The Bullet Journal Method
The power of the Bullet Journal is that it becomes whatever you need it to be, no matter what season of life you’re in.
Ryder Carroll • The Bullet Journal Method
I think this is likely true but it is a journey of years of customization to get here.
It is in the present moment that we begin to know ourselves. Joan Didion, a famous proponent of writing things down, began doing so at age five. She believed that notebooks were one of the best antidotes for a distracted world: “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget w
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It IS truly amazon how many seemingly salient moments drop from memory within hours of them occurring. I see this with my kids all the time. I think, "I want to remember the way Theo is playing with Tilly right right now," but it's gone moments later.
Curiosity points the needle of our inner compass toward the hopeful magnetism of possibility and meaning. It’s the force that compels us to venture out of our comfort zone into unfamiliar territory filled with uncertainty and risks. The question becomes: How do we best harness our curiosity while reducing the risk of failure? We set goals. When set
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While I don't disagree with this area of the book, I think there are many books that handle goal-setting in more depth than this. I kind of wish this book didn't feign comprehensiveness as much as it does. I'd recommend David Allen's "Making it all Work" as a good companion for this section.
The best way for your radiance to serve others is to challenge yourself to grow. To that end, make deliberate learning an ongoing focus of your life. Being intentional in your pursuit of knowledge will help you engage with the world and open it up in ways you would have never considered, or been willing to, otherwise.
Ryder Carroll • The Bullet Journal Method
In his beautiful commencement speech “This Is Water,” at Kenyon College, author David Foster Wallace talked about the day-to-day and how “the so-called ‘real world’ will not discourage you from operating on your own default settings, because the so-called ‘real world’ of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contem
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This is where the system can take a lifetime. You can put as much as you want in your notebook, but unless you spend the time being mindful about it, and adding context to it, it's a meaningless log you never get back to.
Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the painter who dares and who has broken the spell of “you can’t” once and for all. —VINCENT VAN GOGH
Ryder Carroll • The Bullet Journal Method
Damn straight. Now I feel like a famous painter—my medium just happens to be an ugly BuJo.
When we put pen to paper, we’re not just turning on the lights; we’re also turning up the heat. Writing by hand helps us think and feel simultaneously.
Ryder Carroll • The Bullet Journal Method
The complex tactile movement of writing by hand stimulates our mind more effectively than typing. It activates multiple regions of the brain simultaneously, thereby imprinting what we learn on a deeper level. As a result, we retain information longer than we would by tapping it into an app.
Ryder Carroll • The Bullet Journal Method
I believe this, 110%. I look at handwritten notes and mental associations come swimming back. The context I add via highlights, and even layout, seem to have a big impact.
We honor the lessons we’ve learned by applying them to the next phase of our life. Big or small, migrate only the content and techniques that have proven themselves to be valuable, nothing else. A new notebook is not about starting over—it’s about leveling up. Migrating notebooks is a benevolent reckoning, where you face your responsibilities to se
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One of the most powerful concepts here in this book, and also the most slippery, is how to make your notebook capture meaning that is useful in the future. Clear writing is part of that.