Do you share your resources with others?

Over the past few years, I’ve become a fairly regular journaler 📝. What once started as a way to remember enjoyable memories and funny quotes from my friends and family has turned into an extension of my mind that helps me to live a happier and more fulfilling life. Especially in the last year, my journal has become a trusted friend and an appreciated partner. It’s a place to remember and reflect on appreciations, ideas, questions, victories, rough edges, and sometimes pits of despair.

My journal is an extension of my mind 🧠. It lets me be more than I could be with my body alone. It gives me a place to remember things that I would otherwise forget and to process my thoughts, reflecting on my past to shape my future. One of the most important recent sources of growth for me has been seeking out other points of view that are divergent to what I already know, believe, and value. For me, the process of encountering and wrangling new and divergent ideas — often in my journal — is way more fun than shouting Yes, Yes, Yes! 📣 in an endless echo chamber of ideas in which I already believe.

It’s hard to find, learn about, and process new and divergent ideas. It’s often a process of trying new things, forming new opinions 🤔, and trying to converge divergent ideas into a coherent me. That can be hard and exhausting, but if you really think about it — the things in life that are more challenging but within or just beyond our ability are the most rewarding things. It’s in struggling well that we grow and achieve a sense of accomplishment and mastery, living a fulfilling life 🙌.

It’s largely thanks to those that have openly shared their ideas, knowledge, and wisdom that I’ve been able to encounter new and divergent ideas. Without authors, speakers, bloggers, artists, etc sharing, I’d have to reinvent the wheel. I would never be able to encounter such an abundance of ideas in my lifetime, perhaps having less happiness and fulfillment in my life. I really appreciate 👏👏👏 these people for sharing — I often appreciate them in my journal after reading a really divergent book or encountering a really impactful piece of art.

And so as I reflect on the hundreds of journal entries I have written over the past few years, I wonder — why do I keep all of these to myself 🔏? How can people learn from what I’ve learned if I don’t share? I want to live in a world of abundance, not scarcity! Therefore in appreciation of all those who do share, I too have decided to start writing many of my journal entries publicly.

Please take my musings with a grain of salt. They are primarily for me to work things out for myself. I’m sure many of the things that I say here will change over time. I’m sure I’ll contradict myself. I’m sure that you’ll disagree with some of what I say. It’s a joyous process that we get to continually evolve as humans, but our evolution is often circular and vulnerable— revisiting the same things over and over, changing our thoughts and values over time. Therefore I invite you to follow along on this journey and I hope that maybe you too will consider sharing your abundance with the world.

Perhaps better said from French philosopher Michel De Montaigne:

“Reader, you have here an honest book … in writing it, I have proposed to myself no other than a domestic and private end. I have had no consideration at all either to your service or to my glory … Thus, reader, I myself am the matter of my book: there’s no reason that you should employ your leisure upon so frivolous and vain a subject. Therefore farewell.”

Thanks to Oshan Jarow for sharing this quote and his thoughts behind it — one of my favorite sources for new and divergent ideas! 👏👏👏

-Adam Zolyak