It’s accepted that keeping a notebook or journal is useful for learning anything. For jiu-jitsu, I know just a few people who bother with it. My thinking is that people simply don’t know what to write in them. Should it be technique notes, class recaps, training log, or reflections? It can be any or all of that, or anything else.
I’ve seen “jiu-jitsu journals” sold, but it’s better to use a blank one, and figure out the best way to use it for yourself. Know that the first 10-25 pages will be inconsistent, but that’s part of the process.
The point is putting something down, and reviewing it later.
Because the writing is the thinking. I’m reminded of this Richard Feynman interview:
Feynman:
Have you got all that?
Weiner:
What do I have from it? I remember my recollection of it.
Feynman:
You didn’t write anything down.
Weiner:
No, I want to talk with you about it.
Feynman:
Just cause you got this god-damned tape recorder, it has to be on the tape-recorder or it doesn’t count, huh?
Weiner:
I could not possibly recreate the content of that argument but I want to reconstruct the general circumstances. You told me that you had spent considerable time boning up for this high energy course that you had volunteered to teach the following fall, in the fall of ‘68, so that is something for me to pick, that was the first time you taught that course.
Feynman:
Yeah, I’m very confused, I have taught it three times now and I can’t remember.
Weiner:
That was the first time, OK.
Feynman:
If you’ll wait a second, I have things by which I can remember. I have the notebook from that course. I have a notebook where I, when I do my research or at least I did — I put the date on every page that I was doing things, as a result of you. So if I look at that thing I can remember better what I was doing at different times. There are dates on the pages.
Weiner:
Let’s do it. Is it here?
Feynman:
Yes, let’s try to see what we can do with it.
Weiner:
Really, that makes a lot of sense. We’re starting again and the break was a very rewarding one because we dug up four notebooks. For a minute let me just describe them. These are loose-leaf notebooks with each page containing your work, everything that you asked yourself. It is almost in a first person diary form asking yourself questions and then setting out an agenda for work, indicating you spoke to so-and-so today and you got this idea and then you want to pose yourself a certain agenda and then tackling it. Each page is dated. Some pages have a later date on them because you have gone back to them and said, well, this problem didn’t work out or it was solved in terms of the work done on June 5, 1968 or incorporated into that. And so this represents the record of the day-to-day work.
Feynman:
I actually did the work on the paper.
Weiner:
That’s right. It wasn’t a record of what you had done but it is the work.
Feynman:
It’s the doing it — it’s the scrap paper.
Weiner:
Well, the work was done in your head but the record of it is still here.
Feynman:
No, it’s not a record, not really, it’s working. You have to work on paper and this is the paper. OK?