Pocket notebooks.
Why don’t more people carry pocket notebooks? I don’t understand what your resistance is. Seriously, get your act together, bozo.
The human mind is simply not capable of juggling an expansive series of thoughts, and I personally would like to retain as many of my thoughts as possible.
Perhaps, people just don’t value their own thoughts/ideas as highly as they should. I don’t expect others to necessarily value my own personal ideas highly (I mean, why would they?), but I certainly hold my own ideas with high regard. I decided, around the age of 13, that any imagery that my brain conjures carries some inherent value. Even if that value isn’t immediately apparent, it can become apparent after tweaking and perfecting the thought, whether through self-analysis or bouncing off a third party.
For this reason, since the age of 13, I’ve always carried around a pocket notebook in my breast-pocket. Whenever anything unusual happens in my daily routine, I’ll take note of it. Even if a joke isn’t making itself readily clear to me, sometimes making the smallest adjustments to real occurrences allows for some of the funniest material, especially considering many of the funniest ideas are rooted in reality.
Pocket notebooks also help with anagrams. Having a designated page for sketching out anagrams through letter rearrangements and vowel/consonant inventory is crucial. Fortunately, over the years, I’ve reached a point where anagrams come more naturally to me than ever before. I now see the letters in my head, and oftentimes they rearrange themselves for me, taking my mind on a journey of sorts, to alternate realities through simple letter rearrangements.
Sketch drawings can be fun, too, but that’s not really my thing.
By carrying a pocket notebook, I am, like all of you, still experiencing the mundane aspects of daily life. The only difference is that, where most people do acknowledge the slight variations from regularity, I go one step further, embracing these occurrences by taking notes about them. This allows me to spend time later analyzing and reflecting on the irregularities that I observe in relation to typical human behavior, with the hopes of ultimately applying the aforementioned to my own material.
Here’s the point: if you want to truly experience LIFE, and if you want to be able to sit down one day to recall the ups and downs of your past, maintain a pocket notebook.
I don’t keep a journal. I’ve never once kept a journal. If you want that, feel free to go get one on your own time, but that’s not going to work here. Nope. I don’t think so. What I do, contrary to those who keep a journal (stooges), is simply take note of the experiences. Where a journal-holder would include their feelings at the time of the entry, I leave my emotions entirely absent, except for those few times when my emotions are critical to understanding a given entry. The purpose of my method is maintaining control of objectivity. After notating a specific behavior, I might feel differently about that same behavior on any other day. It’s possible that, at the time of the noted event, I was in a different emotional state than that of my typical day-to-day. For this reason, I include my emotional state only where absolutely necessary, because much more often, I leave my emotions absent. This way, when I reflect down the road, I will have multiple perspectives in regards to that specific event, so my ideas will be significantly more concrete.
Until next time,
Michael J. Erickson, CEO & Co-Founder
