I hated this notebook

But it delivered some solid results

Notebooks, I could ramble on about them forever. I’ve written about them at length before, as some readers will remember. I usually write posts explaining why I think certain notebooks are wonderful but this time I decided to go against my instincts and use one that I really didn’t like. The results surprised me.

I had bought 5 - 6 of these notebooks years ago for notetaking. They’re sketchbooks so they are unlined and the paper has that rough quality we all expect from a sketchbook.

Also, I have no idea what the ideograms on the cover represent.

This notebook was partially filled with some older notes that I needed to harvest and include in yet another notebook, so I ripped out the keepers and kept the blank pages.

So what to use the notebook for?

Freewriting, I decided. So I just wrote. I hated the paper, I didn’t like the cover, the notebook did not inspire me in the least.

So I just wrote. I wrote and wrote and wrote. I wrote a lot of gibberish and crap. And at best I felt indifferent about the activity, at least in the beginning. So I wrote what came to mind and if I got bored I changed things up. I devoted a couple of pages to silly diagrams with stickers on them, creating images and words of faux-importance. If I ran out of steam I tried something else. I did this in the midst of watching TV and or gaming. I just kept going.

Then something interesting started to happen. I started to think about my career, the things I liked and disliked. I thought about the things that stressed me and I also thought about how many years I probably have left before retirement (anywhere between 7 - 12 years). I thought about the working relationships that I’ve developed during the past 33+ years. And, through this wretched beast of stationery that I just let my mind chatter with I adopted a new perspective and felt refreshed, if only a tiny bit.

All this to say, don’t judge a notebook by its cover or paper, judge it by what you were able to accomplish with it. Eddie Van Halen was once quoted as saying that tone was in the fingers, implying that the best musical instrument could sound awful in the hands of a novice, while a master knows how to make the best art they can despite the tools at hand. I’m not a master but I do know a thing or two. And while fancy, expensive notebooks have their place, so do the crappy ones.

Words for thought.