High achievers journal.
We write our thoughts, we process challenges, we get present with our words. Every morning routine book talks about it. Every guru tells us the power of it. Podcasts constantly extoll the virtues of taking the time to collect your thoughts on paper.
I believe you’ve been doing it all wrong.
Most of my life, I’ve been told that keeping a journal is to help process the bad things. To remember the hardships, and to grow.
What if that’s the wrong recipe?
I grew up in a French kitchen. My Great-Grandmother founded a restaurant in her home in 1931. The great depression was in full effect and she’d lost her husband to pneumonia two years before. She had two kids to raise and little choice. Over the next 83 years, that restaurant would win awards aplenty, grow into a bed and breakfast with 30 guest rooms, and in 1986 it became my birthplace.
By the age of seven, I was on a mission to buy my first airplane. The first step? To work for my Grandparents doing whatever they would let me. I led tours around the property (it’s on the National Registry of Historic Places), shined shoes, acted as a bell hop, and my favorite? I did mis en place for hundreds of diners. Snapping peas, sectioning grapefruit, prepping salads, wiping dishes at the pass through. Whatever needed to be done. It was there I learned my deep love for cooking, for serving others, and for food.
A couple of years ago, my friend Preston Smiles was sharing his wisdom with a room I was in. What he said went completely against the grain of everything I’d ever heard about journaling. “When your life is going right, THAT is when you should journal”. He urged everyone to take stock of the moments when everything felt in flow, when life was working. To honor what had brought you to a place of joy, of success, love, or belonging.
When he said those words, the nostalgia hit me like a ton of bricks. I remembered being eleven years old. My Grandfather had passed away that September. He was an incredible Chef.
That Thanksgiving I watched as my Uncle and Mother stared deeply into the kitchen refractometer, trying to perfectly replicate the salinity and fat content of our best thanksgiving gravy. My Grandfather had accomplished his version of perfection some years before and written all the data down. The perfect recipe, not just the contents, but the chemistry. If it had been available to him I’m sure he would have saved the molecular makeup…
But this was years before Top Chef and molecular gastronomy took the main stage (Richard Blaise and the Voltaggio brothers are still my heroes for that work) </foodnerdsubrant>.
I’d been a witness to a family heritage of writing down what created perfection, but I’d never had a mentor, friend, or coach guide me to following the same process in any area but the kitchen.
When things are going well, write the recipe!
When things are perfect, honor it by writing every known element so you have the keys to getting back to that perfection.
Living is Reliving.
When we take the time to write down our memories and experiences, there is deep value in the process. It helps us own our thoughts, helps us truly process. But when we take the time to relive those moments, to sit with the details we've forgotten, we get another appreciation for the life we have had. Writing out our recipes for perfection is such an obvious move, and one I'd never even considered outside of the kitchen.
What recipes for life have you written? What wisdom can you share?