Confront ignorance, internalize insights, uncover the deep patterns shaping your life, and turn yesterday’s experience into tomorrow’s successes.
The Common Journal will be the most valuable book you own: a mirror of who you are, a record of what you’ve learned, and a map forward in navigating life’s many challenges.
All that’s required is a pen, notebook and a few minutes a day.
Index
- The Common Journal
- Building a Common Journal
- The Habit of Journaling.
- What to Read
- Review and Migration
- Collected Thoughts
Coming Soon – Sample daily entry.
1. The Common Journal
”Understand yourself: your temperament, intellect, opinions, emotions. You can’t be master of yourself if you don’t first understand yourself. There are mirrors for the face, but none for the spirit: let discreet self-reflection be yours.”
– Baltsar Gracián
The Common Journal combines the knowledge acquisition of a commonplace book with the introspection and self-discovery of a journal.
The result, a system of journaling that serves to cultivate a varied and interconnected knowledge set, uncover valuable and hidden insights into your nature.
And since it will be a physical object, edited and honed and rewritten over a lifetime, it can be passed down one day should you choose.
Commonplace Book – Scrapbook filled with ideas, quotes, aphorisms, observations, anecdotes, recipes, formulas, and personal knowledge. Tracing its origins to the middle ages, the commonplace book achieved the height of its popularity during the Renaissance to 19th century.
Journal – A personal book kept with chronological events and introspective entries. Journaling has been used throughout the ages to reflect on and focus our thoughts, record memories, and discover our natural inclinations and purpose.
The commonplace journal combines the power of a journal’s introspection and insights with that of the scrapbooked knowledge and wisdom you encounter in life.
This combination serves as the meeting place, or commonplace, to generate new insights, creation of ideas, interconnected knowledge and ultimately mastery of self and the world around us.
Ignorance & Understanding
To achieve these results we must understand the four primary ways we source our information. These four sources shape our worldview, the lens through which we interpret the people, experiences and events of our lives.
- Personal experience.
- The experience of others, either observed or instructed.
- Knowledge from recorded or preserved media. This includes books, television and the internet.
- Creating connections and discovering commonalities between the above three, resulting in new knowledge.
Your common journal will be the meeting place for experience and knowledge, resulting in new and novel understanding.
As humans we rarely see our world as it truly is, but instead as we wish it to be. We filter our present circumstances and experiences through a subjective lens of our past experiences. These lens become a form of prison, limiting our actions and how we can navigate events. Power itself is mastery of self, and no man can be master of his mind when he fails to see the world as it truly is.
In addition to creating new and novel knowledge, your commonplace journal will allow you to discover the beneficial and harmful lenses through which you see yourself and the world.
This personal book will, over time, become one of your most cherished possessions, an invaluable resource that you will find yourself returning to day after day.
2. Building a Common Journal
“We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.”
— Cecil Day-Lewis
Begin with a high-quality journal. The more enjoyable your journal is to use, the more likely you are to use it, the most important part of journaling is using your journal daily.
For your first journal, I suggest it be around 30-100 pages. You’re going to learn a lot about how you like to journal your first time around, and it feels rewarding to start anew, a smaller journal let’s you begin that process sooner.
For your second journal, select a journal with a sturdy leather slip cover and high-quality paper inserts that will be pleasant to write in. The choice of cover between hardcover or softcover will be one of personal preference, I prefer a leather slipcover where I can exchange paper inserts.
Why pay so much for a nice journal? Because you intend to put something valuable in it.
And your journal should go wherever you go so pick the right size and weight that will be the easiest to carry with you. Better it be a bit smaller and lighter than left at home gathering dust.
After years of experimentation I find myself somewhere between an A5 or A6, both striking a good balance between size that is both pleasent for travel and writability.
- Nanami Paper – Arguably the best, and perhaps thinnest, paper for use with pens and fountain pens. If you can find these in stock, count yourself fortunate.
- Taroko Etsy Shop – A5 leather slip cover and the Enigma A5 dotted.
- Etsy is filled with shop dedicated to high quality journal paper inserts and slip covers.
Index
Begin with creating an index should your journal not come with one, taking 1% of the total pages to dedicate to your index. e.g. for a 200 page journal, you would dedicate 2 pages to the index.
Should your journal not come with page numbers, label each page number as you write in the bottom corner.
Add topics, ideas, and important entries to your index as you write them.
Your future self will thank you for a tidy index with page numbers.
Goals
Label “goals” at the top of the next 5 pages after your index. These pages will be reserved for your goals over the course of filling your journal.
Once you have completed a goal, write the date of its achievement beside it, and within these pages a 1-2 sentence summary of what you learned from the experience.
If you require space to explore, plan or reflect upon your goals, add it to a daily entry in the body of your journal and then reference it within your index.
Quotes & Principles
“As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Label “Quotes & Principles” at the top of the last 10 pages of your journal.
These pages will be reserved for quotes you’ve found inspiring and enlightening, along with the principles you’ve encountered to use as a foundation for future living and decision-making.
Why only 10? Because these few pages will be a repository for only the most valuable quotes and principles you discover, ones worthy of consistent self-reflection and daily practice.
And 10 enough pages should be enough to capture a broad selection of personal knowledge, yet few enough to easily reflect upon regularly.
If you are unsure about adding particular passages to these pages then simply add them to entries into the body of your journal and transfer them later to those precious pages after further review and reflection.
Quote Example – “There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.”
– Warren Buffett
Principle Example – Work expands to fill the time available for it’s completion.
– Parkison’s Law
Daily Entries
“Write hard and clear about what hurts.”
– Ernest Hemingway
The free pages of your journal will become your daily entries and notes. Label the date above each entry along with your present location should it be relevant.
These daily writings may consist of whatever you wish, whether they be a mix of observations, prompts, ideas, exercises, book notes, self-reflections and more.
In order to produce the greatest amount of value from these daily entries, begin with a targeted selection of essential topics.
- Problems you are presently facing.
- Successes with lessons learned.
- Mistakes and failures, with lessons learned.
- Failures in discipline, and what you will do differently going forward.
- Progress towards your goals.
- Powerful desires and emotions, their impact on you, and exploring their root source.
- Observations of others.
- Observations of yourself.
- Book notes including principles, quotes, and your reflections upon them.
- Notes from seminars and courses.
- Observations about your decision-making. The thought process, logic, and outcomes.
Write your reflections down as soon as they occur for the most powerful effect, which will further enhance the ability of your journal to deliver timely and powerful insights.
As you reflect upon these entries, look to the commonalities, connections, reoccurrence and patterns that will inevitably emerge over time. Over time, blind spots that were once hidden will begin to reveal themselves.
When you record these experiences, write as though no other human will ever read your entries; these pages are for you and you alone. So be open and truthful with yourself, obscure nothing.
“Sample entry, coming soon.“
Sample Entry
Writing Tools
It’s recommended to use pen, rather than pencil for your journal since pencil will fade with time.
Whether you prefer gel, ballpoint or fountain pens is one of personal preference. Select the tools that bring you the most joy to write with.
Some recommendations to start with.
- Preferred gel pen, pilot juice up .4mm.
- Entry level fountain pen, LAMY safari fountain pen, extra fine, with a converter for your chosen inks. Blue fountain pen ink, pilot iroshizuku fountain pen ink.
- Pencil for making notes in books, rotring 600 mechanical pencil.
- Lightweight pencil for travel, kurutoga rotating mechanical pencil.
- Small ruler for creating headings, 6 inch architecural ruler.
- Set of fine-tip highlighters, staedtler triplus fineliner pens.
- Sticky tabs for marking topics and chapters.
3. The Habit of Journaling
Journaling is a skill, one that takes time to develop deep mastery over.
As you begin your practice, remember that the most important step is using your journal daily.
Use the practical psychology of the habit reward loop to your advantage.
Cue > Craving > Response > Reward
Successful Habit Reward Loop
The habit of journaling can only take root if there is a cue to remind and encourage you to use your journal.
In order to build successful cues, begin with carrying your journal everywhere you go. You won’t be able to write in your journal, if you don’t have it.
Use a visual reminder cue to your advantage, when you arrive or at work, remove your journal and set it beside you. Upon seeing your journal, and having it close at hand, you will find greater ease in using it.
Set a daily reminder cue, such an alarm or calendar invite to use your journal.
To begin establishing a reward from your journal, begin with writing one line a day. This line can include one personal success or accomplishment or gratitude, no matter how small, that you can acknowledge and reinforce.
Making your bed, cooking a meal, reading a few pages from a book, going to the gym.
Examples of Success to Include
This reinforces a mindset of action oriented accomplishment.
And once you’ve finished your one line, feel free to continue writing as much as you wish, or stop. One line a day, done daily, will begin to compound upon itself quickly and lead into new insights and gains.
Continue with writing one line a day as the foundation for your daily entries until you’ve established the habit of journaling as a default. You’ll know you’ve hit this milestone as you’ll begin to look forward to your writings everyday, and miss their absence when you skip them.
Prompts
In addition to your one line per day and essential topics, you can also use a personal mix of prompts to further enhance your practice.
I’ve found using 1-3 prompts per day tends to be a good balance between effeciency and reliability in establishing the habit of journaling.
A sampling of prompts to consider.
- Three things I’m grateful for are …
- What could I do that is under my control, that I would do, to make my life a little bit better.
- If I lived even more consciously, freely, and courageously, I would do …
- What would this task/project/problem look like if it were easy.
- An idea I could experiment with today is …
- What is the most important thing to focus on today.
- Three successes from today/yesterday are …
- Today/yesterday I learned …
- One thing I could’ve done to make today/yesterday better and how can I apply it to today/tomorrow.
- What could I do tomorrow that would create an outsized effect in my life with minimal effort/input on my part.
- What thoughts and experiences can I put to rest today so I can sleep well.
Over the years, I’ve found myself returning to three consistent journaling prompts daily, answered either in the morning or evening.
I start by writing each of the following words, today, learned, and tomorrow. After each word, I write as much as is needed, or as much as time will allow. There’s no set structure to what follows each word, only the free flow of consciousness and interacting it afterwards.
- Today / Tomorrow –
- Today – Looking at my calendar, how is my day going to go. What actions can I take, or efforts can I focus and where to make my day pleasent and successful. What tasks should I be focusing on.
- Tomorrow – Today is past, but I may still awake in the morning and have another opportunity to live life again. What events will I experience tomorrow, what’s on my calendar, what do I need to be careful of, what should I put in place for success?
- Learned – How did today go, and what have I learned from it? Did my mental models serve me well, did they fail entirely? What can I adopt, adjust, or discard? What can I do differently next time to avoid the painful consequences of a mistake?
Over time you’ll create your own set of prompts and ideas. Personalize this, explore, and discard the prompts you find hold little relevent value.
4. What to Read
Coming soon.
Taking Notes
“Preserve your memories, keep them well, what you forget you can never retell.”
– Louisa May Alcott
Coming soon.
5. Review & Migration
Once you have filled most of your pages, begin reading your old journal from the very first entry, copying into the new journal the important lessons, notes, experiences, behavior patterns and knowledge from your daily entries.
For some, reading these entries may be difficult, especially if you’ve encountered hardship and trauma. However, this is also an opportunity to celebrate your successes and to look back on your past self and smile.
Again, I want to stress, be compassionate towards yourself as you read and review these entries. Take pride in the fact that you are among the rare company who engage in such a project of growth and development.
This process will not happen in one sitting, and may take several weeks to months of diligent writing depending on the size of your journals.
Migrating journals can become quite addicting, and if you love the process you may want to stay with journals of 100-200 pages. If you find you prefer to do this every 2-3 years, then using a journal of 300+ pages may be the best choice.
Migrating to a New Journal
Migration is the powerful practice of selectively copying your old journal into a new one, compounding the value exponentially with each successive migration.
After about a year or so of keeping your commonplace journal, you will have built a well-worn book filled with quotes, principles, insights, reflections, life events, analyses and curated notes from the broad sources you have been learning from.
I’ve found it takes me about 2 to 3 years to fill my enormous 480 page notebook, which is why I recommend for newcomers to the practice you start with a journal closer to 100 to 200 pages. The reason being that migration is such a rewarding exercise it often cements keeping a commonplace journal into becoming a life-long habit.
This isn’t to say you’ll have 100-200 pages of deep reflections and philosophical writings however, any well used journal will contain trivial entries and fluff. Leonardo da Vinci was known to keep his grocery list in his workbooks.
Begin by taking out a new, blank journal and putting it alongside your currently filled one.
Revisit chapter 2 and create the outlined structure in your new journal.
Set both journals side by side, creating check boxes in the old index and choosing what you’d like to bring from the old into the new. You’ll be checking these boxes off as you successfully migrate these passages into your new journal, editing and condensing them as you do so.
Now review your “Quotes & Principles” section and begin to copy the essential ones, discarding the ones that have served their purpose. This should free up a few of these precious pages pages for new writings.
After your second or third migration, add another 6 pages titled “Laws” after yours quotes and principles. This will serve as the section for the truths that are so precious, you wish to remind yourself on them daily. Consider this section your codex on living life and living it well to the standard you choose.
Having completed the new structure, you can now begin using your new journal for your daily entries, as copying and editing the above check-boxed passages can take weeks to many months depending on their nature and how much you deem worth keeping.
I find I typically only bring about 20-30% of the various notes, quotes and principles from the old journal into the new, as various connections have been established between topics, as well as quotes and topics I no longer find relevant or worth the energy of writing.
The major benefit to this method is its ability to enhance your writing for clarity and brevity in communicating complex subjects as the prospect of copying 10 pages of dense handwritten notes can take easily an hour, encouraging you to heavily edit them down.
During your first migration, you will want to dedicate passages to specific topics and begin to collate your various notes into them.
Book notes can now start to be condensed together into topics. The 10 pages of notes I took from Robert Greene’s book Mastery can now simply be titled “Mastery” and serve as a foundation for adding future notes to it.
I like to keep these topics to about 10 pages to start, and adding a second entry in the index with another 10 pages should I fund the topic needs to grow.
These topics should be personally driven, but some examples from mine include power, habits, relationships, questions, learning and studying, minimalism, philosophy and mortality.
I use small, sticky note dividers for these topics with the name written on them for easy reference.
As you keep migrating your commonplace journal from one to the other, you’ll will edit, delete and combine your writings.
Don’t be afraid to discard previous writings, it’s a lot of work to copy 10 pages of notes from one journal to the next. The value of doing this by hand is that it forces you to condense and combine ideas into brief works.
6. Collected Thoughts
Digital Journaling & Apps
While technology has allowed us to capture vast amounts of information and store it safely forever, it’s precisely this dynamic that prevents engaging with such information and turning knowledge into understanding.
Be warned. Using your phone, tablet, or computer as a journal will only lead to you becoming easily distracted and lost to the constant stream of temptations stealing your attention and intention away from the task at hand.
A physical book has power precisely for the fact it demands our time and attention, our most precious resources in the digital age. And you will gain a deeper reflection for the content you write, with longer reaching retention using the written word, far more than typing could ever offer.
With a physical book, there is only you, your mind, a pen, and the welcoming page.