“Do you have a notebook?”

I was in a job interview once, and the prospective employer asked what seemed to me to be a most obvious question: “Do you have a notebook?”

“Why of course, sir,” I said, holding up the proud Moleskine imitation I had in my hand. “Right here.”

The man laughed. “Old school,” he said. “I meant, do you have a laptop?”

Ouch! The author goes on to talk about recording our thoughts on paper vs. in blog posts and tweets and concludes:

We are afraid of not having an audience, of not having eyes looking at us. We are afraid of being alone. We have become a lonely and haunted generation, because the point is that you keep a notebook because thinking and writing are pleasures in themselves, to be enjoyed in themselves, and you don’t need another person to “like” them for them to be so.

Read the rest of this insightful post here: Do You Have a Notebook?

7 thoughts on ““Do you have a notebook?””

  1. I would have said the same thing. Although I work in the IT field I still carry a moleskine and prefer to write things. I also use a 50 year old fountain pen and a scripto “swirl” mechanical pencil so people do tend to look at me like I’m weird.

    I often have to remind my coworkers that my Moleskine does not require batteries, is not susceptible to power outages, never needs a software upgrade, and never gets a virus. It does suffer from memory limitations but so do computers.

    Paper will out live electronics.

  2. I’m a software engineer and once went to a conference with a bunch of other engineers. We had a lot of down time and when asked what I was doing with the free time I told them, “I have plenty to do, I brought my notebook”
    “So did we!”
    We all reached into our bags and pulled out our notebooks. Four laptop computers clacked onto the table, and my notebook – an overstuffed 8.5×11 ring binder and a box of crayolas.
    Everyone was so interested in looking at my sketches and ideas that they didn’t even turn theirs on.

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