What do Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci and Jennifer Aniston all have in common?

Terrible break dancers? Probably, yes.

Lactose intolerance? Maybe, hard to say really but that’s not where I was going. Those possible links aside, all are (or were as the case may be), passionate journal keepers.

Virginia Woolf, Lewis Carroll and Emma Watson too while we’re at it. All very clever people who recognised the creative and/or therapeutic value of getting one’s thoughts down onto something tangible.

Now, I’m not suggesting you invent your own type of shorthand and write backwards (like Da Vinci) or line the pages with complex mathematical equations (like Aniston…or was that Einstein? Details are sketchy either way.)

What we, the good folk at Notely, are imploring of you is to embrace your creative capacity. Follow in the inky etchings of humanity’s greats so that one day, you too might end up starring in a popular American sitcom (like Da Vinci…wait, what?). I need to start writing this stuff down.

Hey, perfect segue?

Notebooks, journals and diaries have provided fertile bedding for ideas to be nurtured, grown and harvested for as long as we have mastered the art of paper and its binding.

The wit and whim of the inspired and faintly curious have been birthed onto the virgin page for centuries.

From singers to sculptors. Painters to poets. Monarchs and scammers to young Instagrammers.

Feel obliged to take a leaf out of their books. You are more interesting than you know.

Your journal might not detail the rise of a monarch (like Samuel Pepys), emit dangerous levels of radiation (like Marie Curie’s does) or document an ultimately doomed expedition (like Robert Scott) but then again…it might.

By Jamie Simmons