Journaling might deserve a bigger spot in the founder's toolkit
I’m starting to suspect that a bit of journaling ought to be in every founder’s essential toolkit, right up there alongside email, calendar, and todo list.
I really like the “morning pages” style of starting the day with a longhand braindump of whatever is on my mind (via The Artist’s Way📕 by Julia Cameron). Although designed for (and effective at) removing creative blockers and unearthing new creative threads, I put even higher value on their more mundane benefit of bubbling up the hidden stresses and unclear priorities. While braindumping about whatever, I seem to find the right stuff, the important stuff, somehow slipping out of my subconscious and onto the page.
Still, I shouldn’t overglamorize the pragmatic, nor sideline the mental and emotional.
We are, after all, all attempting to keep our respective shit together. And there’s real benefit to using a bit of writing to oneself – not for clicks, not for attention, not for anyone – as a path toward finding our stories. Which, it turns out, can be rather helpful!
In Made to Stick📗, the Heaths reference a study where folks were asked to deal with issues via either (1) basic reflection, (2) visualizing the success/outcome/impact, or (3) story-telling the origins of how they got into this mess in the first place. And to everyone’s surprise:
The event-simulation group [i.e., the people who simulated and told themselves the stories of how the events unfolded] did better on almost every dimension. Simulating past events is much more helpful than simulating future outcomes. […] Maybe financial gurus shouldn’t be telling us to imagine that we’re filthy rich; instead, they should be telling us to replay the steps that led to our being poor.
And while this particular study sounds like the sort of thing that might not exactly replicate, it also matches my lived experiences closely enough that I’ve gotta give it some amount of credit.
And from The Whole-Brain Child📘:
This is what storytelling does: it allows us to understand ourselves and our world by using both our left and right hemispheres together.
To tell a story that makes sense, the left brain must put things in order, using words and logic. The right brain contributes the bodily sensations, raw emotions, and personal memories, so we can see the whole picture. […]
This is the scientific explanation behind why journaling and talking about a difficult event can be so powerful in helping us heal.
For this same reason, it’s important for kids of all ages to tell their stories, as it helps them try to understand their emotions and the events that occur in their lives.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I strongly suspect that most of us could benefit from a bit of the same medicine. PS. Two details of morning pages that might be relevant:
- You do them first thing in the morning, before allowing media or messages to infiltrate and redirect your brain
- You continue until filling 2-3 pages, even if you’re just writing “blah blah blah” on repeat; this tends to take 15-30 minutes, which opens up enough empty space for stuff to properly bubble up
Anyhoo, I like them. They’ve been a crucial part of my day for maybe 70% of the past decade, and I always seem to end up struggling most during the times when I’ve let the habit slip.
Comments (10)
I started doing morning pages in January 2020 and have kept them up missing only an occasional day here and there. I 1,000% agree with everything you wrote here. I get up and I do it without deciding to do it. Just write and whatever is there right then. Every couple months I'll page back through and take a highlighter to note things that stand out or I'll even annotate pages. It's kept me connected to myself and helped my sense of the passage of time.
I have been doing my MP (morning pages) since Dec 2017. However, recently, because of a number of changes in my life, I had to give up on my MP and switched it to EP=Evening pages. Works pretty well too!!🙃
I have tried the journaling thing, it didn't stick for some reason.
However, I do want to comment about event-simulation.
Recently, I made new friends on Twitter and one of them (Edwin) asked me how I got a multinational company as customer.
The story i told him was a chain of lucky breaks.
• if I hadn't attended my old friend's birthday party…
• if the customer had not changed their CEO…
• if the new CEO hadn't set out the mandate to automate everything...
• if the customer’s Singapore ops team who knew me since the previous CEO and stayed together into the new CEO tenure…
• if the Philippines office hadn't required the Singapore office to intervene...
• if their in-house IT team was efficient in the first place...
It was a lot more detailed than this, so this is just a summary.
Edwin didn't disagree but pointed out the efforts I put in. All the stuff I didn't include in the summary.
This retelling a past in story form, and have it be commented on by another person, made me slowly realized, how much agency I actually do have and of course, how much randomness there is also in the universe.
So I've shifted ever so slightly closer to Edwin's point of view.
Quite positive it is beneficial! But I always feel like it need some prompts or my brain is just typing some very generic stuff. Any prompts that you think of when starting MPs?
I have used prompts at times (especially when very blocked). There are a bunch of prompts for creative (re)discovery in The Artist's Way's weekly curriculum, and other times something as simple as unpacking a quote I've read that struck a chord is plenty to get me going. I'll also take a lot of notes/underlines/ideas while I'm reading other stuff, so that can get me going, too. But honestly, as weird as it is, most of mine start with something like, "doop doop blue trees sky birds tired coffee stressed stressed why stressed i think..." and then I'm sort of off to the races. I basically force stream of consciousness to keep putting random words down to give real thoughts the opportunity to emerge without any self-censoring or analysis.
Love this:
“This retelling a past in story form, and have it be commented on by another person, made me slowly realized, how much agency I actually do have.”
Wonderful example :)
Really lovely post 👌🙏
You made me realise that I haven’t been doing this and I want/need to get back into it❤️
Re: keeping our shit together;
overcaring, overthinking, and thinking that one can control things that are not within one’s power to control. Those are such massive triggers of anxiety! have you read “The Prophet” by Gibran?
I haven't, but I will -- many thanks for the link! Semi-relatedly, I've been enjoying some of the Daoist stuff lately, especially C.C.Tsai's illustrated versions, which touch on similar threads, at times.
my pleasure! Gibran has been getting me through these past months!
Ooh, that looks interesting thank you for that!
The Daoists are great, I love me some Zuangzi
Makes sense! I guess sometimes we don't need constraints in order to produce valuable things :)