The Essence Of Someone
Photos are not the only way for parents to capture memories of their children growing up.
Because we are born unique;
Because, sometimes, we get lost, and we need to find ourselves again;
Because we are endlessly complex beings;
Because great stories are mosaics of details;
Because our fate is half who we are, and half what we do with that;
Because the memories that others rehash never tell the whole story;
And because we pay more attention to events when we know we are going to have to tell them to someone later;
Here is your personality notebook.— Introduction to T. & Z.’s personality notebooks
Before your first child is born, you form those great intentions in your head about who you will be as a parent. Of course, most of those intentions disappear as soon as lack of sleep kicks in.
I dropped many of the expectations I had set for myself, but I managed to preserve one.
A Personality Notebook
I have been keeping a kind of diary for each of my children, since their birth. I call it a personality notebook. It’s a notebook in which I note down what appears to be strong personality traits.
Every three months or so, I sit down, scan some notes I captured along the way, discuss them with my wife, and write a page about each of my children.
I don’t write what is happening to them as much as how they react to events. I try to focus on who they seem to be, as a person. Anecdotes and impressions that reveal something about them.
Something that makes them… them.
My goal is to give this diary to them when they're older. So that one day, if they ever feel lost and want to find themselves again, they may understand what was their natural temper at birth.
The Simplification Process
At one point, I doubted a bit of the value of those notebooks. Was there really anything valuable in them?
What I’m writing was all over the place. Anecdotes contradicting one another, reactions reflecting their age more than their personality, random observations likely not to mean anything deep, etc.
How could that mess ever become useful for my kids?
Then I saw the pattern.
With this notebook, I’m doing the only thing I know how to do. Simplifying things, seeking the core, finding the heart, looking for the essence, identifying the obvious information that got buried under layers of noise.
But this time, I am in the phase that comes before any simplification work can happen — the complexification phase.
Capturing The Complexity First
Because things don’t start simple. Simplicity never comes first. Complexity does.
Simplicity emerges from the hard work of digging into the complexity, and extracting the essence of it, while removing the noise. To come out with something simple, you first need to embrace the complexity of the situation.
One day, if my children have this need to come back to their true selves, their character notebook won’t give them a clear answer. But I hope that, somewhere in the noise, they will find a signal, something that helps reconnect with themselves.
The simplification work will be up to them.
I’m just ensuring they have enough raw material to dig into.
Every two weeks, I write an article to explain how the mind works, usually through a comparison that everyone can relate to.
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