I’m once again venturing into the dangerous territory of offering unsolicited advice, as Kevin Kelly did in his blog post, “68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice,” intended for young people and based on almost 70 decades of life-lessons learned. The advice I’m offering today is, take notes.
Take notes about the places you go, the people you meet, and the things you learn. Take notes about what happens in important meetings — the commitments you make and the commitments other people make to you. Keep a record of all the books you read, and the important things you learned from reading them. Write down the name of the guy who fixed your electric garage door opener and what he charged for doing so. Write down what other people tell you about their kids, their jobs, and whatever else is important to them. Take notes when you talk to customer service, including the name of the person you spoke with and what promises they made. As you read, capture interesting or inspirational quotes you come across. When you travel, write down the names of the places you visit and the people you meet.
And, of course, keep these notes in a form that will let you go back to them much later and find whatever information you’re looking for. As good as your memory may be in your twenties, it will get worse. And when you’re young, you’re probably only trying to remember things from months or years ago; it’s much more challenging when what you want to recall happened decades before.
You don’t have to keep all your notes in the same format or in a single place. You might capture details about your friends and family members in their contact records on your phone, while keeping a list of the books you read in an Excel spreadsheet, as my late friend Bill Cole-Kiernan did. (I’ve forgotten how many books he said he’d read, but it was in the thousands.)
Unless you have an extraordinary memory, you may not recall learning four years ago that a colleague’s oldest daughter had gotten into the college of her choice. But if you’d made a note of that, you could say when you saw him today, “So Sarah’s graduating from Brown next year, right?” That kind of thing makes an impression.
Ryan Holiday, the American author who has become an authority on the subject of Stoicism, has a notecard system using 4×6 index cards. He collects quotes, ideas, notes from books he’s reading — pretty much anything that strikes his fancy — and he’s credited this system with his having been able to write three books in three years.
The fact is, you just don’t know what the future holds. You may decide to write your memoirs, which will be about 100 times easier to do if you’ve kept a journal over the years. But even short of that, being able to pull up details from your past that have long since slipped your memory can be invaluable.
With the exception of collecting quotations, I did almost none of this for most of my life, and I’m sorry for it. Over the last ten years I’ve been more diligent. I’ve kept a “personal log” in an app called DayOne on my phone, sometimes with photos. I note every person I meet and place I go that isn’t part of my daily routine, as well as the movies I watch and books I read. DayOne lets me categorize my entries, so if someone asks me if I’ve seen any good movies lately or which Thai restaurants I’ve been to, or if Jennifer asks me the name of that arboretum we visited on our last trip to England, I can quickly retrieve the answer.
I wish I’d started doing this much sooner, but wherever you are on life’s journey, it’s not too late to begin.