Searching for a Notebook
Originally published on 26 October 2022
One of the big aims for this year was to find purpose and set out long-term goals for myself again. It has been about re-evaluating my life, revisiting old goals, reinventing myself, and I am now ready to define new goals to match the future I want.
I recently finished Dorie Clark’s The Long Game: How to Be a Long-term Thinker in a Short-Term World (highly recommend it) which really helped guide me on how to be more strategic with my goal-setting. It was time to do some horizon thinking and plot the goals for the next ten years of my life.
I knew I had a blank Moleskine notebook somewhere for this exercise. I had bought it once upon a time for a special project which never got started. It’s a particularly beautiful hardcover one, soft mint green, and perfect for this exercise. I knew it must be somewhere in this house, so I went searching. Instead, what I found were paper pieces of my life and what has shaped me into who I am today.
Paper Trail
I am a secret notebook and paper hoarder. I keep these mementoes of my life well hidden from people but if you go to my study, they are tucked away in boxes, drawers, cupboards, and within notebooks themselves. I don’t know why I do it. Some of the things I keep are truly bizarre. Like my French idioms worksheet from high school hidden away in a box. Or my train ticket for a particular trip to Oxford tucked into the back of a notebook. All of this has been carried with me across continents and several house moves.
It is like a time capsule of my life and a paper trail of how I have grown as an individual. It is even reflected in the type of notebooks I have chosen. I have graduated from cutesy, colourful spiral notebooks to plain, practical Moleskine and Muji ones (still colourful occasionally). Hidden within those notebooks are to-do lists and meeting notes from my days in Parliament through to Wits University. Post-its are tucked inside with key information or a little note to myself about something. One little note in a PhD notebook that made me chuckle was “Why am I doing this?”.
Notebooks from the past
As I dug deeper in the boxes and drawers there were postcards from friends when I lived in France as an au pair. The printed-out email from the one and only boy (man now, I guess) who ever truly loved me. The perfect parliamentary question that was drafted for my favourite MP – a personal win. Random drafts of my PhD with scribbled notes from my supervisor or myself that I have kept for some reason. Drafts of documents I worked on at the university. The nostalgia hit hard.
The serious journaling of my life eventually started with the lockdown in March 2020. I laughed when I opened the first one which was titled 21 Day Lockdown. Little did we know how long it would actually last. I couldn’t read further.
I eventually found a notebook that had goals in it. It seemed to have been from 2021 as I was starting to navigate my way out of my toxic work environment. I looked at the Alex then and how she was struggling desperately to find some work/life balance. The goals she was setting were admirable, but nothing compared to what she sets now.
I was going to pick up that notebook, tear out the old pages, and use it for my new goals, but I decided not to. I would rather leave this time capsule of the Alex that was.
Blank Space for New Goals
It is good to reflect on the past before looking to your future. I didn’t quite expect it to happen while searching for a notebook or how much of my life I have kept on paper. You learn from all those drafts, to-do lists, mistakes, and accomplishments. It is why I didn’t recycle the old notebook. All these experiences shape who you are and what you can achieve in the future.
Clark writes in the introduction to her book, “Everything takes longer than we want it to. Everything”. So, when looking to plan my goals for the future, looking back at the past has helped to make me realise how much I have achieved in the past decade. All those notebooks are full of experiences and lessons. It also puts into perspective the time and work it will take to achieve the goals I have in mind now. Many more notebooks will need to be filled.
Another core takeaway from The Long Game is to give yourself space for long-term thinking. Clark discusses this in a more practical sense in terms of managing your time and commitments in this article from Harvard Business Review. But sometimes, you also need the blank space of a fresh notebook for setting those long-term goals so you can create a break from the past and move forward into the future.
Did I eventually find the notebook I was searching for? No. It must have gotten lost in the move. It is probably a good thing. It means a completely fresh start for my new goals.
Alex the Generalist
