Write things down and change your life??

So I have begun keeping a journal. I have tried this before off and on at various periods in my life. But for one reason or another, dropped the habit. Then a few years ago while in grad school, I took an awesome class on creativity. The instructor made us keep a journal during the quarter and encouraged us to keep it even after the class had ended.

I have a vivid memory of my professor inviting a former ad agency colleague to our class to give a guest lecture. His name was Mitch. Mitch brought four of his own journals and kindly let us thumb through them. We saw drawings, quotes, song lyrics, magazine and newspaper clippings, deep thoughts, pitch ideas and pages and pages of notes. It was very cool. He said he loved looking back at old journals for new ideas or even just a laugh at a thought he had harbored at one time. The entire class session was about journaling. What a cool guy. What an even cooler professor for letting that happen.

Mitch made the point that sometimes you get a great idea, but you're not in the most convenient place (e.g. on the el, in the bathroom, driving). But if you have your journal there, you can capture it before a great idea is lost among the thousands of other thoughts that fill our head each day.

Mitch talked about how Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld were lifelong journalers who noticed everyday happenings that had good joke potential and jotted them down for future reference. Those journal notations often provided fodder for stand-up routines or sitcom plot lines in their later careers.

Just last week, I received a magazine in the mail from one of the organizations to which I belong. There was a great article in there about journaling and one of the pull quotes read, "Write things down and change your life." Another direct quote was "The single most important reason for writing down your dreams and goals is this: A dream carried around in your head remains a dream until you take action."

And so the next day I started a journal. I wrote down one of my lifelong goals and hope that by doing so it might actually happen. And I am going to write it down here too, so that perhaps the added emphasis of putting it on my blog for all to see will help motivate me to make it happen.

Drum roll please....

I want to write books. I want to publish those books. I want to make a living off of doing this.

So there it is. It's out there. Let's see if I can make it happen!

Cheers,
Jacquie