The problem with fancy notebooks
On a recent episode of Back To Work, Merlin Mann talked about how he uses notebooks and the problem with fancy notebooks:
There’s something about a piece of paper that can be both really intimidating and very inspiring. Because there’s nothing you can’t do with a piece of paper. The biggest hurdle to using a notebook… is to get over the reluctance to put a mark on a page.
When I buy one of these Fancy Italian Notebooks, it’s so pretty. And I haven’t screwed it up yet! I haven’t said anything dumb. I haven’t made something I didn’t mean to say. Part of the problem with the Costly Italian Notebook is you don’t want to screw it up: each one of those pages cost money. It’s expensive. You don’t want to tear pages out of there because you don’t like what you wrote.
You start out thinking, “You know the nice thing about paper is I can do whatever with it,” but the irony becomes, “Yeah, but I don’t want to screw up this pretty notebook that I kind of don’t deserve.”
The solution, Merlin says, is to take a page from Wreck This Journal, and own your notebook, to mess it up and make your marks, whether they’re crummy or not:
The whole point of [keeping a notebook] is to make it yours… and do it in your own way…. That’s how you need to treat every notebook you’ve got! You need to be okay with whatever you put in there being complete garbage…. This means that even if you don’t know how to draw, it’s okay for you to draw. Even if you don’t know how to doodle, it’s okay for you to doodle. Even if you don’t know how to write, you know what? You are totally okay to just go write something. And if you don’t like it, you can tear it up, and throw it in your neighbor’s yard.
Later, Merlin says a notebook is “a safe place, a place where you can go to make a mess.”
This is something I tried to drill over and over in my journal talk: “Notebooks are a great place to have bad ideas.”
Above: scans of Merlin’s notebook, of which he says “Nothing doesn’t go in here”
