In a recent episode of the “Focus on This” podcast, host Blake Stratton shared something that I found very interesting.
The topic was about journaling, and how it can lead to clarity. Blake took the idea of externalization and put it like this:
Usually you think, “Oh, I know and therefore therefore I write,” it’s not always the case. A lot of times it’s, “I write and therefore I know.” We don’t just learn by consuming, we learn by then trying to articulate what we’ve consumed and put it into our own voice and into our own words.
As I’ve said on here before, that’s my basic idea for publishing this blog. It’s not that I know all of this great stuff that I want to share, but it’s that I come across ideas that might be great and then I use this blog as a way to process and externalize them to help me learn more.
Interestingly enough, in researching a few other thoughts on this post, I dug back into my old Blogging Beats Journaling post — which it turns out was also inspired by a journaling-focused episode of the “Focus on This” podcast.
I still maintain that blogging is better than journaling in many cases, since it forces you to better summarize your thoughts before sharing them, but this latest episode of their podcast has helped me to see the benefits of pure journaling a bit better. Check it out when you have a chance.
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