Keep A Commonplace Book

A Mindful Miscellany, #27

About ten years ago, I attended the U.S. Foreign Service Institute with several colleagues— a two-week regional study course on what the State Department calls South Asia (Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and the former “Stans” of the Soviet Union). While there, during a few lectures which failed to capture our attention successfully, we came up with the idea for the Grail Diary. 

In short, the concept is the journal that Dr. Jones, Sr. had in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, as written by the Dos Equis Most Interesting Man in the World. Here’s a few snippets of how he’s characterized in the commercials:

• He has inside jokes with people he’s never met.

• He lives vicariously, through himself.

• He once taught a German shepherd how to bark in Spanish.

• Two countries went to war to dispute HIS nationality.

• He’s a lover not a fighter, but he’s also a fighter so don’t get any ideas.

• His garden maze is responsible for more missing persons than the Bermuda triangle.

• His business card simply says, ‘I’ll Call You.”

• If he was to pat you on the back, you would list it on your resume.

• He once played a game of Russian Roulette with a fully loaded magnum and won.

• He is the life of parties that he has never attended.

• He once won the Tour-de-France but was disqualified for riding a unicycle.

• He is left-handed. And right-handed.

• Time waits on no one, but him.

We thought our idea was so revolutionary- What would the entries be if the Most Interesting Man in The World had a Grail Diary? How to tame a Bengalese Tiger, Routes to Avoid on the North Face, Tips For Getting Through Customs in North Korea, What the Dalai Lama Told Me About My Last Three Lives, The Paella Recipe I Served The Spanish Prime Minister. 

It was only later that I understood that we had blundered into a very ancient concept- that of a commonplace book. Here is Ryan Holiday talking about it.

From Holiday: “A commonplace book is a central resource or depository for ideas, quotes, anecdotes, observations, and information you come across during your life and didactic pursuits. The purpose of the book is to record and organize these gems for later use in your life — in your business, in your writing, speaking or whatever it is that you do.”

Some of the greatest men and women in history have kept these books. Marcus Aurelius kept one–which more or less became Meditations. Petrarch kept one. Montaigne, who invented the essay, kept a handwritten compilation of sayings, maxims and quotations from literature and history that he felt were important. His earliest essays were little more than compilations of these thoughts. Napoleon, Thomas Jefferson, and Virginia Woolf all kept one. HL Mencken, who, as his biographer put it, “methodically filled notebooks with incidents, recording straps of dialog and slang” and favorite bits from newspaper columns he liked. Bill Gates keeps one.

The picture above is a few examples of grail diaries/commonplace books I have kept over the years. As Herbert Simon says, “In a wealth of information there is a poverty of attention.” Keeping a Grail Diary is a way to push back against the flood, the glut of sensory input. To curate and capture what is important to you.

Some people keep digital commonplace books in knowledge management software such as Notion, Obsidian, Google Keep, etc. While I do think this is valuable, there is something about the analog process of capturing quotes, concepts, ideas, and aspirations through the embodied process of writing that encodes the knowledge. 

Nassim Taleb discusses the difference between Fragile, Robust/Resilient, and Antifragile in Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder. Knowledge captured electronically is Fragile. You can run out of power, drop your device in water, have a software or server crash. A physical notebook is Resilient- you can throw it in your pack for any Zombie Apocalypse style scenarios that go down over the next decade, or just to peruse on a long plane flight. Finally, the act of physically writing things down will encode it into your Memory, which would be the most Antifragile of the three. Memorization allows you to transmit the gathered wisdom to others orally, and update it faster than a digital or analog repository. 

Keeping a commonplace book aids in capturing the relevant tidbits of your life, fosters creative breakthroughs through cross-disciplinary connections, and facilitates the emergence of wisdom. Do it!