The order is the whole trick. Steps 1 and 2 strip away control and skill, step 3 removes your reference, step 4 swaps subtraction for a rule, step 5 makes badness the goal, and step 6 asks you to keep one. Each step lowers the stakes a bit further so the next one is easier to start.
Step 1: Start with no erasing possible
Starting here matters because the pen never leaves the paper, so erasing and undoing are physically off the table before you have time to negotiate with yourself. Set the mug six inches away, pick a pen, and put the nib down on the handle. Trace the rim, drop to the base, come back up the other side, and add the handle last so you finish where you started. Keep going when it looks wrong; a mug drawn as a squashed oval with a handle like a comma still counts. Most people break contact at the first ugly curve, which defeats the entire exercise, since the wobble is the point. Cover roughly the area of your hand and stop when the line returns to where it began.
Step 2: Take your skill out of it
By the time you get here the mug has already proved a bad line doesn't hurt, so the next move strips out control entirely rather than just pressure. Switch the pen to the hand you never write with and sit in front of a mirror, or use a phone front camera if there isn't one. Start with the shape of your head, then place the eyes about halfway down; most people put them near the top and the drawing reads as a child's, then nose, mouth, ears, hair. Don't stop to fix proportions. Expect slow, shaky arcs and let them happen, because fighting the wobble produces a cramped, tiny drawing in one corner of the page. Fill the sheet. Skipping this because it feels embarrassing is the most common way the whole sequence stalls.
Step 3: Kill your reference crutch
Here the crutch gets taken away. Steps 1 and 2 removed erasing and fine motor control; this one removes the picture you'd normally copy from, which is where most drawing confidence quietly leaks out. Pick something with a distinctive silhouette, a horse, a rooster, a crab, and describe it to yourself in plain words before the pen moves: four legs, long neck, tail. Then draw that description, not the animal. If you can't remember where a knee bends, decide and commit, because a confidently wrong knee looks better than a hesitant correct one. Give yourself three minutes. Looking up a photo mid-drawing, even for a second, turns the exercise back into copying and undoes what step 2 built. When you finish, name the worst part out loud and turn the page.
Step 4: Add a rule instead of removing one
Notice the direction change. Three steps have been about subtracting things, and now you add a constraint instead. Choose a corner you can see without moving, desk, window, shelf, and allow yourself only rectangles and circles. A lamp becomes a circle on a rectangle. A chair back is a rectangle inside a rectangle. A plant is a circle on a rectangle with circles hanging off it. This forces decisions about what things actually are rather than how they look, which is the part beginners skip. Draw outlines only, no shading, and don't subdivide any shape into smaller shapes more than twice, because that's where the game collapses into fussy detail. If something fits neither category, approximate it with the nearest one and move on. Two minutes looking, five minutes drawing.
Step 5: Aim at bad on purpose
Everything so far has been bad by accident or by handicap; this is the first step where badness is the goal, and that flip is what makes it useful. Invent a dull company, a plumbing firm, a bank for goats, a shop that only sells left shoes, and write the name in the ugliest lettering you can manage. Then add the most cluttered symbol you can think of: a swoosh, a globe, three stars, a gradient a pen can't actually make. Break every rule you've absorbed, with stretched type, a drop shadow, a mascot holding a wrench. Ninety seconds of deliberate awfulness is easier than ninety seconds of trying to be good, and it shows how much of your hesitation is fear of judgment rather than lack of ability. The failure mode here is accidentally making something decent and getting attached to it.
Step 6: Own one of them publicly
Pick the drawing you keep returning to, usually not the ugliest one but the one with the most energy, and sign it the way you'd sign a check: full name, date, bottom right. A signature converts a practice sheet into a finished object, and that small formality is the entire point of the sequence you've just run. Tape it to the fridge, a monitor bezel, or the bathroom mirror where you'll pass it at least a dozen times before bed. Leave it up for one full day, then take it down and file it rather than binning it, so the next time you sit down to draw you have proof that finishing is normal. The version people skip is the display: they sign it and immediately hide it, throwing away the only part that changes how the next drawing feels.
The order matters because each step only works once the one before it has dropped the stakes a little lower, and the stack of bad drawings ends up being the point rather than the problem. A phone reminder to draw more disappears the instant it's dismissed and leaves no trace behind, while a signed sheet taped where you walk past it stays visible until you decide it's finished. Paper keeps the count honest.