“Every time he made a decision, he’d write himself a memo about what he expected to happen. Then nine months later he opened it up and read it to find out how wrong he’d been. He wanted to learn the most he could from each and every error.”
-The Social Animal by David Brooks
I started keeping a journal specifically to keep track of my first year on staff at my church in Kansas. Today starts week 3 and I’m making a lot of decisions. I’m trying to keep track of all of them and what I hope their outcomes will be. We’ll see how I wrong I am. I’m sure it’s going to be fascinating to look back on the entries of this journal three or four years from now.
Here are a few reasons I think it’s a good idea:
I’ll be less likely to make the same mistakes twice.
It’ll make me better at helping other people just starting out on staff at a church. I think sometimes when we’re discipling our just being a good friend (often the same thing) we can find ourselves thinking “There’s no way I was ever this naive, right?” Keeping a journal will give you tangible proof that, yes, you were once just as dumb and uninformed.
What if you had kept a journal of your first year married? First year as a parent? First year as an empty nester? Mister Rogers’ great ability to communicate with and care for children was often credited to his ability to still remember what it was like to be a child himself. He could remember how visceral the fear of getting your first haircut was, so he knew just what a child facing that might need to hear to be comforted.
Also, when we find success we can rewrite the story of how we got there to stand down the rough patches, the mistakes, the missteps, the absolute screw-ups along the way, so we’re left with a neat and tidy narrative of how you made every right decision to get you where you are today.
A journal keeps you honest.