you judge which mindmap is the best?

The wording? The drawing? The colour combinations? The thought process that can be easily understood from the mindmap?

Take a look at the picture below, I don’t think it is structured very well, but it definitely helps this author facilitate thought about his/her birthday.

Image credited to simplemind.eu

Coming back to the Mindmap Drawing Competition, the winners of those usually write long, structured sentences in mindmap, draw the main & sub-branches to be neat & consistent, draw things that tied to what they have written, and colour sub-branches to be the same colour system as the main branch for visualization.

That is a neat, clearly written thought process in consistent columns and arranged by colour. It SEEMS like a mindmap but it’s really Point-form arranged differently.

To be fair the winner of the competition has much better spacing and structure, but just to give you an idea of long sentences, point-form in a mindmap format. Image from insightsonindia.com

But it has got all the winning factors according to the judges (teachers) — clearly written thought process, neat, easy to read and pleasant to the eye, surrounding a centrepiece idea.

I thought to myself if people can’t understand my mindmap, and I suck at drawing and colouring,

what’s the point of doing it?

As I grow older, I recognize mindmap is supposed to be a tool to help you, and only you, facilitate your thoughts. Everybody’s brains are wired differently. Who else should be able to read your mind by looking at short-form sketching of mindmap?

Unfortunately, back then, there was no teacher that recognize what was happening and explain that to me. After some time, all my peers, regardless of good or bad, stopped drawing mindmaps.