Field Journals are Powerfully Magical
Field Journaling is a collection of your own thoughts, ideas and inspirations combined together to create an encyclopedia of your own information. A Field Journal allows you to uplevel your genius and turn your curiosity into mastery.
Creative Connections.
Field Journaling is about collecting information and data and using that information to gain mastery and knowledge.
How To Do It
Be Curious
Being curious starts with asking questions, but it goes deeper than that. Curiosity requires excitement. Curiosity requires you to get up close and personal. Don't just take information at surface level. Dig deep into it. Ask layers of why. Turn ideas upside-down and inside out. Explore everything and always dare to ask "WHAT IF".
Change Perspectives
Take a look at scientific field journals. They are drawings of the subject from multiple perspectives. Remember to observe the information you've collected the same way. Observe the situation, the story, the experience, etc. from many different angles.
REcord Everything
Carry your Field Journal with you everywhere. You never know when your bus driver, the lady in front of you at the grocery store, or your best friend might have the most inspirational advice. You never know when you will hear or see something that you won't want to forget. This is how you collect ideas, connect them together then file them away for future creations.
Practice Deliberately
It's not enough to collect the information, you must apply it. Practice makes habits. Habits are automatic actions that you perform without much thought. Habits are wonderful when you need to free up brain space for improvement, but habits aren't so great when you want to use them to create change. Deliberate practice makes change, because it challenges you to step out of automatic and start shifting into better.
What is Deliberate Practice?
Watch this video by Anders Ericsson, the author of the book Peak. There is a difference between just practicing something out of habit and practicing something with the intention to create a change.
Why Does It Work?
“Curiosity is a clue...See where curiosity leads you next. Then follow the next clue, and the next, and the next...Following the scavenger hunt of curiosity can lead you to amazing, unexpected places."
- Elizabeth Gilbert
Field Journaling is about collecting clues. Sometimes the clues go together and sometimes they don't. Don't worry about having a theme for your Field Journal. Collect everything.
Remember that "encoding" stuff we talked about in the first module? Field journaling helps you learn and master information because not only are you helping your brain encode these new ideas you are creating a physical filing system for them, both in and outside of your brain.