Life 2.0: Journaling

Today I am going to share an insight that shook my life pretty hard, for the good of course.

How many times it has happened with you that after reading a book you thought that you understood the idea until you were asked to explain it. The idea seemed pretty clear in your head but the moment you had to verbalise it you discovered that either you didn’t have a proper grasp on the idea at the first place or you were unable to explain it in a logical coherent way to a third person.

This is the kind of silent reaction I got from people “You’re telling me that you just finished reading a compelling book but can’t explain the central idea in few sentences?”

This problem haunted me for a long time. Then one fine day I discovered the Feynman Technique, which says that the mere action of writing something down allows for a more effective integration of the learning. This further led me to the idea of Journaling. It was a Eureka moment!

Let me first share my definition of journaling. Journaling is simply an activity of writing in plain language about what’s going on around you and what your thoughts are about them. It can include things like your future goals, plans, dreams, reminders to yourself, comments on ideas/people or any unrelated thing that crosses your mind. It’s a conversation that you have with yourself.

So what’s so special about journaling? Stick with me through the rest of the post and you might find some surprising insights.

Journaling allows you to take fuzzy thinking and distil it into precise line of thought. If you want to think better you have to start writing your thoughts. It’s not a common knowledge that writing, apart from being a communication tool, is a thinking tool too. Famous author, Dan Pink, further validated my belief in this commencement speech.

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