One of the unexpected gifts of looking back through 30 years of journals isn’t just remembering what happened.
It’s seeing how I used them.
People often ask me, “What do you actually write in your journal?”
As I opened Journal #4 from early 1997, I realized I’d already made myself a checklist.
Looking back, almost everything I wrote fits into one of these categories:
Snapshots of life.
Capture the moments while they’re happening.
The road trip. The snowstorm. The excitement. The frustration.
Thirty years later, those little details bring the whole experience back to life.
Snapshots of the future.
Write the story before it happens.
I used to call them “ultimate scenarios.” Today, my friend Cameron Herold calls it a Vivid Vision.
The clearer the picture, the easier it is for your mind to build it.
Conversations with yourself.
Some of my journals are pages of dialogue as I work through a problem.
Writing forces your thinking to slow down enough that you can actually hear yourself.
Maps and models.
Flow charts. Mind maps. Storyboards. Some of the frameworks I’ve used for decades…including the earliest version of the Profit Activators…started as rough sketches in these journals.
One-question pages.
These became some of my favorites. Questions like:
What do I want?
How can I…?
What drives me crazy?
What have I learned?
A single good question can produce pages of useful thinking.
That’s really what journaling has become for me.
More of a thinking tool than diary.
More of a thinking tool than diary.
It’s where I capture experiences, imagine possibilities, solve problems, collect ideas, and connect what I’m learning into something useful.
People often ask me when they should journal.
The truth is, the time matters a lot less than the habit.
Thirty years from now, you’ll be grateful you gave your future self something to remember—and something to learn from.