This pocket notebook is (slowly) replacing my phone

This is my notepad it's been you know sat on a few thousand times used as a wedge so my chair wouldn't Teeter and hopelessly abused in many other ways [Music] I do I carry this thing everywhere with me in short it provides me with something incredibly valuable that at least to my knowledge I haven't been able to find anywhere else this all started from a very well-meaning Nathaniel Drew who is kind of a notebook expert if those even exist it is amazing to me how few people actually do this I was intrigued but like very

skeptical you know as as one should be because not everything you see on the internet is true and I kept bumping into this with other YouTubers where they would experiment with taking notes um you know with a pen and paper or writing video scripts with a pen and paper or scheduling or journaling and things like that so I played around with it a little bit I even bought some like super bad to the bone tactical notepads that are like waterproof and practically indestructible but for some reason I just I just couldn't quite get into it

like I kept like starting and stopping like start stop start stop back and forth until eventually I got tired of it and just quit so I decided that it must be for a very select few grouped people and I was not in that select few but then I started hearing things that I just I just couldn't quite ignore for example I found a best-selling author who wrote like every single memory he had as a child in a notebook as as an adult he would go back and remember and write them and he literally has like

shelves of notebooks it's like whoa or an incredibly prolific author now who writes his books with a pen and paper and then has some one like convert them even back in history I found people like C.S Lewis who would intentionally use ink that took longer to dry because it forced him to stop after every phrase and wait and think before he wrote the next thing like what is going on here and now in our fast-paced media consuming era there are a select few that seem to be moving back to that or at least trying it

out and despite all the fancy new apps and softwares coming out there's just this nagging thought that perhaps we are leaving something behind that we shouldn't and I really really wanted this to be me like I just loved the idea of the the tactile experience and expressing my thoughts on paper and like the permanence of it and the feel and the sound it just oh I know I'm such a weirdo about this but it's the sounds it's the feeling it just sounded so like cool but I just couldn't and that's when life circumstances AKA mechanical

problems led me here to this moment to wear a completely absurd idea was born [Music] what if I bought a little notepad and a pen and treated it like a phone taking it literally everywhere with me the rational part of my brand was like dude it's the 21st century like come on but the emotional part of my brain was like oh you know who knows I mean what if something amazing were to happen [Music] you can guess what I decided [Music] I instantly fell in love with it we went everywhere together and I never left

the house without it I even took it a few places that I didn't take my phone my phone was very offended unlike my phone my notepad never goes dead never distracts me and above all it has absolutely no agenda if I ignore it it doesn't even try to get my attention okay this all sounds a little facetious right but I'm actually like dead serious and here's why attention attention is one of the rarest and most valued Commodities in our world today if you can learn how to capture someone's attention and hold it you instantly have

opportunity that no one else has and from all around us there are hundreds of intruders that are constantly competing for just a tiny little slice of our attention so that they could fill it with their message or their product or their ideas and what's interesting is often the best and most useful technological tools that we have are oftentimes the best at capturing our attention so you're probably wondering like um are you like anti-media or something here Austin uh no I mean I'm I'm kind of a YouTuber so would kind of defeat the purpose but I

do trust and acknowledge that businesses that spend you know millions of dollars learning how to best capture my attention are probably really really good at it like that is their business I'll give you an example and tell me if you can relate to this or not but uh have you ever have you ever picked up your phone to do something specific like you know send a message or or make a note or look something up and within like three seconds you had no idea like you had completely forgotten why you picked up your phone in

the first place and if that's ever happened to you then that's a prime example of you you stepping in to use a a tool to further your own agenda but instead you gotta hijacked by something that looked a little bit more enticing in the moment in a completely derailed what you were originally trying to do at least for the moment but if you're you know trying to avoid a problem or not face something that you should be facing and you just wanted a quick distraction it's great for that but what it's not great for is

organic thinking and here we come to the most important thing that this little notepad offers me that I haven't been able to find anywhere else one of the first things I noticed when I started carrying this thing around with me is it provided me with a place to just spill organic Thoughts with zero like get that zero potential to ever be distracted or for outside ideas to mingle with my own and by organic thinking I'm specifically defining that as like something that only pertains to you that you don't want any other ideas to be mixed

with and speaking from past experiences this could be anything from you know making a grocery list that I'm sure my friend Zach remembers um to you know trying to process emotions and figure out why I'm angry at a friend or another aspect of this is putting down creative ideas because a creative idea can come very quick and it can just pop into your head and if there's any kind of distraction you can lose that at least I can and I just I can't count how many times I've picked up my phone to write down a

creative idea that I've had and just completely lost it because something caught my attention or something distracted me before I could get it all and that is really really frustrating honestly and there's one more aspect of this that I think is really really important and it's worth mentioning it's like have you ever have you ever forgot to take your phone somewhere with you like for a couple of hours not that you had it with you but on silent but you you literally didn't even have it with you if you're anything like me there there's something

different about physically being removed from something that can distract you like your phone versus just having it like with you but on silent it's like suddenly your brain like realizes oh there's like literally no possible way for me to be distracted or pulled in that direction and it seems like it redirects your focus onto other things like your surroundings another way of thinking about it is it at least for me it keeps me from sleeping with one eye open as it were you know like where you're that analogy of like sleeping and you're always just

like you're always aware like just in case something pops up that you you need to be alert for that's kind of what it feels like sometimes and so when you remove that completely it's it's literally gone then suddenly energy refocuses and that's something that again using this really does very well is it it removes any of those distractions and it actually allows your brain to refocus that energy and this is huge because this can literally make the difference of solving or jeopardizing a solution or creative idea okay so I've been wandering around with this notepad

and pen in my pocket for several months now sometimes I go a week without even using it it doesn't care sometimes the table is out of balance at a restaurant so I stick it underneath the leg to keep it from wobbling seriously it couldn't care less now I don't use this for everything obviously there are some stuff that is wildly impractical for me to use a notepad for and now my phone or my laptop just does way better at and so it's not even a question in that regard but when something pops up that makes

me stop and go oh that's important nine times out of ten I will at least during the discovery phase of an idea I will often choose a medium where it is literally impossible for any other agenda other than my own to be present where nothing will mix with my idea this will cost you one dollar so feel free to try it out for a few weeks and just see if it works for you what I love to do is whenever I'm in a group and then like everybody's on their phones and it's all bored and

stuff instead of pulling out my phone I'll pull out my notepad and just start writing it's amazing like literally no one sees it coming