5/2/2023 0 Comments Pocket notebooks![]() “Always do more than is required of you.” But its most important use was as a place to write down the affirmations and principles that would guide his journey toward his ultimate goal- becoming a great general: He used his notebook to record daily happenings, explore ideas of leadership and war strategy, draw diagrams, and even pen poetry on love. ![]() ![]() He returned to school in 1905 with a steely dedication to this time be a success, and he started a small black leather notebook to help keep himself on track. His first year had not gone well he struggled with dyslexia and failed mathematics, forcing him to repeat his “plebe” year in the fall. Patton’s habit of pocket notebook keeping began after his freshman year at West Point. The result of this brain sweat were insights about the American people that still ring true to this day the result of his notebooking keeping was Democracy in America many of his notes made it verbatim into that classic book. As he sat upon stagecoaches and steamboats, he would wrestle with the notes and reflections he had made, trying to distill out a “general truth” that tied them together and pointed to a more important and overarching idea. Two of his notebooks were exclusively devoted to legal issues. He organized his notebook pages into alphabetized headings like “Jury” and “Bankruptcy” and also kept a section for conversations and interviews. ![]() In all, he filled 15 notebooks with his observations, thoughts, and impressions of his travels through North America. On his two year tour of America and Canada, Tocqueville’s most important tools were the notebooks he made himself by folding and stitching sheets of paper together. You have to know it just like A B C.” Clemens accepted Bixby’s advice and thus began a lifelong relationship with the pocket notebook. There’s only one way to be a pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart. Bixby advised Clemens, “My boy, you must get a little memorandum-book, and every time I tell you a thing, put it down right away. He felt confident that the job would be fairly easy to learn but found he could not remember the instructions his teacher, Horace Bixby, imparted to him. Twain’s first pocket notebooks were purchased in 1857 at the age of 21 during his training to become the “cub” pilot of a steamboat on the Mississippi River. These caveats aside, we hope you will find reading about this manly practice as inspiring and fascinating as researching and writing about it was for us. Where images of the notebooks were available they have been shown in their absence a description will have to do. And the choices are a bit eccentric men who were famous for their interesting and numerous notebooks are well-represented but also included are a few from the past and present that just happened to cross our path during the course of our research. ![]() The list is hardly comprehensive the practice was so widespread among eminent men that it would likely be easier to compile a list of famous men who did not use them, than did. The result is this look at how 20 famous men used their pocket notebooks. In the process of compiling those excerpts, we came across intriguing references to how some of the famous men of history used their pocket notebooks and decided to put together a whole post exploring that subject. For that piece, we dug through old books to find references to how pocket notebooks had been used this past century by men in different walks of life. A few weeks ago, we published an article on the Manly Tradition of the Pocket Notebook. ![]()
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