The Commitment to Write
Recording what happens today and your previous history has value
I am currently reading SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard. I am amazed at how hard it is to come up with a history put together with bits and pieces of old writing. While I am under no illusion that what I write will be as consequential as the words of any minor Roman scholar, I am convinced that the writing I do has value and that each person should consider the consequences of not recording the world as you have seen it.
There are five benefits to writing that you might never have considered.
What you write to today might be of much greater benefit to those in the future than it is today. Someone in you family might actually try to understand you.
Often by writing about something you can deconstruct was really happened and draw some valuable lessons from situation that might have been too emotionally charged to analyze in the moment.
What you have accomplished in your life is of great value. It is much easier to appreciate it if it has been written down. It will likely be mostly lost or forgotten if it has not been written down in a coherent way.
Recording what you have done in a situation can help you make more informed decisions in the future.
Details become blurred with time. If they have been written down, it is easy to recover them. It is one of the reasons that smart organizations keep minutes of important meetings.
Much of my college life at Harvard in the sixties was devoted to studying history and trying to piece together ordinary life from records that had been transferred to microfilm. Personally, I hardly knew my own father and what little I know about him I have deduced from newspaper articles, letters and documents that I found when cleaning out the family home.
Twenty-five years ago I became concerned that much of what I had experienced in life and even some of the people I knew were slipping away into the mists of time. I vowed to do better and started writing regularly, even daily. I have written about not only what is happening but what has happened. I tried to go backwards as far as I could by interviewing my mother and others of her generaton. I video taped several, put the Interviews on DVD, only to redo everything recently to get them to play on an iPad.
Most of my writing has been through blogs and websites that I manage create. What I have written about spans the gamut of life. Some of it is ordinary stuff that will justifiably slip through the cracks of time.
However, what I have written is a treasure trove for researcher on the way the events happening have been viewed by an ordinary person. Just one of my blog sites, View from the Mountain, has over 1,500 posts and another, My Technological Infirmity, has nearly 600 posts. I have over 1,800 short text posts and photos on Bluesky. More recently I have written a number of posts on Substack where this post originates. I also have stories on Medium.
With my wife’s help there are also five books to our credit so far, one a tell-all story about my sales career at Apple, another about our years in Maritimes, a third about how the North Carolina from my youth has changed, and the fourth a travel guide to Emerald Isle, NC. It can now more properly be considered a history of the area before it got overwhelmed by people -we actually did six editions of the travel guide from 2012 to 2018.
At times I have asked myself is all the work going into writing worth it? I have done a fair amount of writing for pay but it has rarely been more than a nice bonus check. I strongly believe that my efforts will benefit me and my family members in the future. That it might benefit others is just icing on the cake. I had a text book publisher ask to use a photo of our dry yard as an example of a drought in the mountains. I had one person tell me that he disagreed with me on something about the White Oak River but decided to drop it after finding that I was the author of most of the web articles.
I have already run into cases where I couldn’t remeber the exact details of something but I knew they were in one of my books. Recently I was talking with some ex-Apple people about a trip some of us made to Vienna and Switzerland in the eighties. People were vague on the details and some were confusing it with another trip we did to Munich. It didn’t take long to pull a passage from my book, The Pomme Company.
Golden Apple trips were typically a week long, filled with activities and opportunities that would never be available to individuals. The food, the events and tours were all almost beyond belief. From watching Lipanzer stallions to having our wives given a rose and escorted to a table for dinner, the trip was full of magic. We spent two or three nights in Vienna and then took a private train across the Alps to Switzerland. The train stopped at a high point in the Alps, and a number of us got off and had a snowball fight. We were welcomed at the train station in Switzerland by several Alpenhorns. Our next few days were spent in Interlaken at the Grand Hotel Victoria-Jungfrau.
The passage before even told me the trip took place in the spring of 1987. The book also had pictures to jog my memory.
You don’t have to go back many years before your memory can trick you. I even still have the sales training course website that I built for a company where I worked in 2006. When we took on a new inside sales rep where I work now, I recommended some relevant articles from the website for him to read. My Apple book is full of examples of how not to run a company and many others about how to be successful as a skunk works. Some small comany may yet see through my book that there are other ways than being evil to get high performance out of your employees
Documenting what you have done and the results you achieved is fundamental to understanding how to improve your results.