get one damn good notebook and write shit down.
confessions of a pen dealer part 2
Nassim Taleb popularized the concept called the anti-library. Most people have heard of it by now. It is the collection of books you own but have not read yet, and Taleb argues those unread books are far more valuable than the ones you have finished because they represent the honest gap between what you know and what you do not.
“the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”
-Nassim Taleb
I think about this a lot in relation to notebooks.
Because a notebook is the same idea but in reverse. Not the gap in your knowledge, but rather the gap in your thinking. Every blank page represents a thought you have not had yet, an idea that does not exist yet, an observation you are yet to make. It is sitting there in your bag right now, waiting.
The act of carrying a notebook around with you, even before you have written a single word in it, is already doing something. It is a subtle statement that your thoughts are worth capturing. That something might occur to you today that is worth keeping. You do not need to write anything yet. Sometimes just having it there is enough, because when the moment comes, and it always comes, you are ready.
People have always understood this. Not as some bs productivity hack or a wellness practice, just as a basic human instinct. Da Vinci filled notebooks compulsively, observations and inventions and sketches and shopping lists all living together on the same pages. Darwin carried one on the Beagle. Sylvia Plath was rarely without hers. None of them were following a system. They just knew that the mind moves fast and paper slows it down just enough to catch something real (and also maybe because they didn’t have the notes app)
Our feeds are filled with somewhat complicated advice around notebooks. Bullet journals. Weekly spreads. Habit trackers. Colour coded indexes. There are hundreds of YouTube videos dedicated to showing you the correct way to use a notebook, and all of them are missing the point entirely. A notebook does not need a system. Your mind does not operate in a system. Why would the place where you capture your thinking need to look like a spreadsheet?
The notebook should be an extension of your mind, and your mind is messy, associative, nonlinear. It makes connections between things that have no business being connected. It thinks about something profound and then immediately thinks about what to have for dinner. That is just how thinking works. Your notebook should reflect that. Grand ideas next to shopping lists. Quotes from things you have read next to wifi passwords. Half-formed thoughts that trail off mid-sentence because something else arrived. Beautiful chaos.
I carry a notebook called “RANDOM SHIT” which is my ride or die, and it is exactly that (also carry a notebook called “STUPID SHIT” but thats a separate post) .This week it has a quote I wanted to keep, a reminder to book flights, three article ideas in various states of completeness, something someone said in a conversation I did not want to lose, and a small drawing of nothing in particular that I did while I was on the phone. There are little blue tabs on certain pages I want to return to (substack articles). That is the entire system. It takes about four seconds to explain and it works perfectly because I invented it for my own brain. The chaos on those pages is the point, and the surface those pages are printed on matters more than most people realise. Its not that deep.
Now here is the thing most people skip over when they talk about notebooks and analogue and writing things down. It is not about the pen. I know, coming from a fountain pen dealer that sounds like betrayal. But I have sold enough notebooks alongside enough pens to know the truth: it is the paper that makes or breaks the experience.
Think of it like sushi. We often assume that the fish is the integeral part of sushi. A sushi chef will tell you the fish is almost secondary, everything depends on the rice. Same here. You can have the most beautiful fountain pen in the world, but press it to thin, cheap paper and it feathers, bleeds through to the other side, turns your thoughts into a blurred mess. Good paper holds your thoughts. Bad paper leaks them. (I cannot believe i compared a notebook to sushi rice btw.)
If you are using a fountain pen, or even just a decent rollerball (i don’t reccomend) , aim for paper that is at least 80gsm, though honestly 90gsm and above is where things get genuinely good. At that weight the ink sits on the surface properly, the nib glides rather than drags, and you get none of the bleed-through that makes cheap notebooks so frustrating. Anything below 70gsm and you are basically writing on toilet roll, respectfully (if you’re using a fountain pen).
My personal recommendation, and the one I find myself coming back to constantly, is the Leuchtturm1917 pocket journal. The paper is 80gsm, it comes with numbered pages and an index at the front if you want it, the binding is solid enough to survive being sat on and rained on, and it fits in a jacket pocket without thinking about it. It is not the most exotic recommendation in the world but it is genuinely excellent and it works with fountain pens without complaint. Start there.
I know there is a whole romanticization of the notes app on your phone. It is convenient, it is always there, it is searchable. All of that is true and none of it is the point. There is something that happens when you write by hand that does not happen when you type, and it is not mystical. Writing is slower than thinking, which means you have to choose what to write down, and choosing forces clarity. Your phone notes are frictionless, and frictionless is not always what you need when you are trying to think something through (more on that on my article below)
There is also this: a notebook you carry gets damaged. The cover gets worn, the corners get bent, pages get coffee on them. And that damage is actually the point. It is a record of the thing having been used, having been with you, having been part of your days. A phone note does not do that. It just sits in a folder you never open, perfectly preserved and completely forgotten.
Try this. Go to a cafe. Leave your phone in your pocket, close the laptop, order a coffee, and just sit there with your notebook and a pen. Do not go with an agenda, do not try to be productive. Just sit and see what happens. You will be bored for about four minutes and then something will arrive, a thought, an observation, something you have been meaning to work out for weeks. Write it down. Then write the next thing. That is it. That is the whole practice. Add a date too.
And you never know what you are carrying around in your head until you put it on a page.
Please never stop writing articles. The way you have written is so well thought out, no doubt you have been journaling for ages. I was randomly reading the first few lines, then straightened up, called my sister to read them out loud. Then we read the whole thing together out loud. I do write sometimes but this article is soo good, that I can't wait to start writing regularly.
This inspired me to catch up on my commonplace journals. Thank you for posting this!