Letters to your future self: How to develop the habit of keeping a journal.

Vance Crowe [00:00:00] Inside of the book, there is another Post-it note that is marking a page in this etiquette book. And so I'm starting to get a little bit queasy of a feeling, 'cause I think that Pete is trying to tell me something and I open it up to the page where a post-it note is at. This Is The Man's School podcast bonus episode. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. On Fridays, I sit down to share some thoughts, tactics, ideas, philosophies that can help you become a tangibly better communicator. And this week I've had a lot of time to think because I was traveling down to the University of Florida at Gainesville because the Veterinary Graduate Students Association had invited me in to give a talk on how to engage with people that are, that think about the world very, very differently than you. And it's a long story, but at its core what had happened was they had put on a public event where they were inviting the outside world, moms and dads and kids to come in and meet dairy cows. See how, how cows work, how do they get milked, how do they have babies? How do we treat them when they get sick? You know, this is a veterinary school. They, they have a teaching hospital, they have a PhD program there. So there were all these excited students that wanted to share their knowledge and expose kids to the, the world of working farms. And they had some people show up that were activists.

Vance Crowe [00:01:34] And the activists tried to disrupt the event. They brought cameras, they got really aggressive with some of the people that were teaching the kids. They would get right up in your face and start asking you these questions that, that really made the people in the veterinary school feel like they were gonna be taken out of context. And so after the event finished up, they made a decision, a woman named Miriam Jimenez said, we wanna find out is there any way that we could have dealt with these people that would've been more productive? It felt really uncomfortable. We didn't know what to do. So what is it that we could do in the future? And that is how they found me. And I was invited to come in and give a talk on why is it that people way dramatically overestimate what they know. You know, these activists didn't have their veterinary degrees or their PhDs, and yet they believed they knew much more about how to care for these animals than the veterinary students did. And then why is it that they believe so deeply in their ideas that instead of stopping and having a conversation, they really just wanted to fight? And the, the core of the, of the Veterinary Students Association was to say, what could we have done to make this better? And I won't go through the whole talk. If I get a chance, I'll post some clips of it. I think it was recorded while I was giving the talk. But the, the, I do want to talk about the very last slide in my presentation. So I went through and talked about why people get these ideas, why it's very difficult to use facts to change someone's mind, and then a strategy on how to do what we, what's called steel manning.

Vance Crowe [00:03:12] How to make someone feel like they are having an argument with somebody that is intellectually charitable and understands their point of view and then makes them as, as open as they will possibly be to changing their minds. But I wanna talk about the very last slide in my presentation, my concluding slide, which if I'm being honest, I don't think I landed during the presentation as well as I wanted to because the very last slide probably seemed like to many of the students and the faculty that were there, there were like 150 people. I don't know, it was a big crowd. I think it seemed like a non-sequitur. And it's the, I think it seemed like, Hey, this is great. We've learned a lot and now he's giving us this piece of advice that seems really separated from everything else we're doing. And, you know, that happens. Sometimes I go to deliver talks and a lot of times I am trying to capture an abstract idea and make it concrete for everyone, much like these podcasts. And I think sometimes I, I don't always make the bridge as well as I could. And so I wanted to, to do it here. And, and so I wanna talk with you about the very last slide in my presentation. And I wanna tell about how it is that I came to understand why it is so important that you take this final piece of advice. That it's actually the most important piece of advice if you are going to engage with people that have a different point of view than you, that I can give. It's actually the thing that probably changed me the most.

Vance Crowe [00:04:46] And it started far, far, far away from anything I have to do with giving talks or activists or having people be upset with me. It has almost nothing at all to do with that. But it's something that I think that is, is worth knowing about. And really, the very last slide said, conclusion colon keep a journal. And this is, this is like totally different than everything else I had set up to that point. And then I tried to make the case and I'm gonna make the case in a different way now to you. And hopefully some of the students are listening to the podcast and they can say, ah, that's what he meant by that. I get it now. I think the talking went well. I don't, I'm not trying to undercut myself. I think people were very happy with it. I spoke with several deans afterwards. There were students that came up. I ended up having to rush to the airport in order to get there in time. So I'm, I think the talk went well, but I don't think it went as well as I wanted it to go. So here we go. This is how I came to the conclusion that keeping a journal is so important. Eight years ago I had moved to St. Louis and was living here, and I went back to, to New York City to do some business. I don't remember. And whenever I go to New York City, I always stay with a man named Pete Scotus. Now, if you're an avid listener to the podcast, you might have heard me make mention of my friend Pete, my mentor Pete. But I don't talk about him very often because this relationship is so deep and so complex and so rich that I never feel like I can explain it very well.

Vance Crowe [00:06:23] But Pete is 99 years old and he grew up as an orphan and went on to become one of the most admired men in all of the world. And I am not exaggerating, not even in the slightest, he is a winner of the Horatio Alger Award, which is an award given to people that came from poverty and, and made something of themselves. So people like Oprah Winfrey have been a Horatio Alger award winner. He's a decorated war hero in the Netherlands, where at one point during World War ii, he went on his own and rescued the leader of the Dutch resistance and stole him out of a Nazi prison camp and actually had to hide out. Now when he goes back to the Netherlands, they throw a literal ticker tape parade for him. And he also did things like helped get the movement to get the summer fest grounds in Milwaukee, Wisconsin off the ground. And he was one of the first people to ever sponsor an art exhibit that took Ansel Adams from being an abstract photographer to being known on a national stage. So Pete is an extraordinary man, and I was introduced to him through my father who had been mentored by Pete. That's a very long story. And Pete and I became very good friends. And when I was in graduate school, he used to have me come over to his apartment once a week. We would have dinner, we would talk about things. I have endless numbers of stories about the way that Pete taught me how to be an adult, how to be a better man, how to be a man with integrity.

Vance Crowe [00:08:02] So whenever now that I go to New York City or get actually anywhere on the East coast, I make sure that I reserve some time to go see Pete. And one time I was out there and I stayed for four days and we had a great time. It was one of the, the most memorable experiences that I'd had. And I came back to St. Louis, which I had, I had just moved here. I had gotten married a few months earlier and I was really feeling good about it. And after about a week and a half from coming back from my visit, there was maybe it was more like two weeks, I get this giant package in the mail. And what I mean by giant, I mean it was like one of those oversized envelopes and inside of the oversized envelope was something really heavy. And so it, I could tell it's Pete's, you know, writing, I know exactly who sent it. So I've got this big smile on my faces as I'm bringing it in from the outside and I go, I'm sitting at my dining room table and I open it up and I go to pull it out and I see that it's a book and I'm like, oh, I wonder what book Pete is sending me. He's always sending me letters and articles and we're talking about what's going on in the world. And Pete is always, you know, gently nudging me to pay attention to the things that he thinks are important. And it's been tremendously helpful to me. So I go to pull this book out and as soon as I do, I see there's a post-it note on it that says, please return when done. Which is okay. He sent me a book, it must be one that he treasures, what is it?

Vance Crowe [00:09:33] And then I take the post-it note off of the cover and I see that this is a huge thick book on etiquette. So I think, well this is odd, what's going on here? And I see that inside of the book there is another post-it note that is marking a page in this etiquette book. And so I'm starting to get a little bit queasy of a feeling 'cause I think that Pete is trying to tell me something and I open it up and to the page where the post-it note is at. And I see that it is about writing thank you notes after you've been a guest in somebody's house. And I was so embarrassed because I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that Pete was telling me, read this, see what it says about writing a thank you note. And the reason you're getting it is 'cause you didn't write a thank you note. Now I know Pete very well, and I have experienced many of Pete's gentle nudges in the right direction. He was not doing this because he needed a thank you note. It was not about that. What he was doing was he was making sure that I understood the etiquette that according to this book, if you stay at someone's house more than two nights, then you must write them a thank you note and you should articulate what it is that you did while you were there, why it is that it mattered to you and that you're grateful that you had this time. So I took it on the chin.

Vance Crowe [00:11:06] I recognized that Pete was telling me, I don't really care so much if you don't do it for me, but if you're not doing it for me, I wanna make sure that you, you realize you should be doing it for other people. You should be writing thank you notes. And so I sat down and I wrote that thank you note, and I, I wrote it deep and detailed and talked all about the adventures that we had gone on, the meals that we had had, the conversations and how much it meant to me and what was going on. And I put it in an envelope and I mailed it to him. And then I mailed the book back to him to, and then I forgot about it. But I always remembered those thank you notes. And it's, it's been a very good thing for me because it's helped me to know, hey, these really do matter. This is a part of life that if you embrace it, you can really do well for yourself and for the people that do kind things for you that you experience with. And it wasn't until about two years ago that this thing came back up, this thank you note. And what happened was I had flown out to see Pete again. We have a great relationship. So I flew out to go see him and we are sitting down to talk about various things that are going on in our lives and some of our stories. I always ask Pete for his stories and we got to talking about some of his experiences. And so we went to his office because he says, Hey, I have some letters that I wanna show you. And you see that Pete has these file cabinets and he opens them up and inside of them are thousands and thousands of pieces of individual papers, many of which are written on typewriters or handwritten notes, and they're all filed away.

Vance Crowe [00:12:46] And he pulls out some files and we were looking through to find a note that the mayor had written him about getting the summerfest ground started and some of the projects he started and it was a thank you note. So we pull this out and he shows it to me and I read it. And it is amazing. This guy, the mayor was so pleased with Pete and he was thanking him and it was a, a real, it was, it was a time capsule to talk about what was going on at the time when Pete helped out. And then I, I noticed that Pete had all these file folders and he was still kind of rummaging through them. And he said, Hey, do, would you like to see you know your file? And I was like, sure Pete. And so he digs in and he pulls out a file and it's pretty thick because Pete and I have had many correspondences in the past. And he hands me the file and I open it up. And the very first thing in that file folder is the thank you note that I wrote him after he sent me the etiquette book. And I sat there and at first I was a little embarrassed, but then I was curious, right? This was my past self, something that had happened. It was a deeply emotional experience and I wanted to read it. You know, I was over the embarrassment, clearly Pete and I were friends, we're past this. I wrote him thank you notes, you can see the number of notes that I wrote him since then. And so I read this thank you note and I'm instantly brought back to that trip that we took that, that I had been visiting with him and all the meals that we had and the conversations. But what I was even more struck by was what I thought was important at the time.

Vance Crowe [00:14:23] I had just recently gotten married. I had, you know, bought a house. We were living in a new town and I was talking with him about some of these things and explaining the context and what was going on. And I started to get this feeling, this sensation of, man, I wish I had a lot more of these letters because reading this letter is like getting a letter from my former self to my present self. This thank you note that you're reading from Pete is a wonderful time capsule and it captures the progress that you've made between when you wrote that the first time and now you're reading it now. And I was able to see how I was dealing with problems, what was going on, what pressure was the most important. And because of that perspective, I was able to see, hey man, you're doing okay right now. Look at the man you have become versus the man that you were. This is a good positive thing. And it will help you to understand, could I have done more? Should I have done things differently? Because you have this sense of perspective. And so when I went home from this trip with Pete, and don't worry, I wrote him a thank you note. I always write 'em. Now I started to say, how can I have more of these experiences where my past self rights, its secrets, its knowledge, its lessons learned to a future self, the present me. And that's when I started keeping a journal. And that journal I, I've had it, it's been many iterations.

Vance Crowe [00:15:58] Sometimes I write in it every single day for months and other times I just write in it maybe once or twice a week. And I've tried all different kinds of formats to see what works for me and how, what kind of information do I want in the future? And I've really kind of ironed it down to, to being something that is absolutely not a burden. It's a great pleasure and it's a gift that I'm giving my future self, but I'm also using it to explore what's going on in my world. So that's the advice that I was giving these young people at the University of Florida. It was to say that if you are going to try and change something about yourself, so this group of people, 150 of them showed up to say, we got into this experience where we didn't know what to do. We were in the chaos and we want to know how to get better. We wanna know what we could have done that would've really improved this situation. Well, no matter what you do, you should write down what happened and you should write down what you did and how it worked and what you wish you would've done better. And think of it as writing a note from your past self to your future self or from your present self to your future self. Because this is the only way that you are going to be able to make progress. Because otherwise what you end up doing is you have these experiences where you see something crazy, Hey, these people showed up and they were in our faces and they were saying all these crazy things and we didn't know how to handle it.

Vance Crowe [00:17:29] And if you don't sit and cogitate on it, you don't reflect deeply. Meditate on what happened, what did you do about it? What could you have done better than the, than? The only thing you will get out of that experience is, oh, those are crazy people and let's have a good laugh about how they don't understand us. But if you wanna actually get better, you need to write down what did you do and then what did you wish you would've done better the next time? Because there could be another time next time there probably will be. And if you have that journal, you will have captured how you thought about that situation. And one of the things that I have learned about writing things down, and I heard this from a man named Dr. Jordan Peterson, it is that you don't know what you think until you say it out loud or in this case until you write it down. And that's what ends up happening when you write these journals. It is that it allows you to capture what's going on in your life and then when you go back to look at it again, you get to get the benefit of those lessons that you learned in the past. So this is a bit of a winding example, but I wanted to put this out there because I believe that writing a journal is how you make progress. So if you've been trying to think of, Hey, I wanna look people in the eyes when I give a talk, hey, I want to draw my ideas, I want to start trying to communicate my point of view in a, in a different way. Hey, I have started to really focus on what people are talking about. And then when they end their their comments, I'm gonna say, Hey, tell me more about that.

Vance Crowe [00:19:02] And then I'm gonna write down how did it go. So the next thing, if you've been coming along with me on these bonus episodes, or as my good friend Brian Scott and Matt Schlager have been saying, as the crow flies, they they really want me to change the name of these episodes. I, that, that feels so awkward and cumbersome to me. But any case, if you really wanna get the most out of these episodes and you making changes to become a tangibly better communicator, you can do no better than writing a journal. And I, I had initially thrown this idea out to a few of my listeners, so there are people that contact me on the Facebook page that's I'm grateful for it. And a few people that write me on Twitter. And I poses this idea to a couple of them and I got some feedback about it that said, okay, if you're gonna ask me to journal, you should give me a template. 'cause I sit down in front of a blank piece of paper and I don't know what to write. And at first I was like, oh, well you just write down your thoughts. And they said, well, I don't, you know, I don't know what those are. I don't know which thoughts you want me to capture. So what I thought I would do with the remainder of this episode is just give you some ideas on what I put into my journal. And then I think each week I'll throw out a prompt during these bonus episodes. So just to start off the things that I do, I'm gonna pull out my journal right now. It is tucked away in my drawer. I always have it with handy access. So here's what I do at the top of my page on every one of my journals.

Vance Crowe [00:20:33] I write the date and then I write, I track my weight and I track my weight because weight is something that is a marker of fitness for me. I wanna be fit. I want to make sure that I am not overindulging in food or under pushing myself in exercise. I'm not saying you need to write this down, but you should be tracking some things in your life. And I find that tracking weight and knowing it over the long term helps me modulate my behavior. The next thing I do is I write what my exercise was for that morning. I almost never journal in the morning without having exercise. The only exception is if I work out late the night before and I I don't work out in the morning, then I'll still write a journal without exercising. But for the most part, I always write down what exercise I'm doing. Another thing that I write down is music that I've been listening to. If there's a song that's been in my head over the last couple of days, I write it down. And this one is one that I think adds a layer of complexity and sophistication to the journal in a, in a really interesting way. Because if you think about when you hear a song that was really important to you, you know, 20 years after it was important to you, maybe it was a song you had with a girlfriend you were really into, or a song that you and your friends used to sing, or a song that stuck out to you while you were doing work. Music adds another layer of meaning into what you're doing. So if there's ever a song that's important to me, that's what I write down.

Vance Crowe [00:22:06] Then when I start my journal, i, I talk about what is going on that can set the scene. So for example, in this one, I, I wrote just returned from Gainesville, Florida. I was giving a speech and then I, I go on to talk about it. But another thing that I'll do if, if life has been rather ordinary is I'll talk about the weather. It's been extremely hot, it's been cold, it's been getting dark earlier. Whatever it is that allows me to have, where was I in a mental space from where I am right now? And then from there I just write down what's going on in my world. The only thing that I always try and make sure I write down outside of those those things on the top is did I finish a book? Because I always wanna remember when I finished a book because that helps me set the context for what was going on in my life when I, when I read it. And I always try and write, what will I do better today than I did yesterday? And that always forces me to sit down and say, I'm not trying to compare myself to other people. I'm trying to compare myself to the person I was yesterday. And the only way that I'm gonna get better is if I'm consciously thinking about it. So in almost all of my journal articles, whatever I write, even if it's just for a few sentences, I think about what am I going to do better today than I did yesterday. So to recap, you wanna put the date I put in my weight, how much I have exercised, and then I put down any songs that I've been listening to.

Vance Crowe [00:23:38] I started off with a prompt about what's going on in the world around me, whether it's the weather or some trip that I've just just been in on. And then I just freestyle write. But I make sure that if I've read a book, I articulate it and I write down any kind of notes that I wanna remember about it. And then I always ask myself, what is it that I could do better today than I did yesterday? So that that way I can continue to grow and progress. So I'm gonna wrap up here. This has been a deeply important bonus episode for me. I will come back with more stories of Pete lest you think he is, you know, just a guy demanding thank you notes. You should know that Pete has made done more in my life than anything I can ever describe. And if there is one way that I can pay Pete back, it is by telling stories of things that he taught me about communications and being a better person and having integrity. So I'm offering this up for Pete and I hope that you guys take on writing a journal and maybe this week try and sit down and say, I'm gonna write in a journal three times this week just to make sure I get this in. And try each time to, to just get that format and make sure you write, what is it that you're gonna do better today than you did yesterday. I'll be back next Friday with another as the Crow Flies bonus episode. And I'll make sure to have a journal entry idea in there. And on Wednesday of this week coming up, I'm gonna have an interview with the one and only Dr.

Vance Crowe [00:25:12] Fred Perla, who is one of the most important plant biologist geneticists in the history of the world. He was one of the first people to get BT cotton, which is a genetically engineered cotton that kept insects from eating the plant. And it kept millions and millions and millions of pounds of pesticides off of our fields and out of our clothes and and out of our food system really. So I'm gonna have him on the podcast to talk about things like glyphosate and pesticides and GMOs and the love of wine. We're gonna sit down and do that interview today and hopefully I'll have that published on Wednesday. So thank you so, so much for listening. I hope you guys have a great week and I'm looking forward to hearing about how journaling is going for you. Thanks.