Our Greatest Piece of Technology
We are quick to dive into the latest book, podcast or YouTube video to give us advice on how to solve a problem. When we try to figure out our goals, hopes and dreams we jump to the latest piece of advice that we feel will magically spark inspiration in us to go do the work.
We live in the most advanced technological period of human history, looking back it’s mind-boggling how advanced we have come as a species. Some of the technologies are so advanced they are scary, especially with how fast they’re developing, who knows where the world will be in 100 years? Let’s grab some popcorn and find out.
No. We can’t do that, we’ve got some of our own living and achieving to do because that’s what we love as humans, achievement, however we make it up in our minds.
One piece of technology that’s stood the test of time, provided countless benefits to people worldwide throughout the centuries and I hope will never ever die out (it’s up to us to keep it alive) is pen and paper.
But Pen and Paper isn’t technology Brody! Ah but it once was. At a time in human history, we figured out how to create paper (thank you trees for giving us more than just oxygen) and write things down to record them, it was the latest and greatest piece of technology out there, just like the yearly updated (is it really?) iPhone released by Apple. Once a technology, always a technology. Everything at one point in time was the latest and greatest piece of technology, even the chair you’re sitting in right now.
Pen and Paper has recorded and documented some of the greatest discoveries in history which we would never have understood and discovered if it wasn’t for Pen and Paper and the ability to go over it over and over and over.
How do we understand Einstein’s Theory of Relativity? But going to read his paper on it. How are we able to understand and digest some of the greatest pieces of ancient Western and Eastern philosophy that are thousands of years old? It has been written down and passed down from generation to generation so it ensures it’s survived by a few great people who have kept the work alive. And we get to still read these great pieces of work today, how lucky are we.
When Anne Frank was hiding from the Nazis for two years in her neighbour's attic in the Netherlands, every day she put pen to paper in her diary and started writing Tales from the Secret Annex and her thoughts and feelings which later became The Diary of a Young Girl detailing her experience during those two years of hiding. She was eventually captured and sent to Auschwitz and later died of Typhus. She didn’t survive, but the work she created still lives on and is celebrated today.
Are you starting to see the simplistic power behind Pen and Paper? It’s an approach that has worked for thousands of years for millions of people, so why wouldn’t it work for you?
Aaron Sorkin, one of the best screenwriters in history, is often regarded as having his distinct style… Sorkin Dialogue, wrote much of his A Few Best Men (the play) on cocktail napkins while bartending at the Palace Theatre on Broadway. Writing… on a napkin, between moments of working as a bartender. How many napkins do you reckon he stole? Who cares, look what he created.
I can go on and on with examples, these people made it work with the littlest of resources, just a piece of paper, their pen and most importantly their imagination. And look at the impact it makes on the world. And you can do the same as well.
You don’t need the latest self-help book to tell you what to do, you don’t need to latest guru on YouTube to make a video on how to live your life. You don’t need any of that!
You need to sit down with a piece of paper, a pen with your thoughts and feelings and figure who the hell you are and what you want out of this life you’ve been given. As Steven Pressfield said and wrote a book on, ‘Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be’.
It’ll take more than one sitting, it’ll be a lifetime’s worth of work. I’m currently in that process right now. It’s the work worth doing, the work that needs to be done.
“I can’t write poetry on a computer, man!” - Quentin Tarantino
Until next time,
Brody
