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You Become What You Write About
No matter how fast digital software evolves, there are some habits and objects ground in the physical world that draw me towards them. One of these is physical notebooks, usually a Moleskine. I’ve filled out three of them the past couple of years, and brought a fourth half-filled with me halfway across the world. It goes everywhere with me, usually within arm’s length. I used to use Google Docs to take my meeting notes and weekly reviews, and it just didn’t feel as good, which affected my enthusiasm for writing.
The physical act of putting pen to paper, with or without the aid of a computer, makes me feel like I’m actually transforming swirls of exciting thoughts into words, which always are much more ordinary than they felt in my brain. I’m forced to go slower, and more importantly, to think through what I’m actually writing. Perhaps it’s time for me to revisit David Sax’s The Revenge of Analog, from which I’d first become mindful of the advantages of analog.
I’d written before about how reading a book was a decision to change. It occurred to me, of course, that the other end of the page — writing it — was actually just as strong, if not even stronger, a medium for changing your own worldview. While I’m certainly no academic — I did my undergraduate studies in consumer behavior — I’ve stitched together a couple of psychological and economic concepts to propose a…
