Keeping a diary is a discipline that many recommend, including Dale Carnegie. To be successful in business, one must analyze their thoughts, their actions, and take inventory of what they could do better in their day-to-day business and life to overcome the significant challenges that often present themselves when launching a new business venture. Dale Carnegie was an American writer and lecturer, and the develop of courses in self-improvement, salesmanship, corporate training, public speaking, and interpersonal skills. This article is designed to draw on Carnegie’s wisdom by illuminating things he has said when he lived that could infuse creativity writing in your diary. Let’s dive in:

  • “Do the hard jobs first. The easy jobs will take care of themselves.” Have you ever walked into the gym and dreaded the thought of deadlifting or squatting? These two types of exercise exhaust the largest muscles of the body (your buttocks, hamstrings, and thighs) and are considered the more difficult of the exercises. If you talk to any personal trainer, however, they will suggest that you tackle the most difficult exercises first. Why is that? It’s because you create a sense of momentum after successfully handling the hard job, which makes tackling the easier exercises at the gym so much easier. The same concept applies to life. Take a few minutes and think about your life situation. What tasks or jobs are you putting off because they feel “too hard” for you at the moment? What difficult tasks could you frontload (do first) to stay in alignment with Dale Carnegie’s suggestion here?
  • “Knowledge isn’t power until it is applied.” The folks that win Jeopardy on TV are full of facts. They are walking Encyclopedias, but very few of them are successful at a level where they have changed humanity like an Elon Musk or possibly a Dale Carnegie. Knowledge is certainly powerful, but the compound effect of applying knowledge on a daily basis can move mountains in a figurative sense. What have you learned over the years that hasn’t been applied in this world? Take 10 minutes to ponder Carnegie’s quote and this specific question. Write out a response and then dovetail your writing into how you could start applying this acquired knowledge to the betterment of humanity.
  • “People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing,” stated Dale Carnegie. The same could be said about keeping an online diary. The benefits of journals is that you can either go about it alone, or you can join group journaling exercises on a specific topic. With online journaling software like JournalOwl, you can pick a topic and join a group journaling challenge – the topic could be an educational video from YouTube, a classic eBook, or anything in between. Sometimes interacting and collaborating with others make the exercise that much more pleasurable, which will entice you to keep going when the subject matter feels overly complicated or tiresome. In the words of Carnegie, most people will quit if they aren’t having fun with what they are doing – so it’s up to you to find a way to make it fun!

Creating a better life and improving those around you can only be done with deep introspection. The benefits of journals and keeping a diary can’t be counted. The intangible benefits are sometimes unrealized for many years, but the seeds of keeping a journal are planted with the distinctions an individual makes as they deep dive into their own psychology, or another’s psychology by analyzing the quotes they left behind on earth. With a daily journaling practice, you can expect to grow and develop as a human being in a way that you would otherwise not.