Great Men Keep Journals | Hacker News Reader

Great Men Keep Journals

artofmanliness.com

116 pointsrobjama67 comments

I used to journal for years and stopped. Then I messed with OhLife (a YC startup) and kept going with it. I'm not connected with them other than being a user, but if you're online anyway, it's a pretty handy tool to keep a journal. http://ohlife.com/

It's also a good example of a clean design and user experience.

I have never really kept a journal, but when OhLife came along I thought it was a great idea, for about 3 days (the idea is still good). OhLife is great, my wanning self discipline however, is not so great.

Thanks for the link. Just signed up.

Interesting. Somewhat off-topic but what on earth is their business model? Journals are private. There are no advertisements. The service is free.

YCombinator hopes to make money from this how?

Don't get me wrong: it's a simple and clever idea. Just... it's not philanthropy, is it?

They send you an e-mail daily... one that you presumably actually look forward to getting. Surely they could add an advertisement to this e-mail if they wanted?

Probably.

And don't call me "Shirley".

I'm so sorry. I just couldn't resist....

(If you don't get it, watch this movie soon: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080339/)

Never explain jokes! You can dissect a joke, but it dies in the process.

But it's ok to point to a reference for the joke. It helps to educate people.

Some things don't need a business model. They should release the code as free/open source software if they haven't already.

Just think of it as a gift to the world and you can rest easy at night :D

Y Combinator is supposed to invest money in startups with the hope of making bucketloads of money. It's not a charity for establishing cool web apps as a gift to the world.

Phenomenal, simple idea. I, too, signed up.

I can still dig up random LiveJournal entries that I wrote on a whim ten years ago. What would people here rate the chances of me being able to do the same with OhLife entries in ten years?

Don't you keep all emails you send in a "sent" folder?

Good point, and true enough. I should have signed up using my Google account (I should still sign up using my Google account).

I recently unearthed my AOL user database from the late 90s. Dropping it into a simple text editor, I get a ton of garbage characters but also every e-mail I ever sent or received on my AOL account for about five years (including almost all the Spam). While it was sometimes painful reading through that mess (for various reasons), I gained some interesting insight into my past that I found useful. What's interesting is that I have a great deal more mail saved up in my various e-mail boxes, but I wouldn't think to go through and read those chronologically as I did with the AOL mail.

I use OhLife because it's so easy just to hammer off a few sentences at 8pm when it sends you that daily email.

And the random excerpt from the past is what keeps me opening the emails every time. Interesting to look back at the past.

I love Ohlife, it's just so easy and natural to send an email, it takes almost no activation energy.

That looks like a great site. I've been using http://www.memiary.com for over a year now. Its method of encouraging use is to present five small text boxes. Seeing that you only need to enter in a few list-like entries encourages me to actually write _something_ down.

It also has iphone and android apps (I actually wrote the Android version), which make it really convenient to update.

This is obvious selection bias, on several axes. Here are two of them:

- There is more/richer information available on people who keep journals, so it's easier to make the case for their greatness.

- If someone does great things but no record is kept, they are not acknowledged.

I enjoyed the stories of his grandfather, but the flawed reasoning in the argument annoyed me.

It's a case of inverted causality. The author thinks that because a lot of great people he knows about wrote journals that writing journals helps make a great man. It may in fact be that great men that write journals are the ones he knows about.

It does not address the (likely many many) people who keep journals but will not be considered great.

It is a valid point that keeping a journal does increase your legacy as it becomes easier to write memoirs for your grandchildren. Even if no one else will read it, they will have a vivid portrait.

I've kept a regular journal for most of my adult life.

I don't think it means much either way as far as whether I'm "great", whatever that means anyway.

I think keeping a journal has been vaguely useful.

That might be a better argument for it.

I have written a journal almost constantly since I was perhaps 15.

I love it. I can express on it all of my emotions, but still secrets are kept. I can write on it all of my thoughts.

It is, I must say, because of the journals I have kept that I have overcome so much adversity and it is journals which help me to push myslef further, and become better, every singl day. More often I do not know it, but the simple act of sitting in front of my computer and writing my thoughts down helps tremendously towards taking me further to what I want.

The problem I think is that, all the journals I have written, perhaps five or six, are now forever gone and deleted.

The strange thing is that in every entry, though I primarely write about myself and for myself, I aboslutley feel like there is an audience out there. Yet the more stranger thing is that, regardless of the imaginary glory of the moment, a diary to me is a personal thing, for my eyes only. It is something which maks sense to me only, and sometimes, to the moment that I wrote it alone.

Diaries can be dangerous. They are a perfect tool for narrowing your thinking. What you want is repeated over and ver, to the point that you do not feel that you want it anymore but are just saying so.

But I love writing journal entires. Despite the many journals that were deleted by whim and others that were deleted not by choice, I love writing them.

A journal makes me mak sense of what is was ad could be, and tthat, abouve my childrens fascination, is why I write them, despite the fact that they end up deleted and disapeared forever.

> Diaries can be dangerous. They are a perfect tool for narrowing your thinking. What you want is repeated over and ver, to the point that you do not feel that you want it anymore but are just saying so.

Indeed. It's sort of like the danger of writing only for your peers and thus subscribing to their groupthink (a danger especially present on sites like this one), but even more so: you're writing for a peer-group of one. You'll never get an alternate opinion thrown at you that can disrupt you from going down a stupid path, when you're making that journey alone.

However, that can be useful in some situations: unlike evolution, where every complex adaptation has to be made up of simpler adaptations that were each successful on their own, we can refine thoughts in textual meditation that would seem stupid if presented to others in their prototypical forms: we can climb down the fitness landscape to explore.

I'm sorry but could you please explain the difference between a diary and a journal? I just realised that I have no idea what the difference is ...

I used the terms interchangeably.

I love blank books. I feel like there's so much potential to fill it with random thoughts, ideas, doodles. Most of all, I have a greater appreciation for just being able to exercise my handwriting. I feel like that is the one skill I have taken for granted since school. Granted it's much faster to type down my thoughts, but I take greater pleasure in trying to decipher--if not improve--my handwriting.

Always remember that diaries are admissible in both the courts of law and public opinion. Contrary to actions, diaries can unequivocally prove state of mind. Furthermore diaries will not speak in the voice of those that wrote it, but will speak in the words of those that read it. So when deciding to keep a journal, ask yourself "what would Bob Packwood do?" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Packwood Knowing what he knows now, he would decide not to.

Proper encryption can be a help, there, I guess. Especially if you write your innermost motivations and feelings, you'll never want it to be available to anyone else (at least until you're dead).

You'll also spend money on the legal fees required to have your lawyer (or paralegal) review your diaries / journals to see what parts must be produced to the other side and what parts can be withheld.

Here's an example of what can happen if you don't screen your document production. I once took the deposition of a guy who was suing my client, his former employer, claiming that he owned an invention he'd made for them. The guy kept a diary. Instead of giving me only the diary entries that had to do with the invention, his lawyer just turned over the entire diary for the relevant period -- including entries about feeding live mice to his pet snake. Needless to say, in the deposition I asked the guy about that. Snake-feeding was completely irrelevant to the case, but if we'd gone to trial, I imagine I would have tried to find some way to put that testimony and those diary entries in front of the jury. (We didn't go to trial because the judge granted summary judgment for my client.) My guess is that the lawyer wished he'd screened the diary before producing it to me.

I just wrote myself a little script. Let's see, if it sticks ...

  $ cat bin/journal 
  #!/bin/bash
  FILE=${HOME}/Dropbox/journal.txt
  echo >>${FILE}
  date >>${FILE}
  echo >>${FILE}
  vim + ${FILE}

I've been using this zsh function for a year or two:

        jr () {
            echo "---"
            echo "\n##"`date +" %a %D %l:%M%P"` >> ~/journal.txt 
            cat >> ~/journal.txt
        }

It usually emits 72 dashes, so that I can stay within that margin (manually, heh). Edited to not break HN. The '##' is because I habitually markdown format everything.

That seems kind of unsafe to me, since it's all keeping it in one file.

How is it unsafe? (asking because I don't know, not to contradict)

One accidental command and every entry is lost, not just one entry or the most recent. Adding a "git commit journal.txt; git push offsite master" or something similar to your journal script will alleviate that risk.

Edit: you also don't have file timestamps to show when an entry was actually written, in case that matters to you.

Mine is similar. My journal file is the hidden file ~/.journal and my script is in my home bin directory. It sets up a cat from STDIN, so I can just jot a few things down and ^D. I wanted something that would be as easy to use and non-intrusive as possible. And I used the %% on a line by themselves as the divider, as I also do in my Quotes_Aphorisms file, so scripts for searching and manipulating the fortune databases will also work on them.

  #!/bin/bash
  echo "%%" >> ~/.journal
  date +"%a %Y-%m-%d :: %X" >> ~/.journal
  cat - >> ~/.journal

I wrote something similar just the other day :)

I don't write daily though, only when I feel like it.

I'm doing something similar. I found a cool vim command, ':r !date' for the current date. I'm using hg mercurial in addition to get additional backup security and logging. : P

I also decided host the repo at bitbucket. This will let me have 'offsite' backups and the ability to pull my journal whenever I have a computer and internet... which is always.

"Pro-tip": you can also do :.!date

Sounds to me like he just failed to find any great men that didn't keep a journal. It's by no means a common trait among them.

I found 750words.com useful to get me started on the Private Journalling habit. It also helps with brainstorming on the days when i feel like doing that.

The site uses game mechanics to keep you at it, until you no longer need the game mechanics - You just do it everyday without the reminder email or the Badges. They have a one-month challenge as well for those inclined for healthy competition.

750words.com/one_month/accept

Everybody 'wins' as long as they stick it out.

I've kept a journal off and on since my junior year in high school (20 years) and while I'd never claim to be a great man, it certainly is fascinating to look back over time at the things I was going through, the things I chose to write about, the times I wasn't writing, etc. I've found patterns (like I don't write in the summer much which corresponds to pretty much everything else - summers in Texas are brutal), worked through personal issues and of late, I've started working on convincing myself to do something completely different with my life by examining my meditations in the journal.

I tend to find writing easy but I think even jotting down what you did in a day could be useful on all kinds of levels. I recommitted myself this year to journal regularly every morning when I wake up and so far, it's been a fun and enlightening experience.

I think before I could keep a handwritten journal again, I'd have to learn either shorthand or drawing. Besides resisting the temptation to self-pity, of course.

Might actually a good idea for some neat new skills this years. Sadly last time I looked there were too many shorthand systems (and the default German one looked rather complicated), and I've yet to find a drawing book that makes me seem less clumsy ("Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" was recommended here before, but didn't do anything for me).

I kept a journal on a couple of backpacking trips. I ended up spending over an hour a night on it and would have kept going if it weren't for exhaustion. Eventually I couldn't bring myself to start an entry because I couldn't face the commitment.

Usually my days aren't as interested and filled with introspection as when I'm backpacking, though. I just signed up with http://ohlife.com/ as mentioned by dabent.

For work I have weekly text files, where I write down what I'm doing.

Originally this was to help me compile the weekly timesheets that my (then) employer required.

But the notes saved me from a lawsuit and I know find it useful for keeping notes on why I'm building things a particular way (especially when coupled with grep/ack/Spotlight).

For personal stuff, I have an A5 hardback book and a fountain pen - nothing beats it.

Journaling is very good for the mind. I have a lot of random thoughts and theories about business, life, politics, science,etc that I love to document. Writing it down forces you to think out my ideas into something coherent.It's fun to look back in your jounal and see what you were right or wrong about. And for some reason it is an emotional release.

I use a livescribe pen to jounal. Stores everything I write down digitally.

I used to keep a journal and found it very therapeutic writing my innermost thoughts and then as I got older I'd laugh at the things that stressed me out when I was younger. Then my mum found it one day and started reading it and that put an end to it... I've tried doing it online but it's just not the same as writing it in a beautifully bound journal and flicking through the pages.

I've wanted to keep a journal for several years. But I just didn't stick to the habit.

But now http://ohlife.com has changed that.

The fact that they send you an email daily And in the same email they also put a random memory from your past has really helped me stick with the habit.

I'm into 4 months... I think it works.

Maybe you would enjoy it too...

It's a neat interface and very compelling.

I just signed up since I've been wanting to keep a journal, just never gotten around to it.

There is definitely some fear about that, there are times when I have actually cut out a page that had info I didn't want to be available any longer.

I've created a web site called "PublicLog.com" which is at http://publiclog.com

It's 100% public.

It's for sharing your activities (past, present, future) and learning about other user's activities.

(I know, I know the UIX design is horrible! I'm working on improving it!)

Hope you find it useful.

There was another trend back in the day, something like a bookmark/quotes book. You would write in this journal quotes and page numbers from books/poems that you liked so that you could refer to them later on. The nice thing is that by writing down the quote, you would also be more likely to remember it and the surrounding context. I read Byron's Don Juan and man, if I didn't write down a few quotes and page numbers I would have forgotten what happened in this epic story!

Are there any good command-line journaling applications out there? I'm thinking about writing something simple that would automatically organize entries into separate monthly files, add date headers, store everything in version control, etc.

Googling for "command line journal", unfortunately, is not the right way to search for such a beast...

Here is a quite easy way to add journal entries via Emacs org-mode: http://phunculist.wordpress.com/2008/12/18/adding-a-journal-...

I'm currently looking at syncing org-mode files through a private GitHub repo.

Case in Point: Excerpts from Captain Rich Habib's Journal during The Race to Save the Cougar Ace

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-03/ff_s...

The digital/analog divide is a problem for me. I love the process of putting pencil to paper and writing, but amazing tools like org mode keep me on my computer. I hope eventually I discover how to properly balance these two types of logging.

another helpful site for keeping a journal: http://www.inboxjournal.com. i like that the site sends email reminders where you can post entries, and that it has a clean interface.

Every time I read a title like this, I just picture Teddy Roosevelt. Figures this link is from art of manliness.

I keep a Moleskine journal in my rear jeans pocket. It's small, and contours to the curve after a day or two so you don't even notice it's there. I keep it with me like I keep my keys and wallet, without exception.

I write on it on a semi-regular basis. The purpose of keeping with me is so I have something to write on as ideas come up, as girls give phone numbers, or ifI have free time to write down the thoughts of the day. That last part is the most important: I never liked sitting down and braindumping my day in a blog or a big book; I write a lot more when I can do it at any moment, sentences at a time.

I've been doing this since September 2007. 3 years, 3 months later, I'm on journal 14.

I do the same thing but mine's a Field Notes. Smaller (about the size of 2.5 credit cards). I write my travel itinerary, phone numbers and dates, random ideas, todos, etc. It's also good for sketching, something which my smartphone cannot handle.

Would love to find a book that has a more durable, fabric cover though as opposed to a paper one. Sort of like the old US passports had, my passport has seen so much abuse it ought to be illegal. Anyone know of one?

Field Notes is made in the USA (Plus)

But has goofy writing on the cover and has staples, not, stiches (Minus).

More expensive than Moleskine (Minus)

Doesn't have detachable back pages (Plus). Keeping these in the back pocket, the papers tend to try to separate.

TIPS FOR TAKING A JOURNAL WITH YOU ALWAYS: -Get a Moleskine or Field Notes and keep it with you like your keys and wallet. Never, ever leave it behind. Get in the habit.

-Don't let anyone read it themselves. If you use it as a diary, this rule lets you write in it more confidently. Also, don't tell everyone it's your "diary" or "journal". Tell most people it's just a private notepad. This keeps nosy people out of it.

-Don't forget the pen! A good pen (not gel) or pencil should do fine.

-Sitting around at the DMV? Write a bit. Thinking about a movie you saw? Write about it. Looking at a cute girl across the bar? Take note (if you have time). It's the little things that bring back memories you'll never remember you have.

Oh, and if you're drunk and your friends put you in the shower with your clothes on... take the journal out of your pocket.

I actually use a small sketch book. Hard cover, acid free paper with no lines, and heavy enough paper that ink doesn't show through. Also about 1/3 the price of a Moleskin.

Borders has their "Piccadilly" line of moleskine-alikes, about 1/2 the price and 90% of the quality. I really like their larger sized ones.

Now it's called blogging. Xanga -> LiveJournal -> Tumblr.

Did you read the article? Blogging is mentioned.

Personally, while I do blog periodically, my journal is entirely different than what I publish online. My journal is for my own consumption. Some things that are written down there (I prefer pen and paper) may end up online or in an essay, but others won't see the light of day (often for good reasons).

I write the same way in my blog as I do in a diary and leave it open with my name attached. I prefer it.

Other than that I'm not sure what we're arguing about. Though it is interesting you have things to hide.

For me it's not having things to "hide", it's editing and keeping drafts. And I sometimes like pen and paper to supress premature editing. If I have a keyboard, it's hard to keep my fingers off Alt and Ctrl. (I exclusively use web apps and I haven't found/made a good browser-Vi yet.)

Why is it a bad thing to keep some thoughts to yourself? And I'm not necessarily referring to thoughts about other people.

You are confusing having something to hide and keeping your thoughts to yourself. There is a difference.

No, I'm pretty sure I know the difference. But the older I get, the more sure I am of my opinions, the more educated I am of my thoughts, the better I am of writing, the less I care the more I start to see something to hide and hiding thoughts are too similar.

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