How To Keep The Ultimate Journal (Commonplace Book) + LIVE DEMO

Hey, Leo here for Actualized.org. In this episode, I'm gonna be talking about how to keep the ultimate journal: your commonplace book. Stick with me throughout this whole episode because, towards the end, I'm gonna show you a live demo of my ultimate journal, my commonplace book. I'll show you all the categories that I set up and how I use it to really supercharge my creativity.

But before we can get there, we need to talk about what a commonplace book is and why it's so important. This is one of those things that's so practical that it will completely change your life as it snowballs over the years, over the years, over the years. I want to show you the effect that it had in my own life.

So, what is a commonplace book? A commonplace book is a repository of all your knowledge. Every idea that you run across that strikes you as important, significant, or inspiring, you write it down. You organize it and put it all together into a sort of personal Wikipedia. This is like a scrapbook that contains notes, clippings, lists of goals, to-do lists, random ideas that you have for projects and business ideas, and any kind of hobbies that you have.

You can include lessons that you learn from books or from listening to videos, listening to me, or any insights that you personally have in your psychedelic trips or whatever sources you're getting your insights from. You're writing all those down. You have lists of quotes, drawings, and you can have diaries in there where you write down your intimate thoughts.

You can include exercises that you do, personal development exercises, consciousness work exercises, or whatever. You could have schematics, pictures, tables, lists of resources, links to stuff that you find on the internet, like articles that are very important that you've read. You can have screenshots and screen clippings of important stuff that you've seen, and it can just go on and on and on. You can have videos in there; you can even have audio in there. All of this is put together into a scrapbook sort of thing.

Now, this word "commonplace book" is a bit of a weird word. Why do I use this term? Why don't I just call it a journal? Most people would call it a journal. Well, when you say "journal," usually what that implies to me and to most people is just like one page, and it just scrolls down and down and down. You're just writing stuff down sequentially. That's not what this thing is. This thing is much, much more robust than your typical journal.

So, the alternative to that is "personal Wikipedia." That's how I like to think of it. That's how robust it can be, with links pointing to different places like that. This word "commonplace book"—I didn't make it up myself. This is actually a term that exists. Commonplace books became a popular tool for intellectuals, thinkers, and philosophers in the era of early modern Europe.

As Europe came out of the Middle Ages, we had the Renaissance, then we quickly had the Scientific Revolution. Then, around the French Revolution, there was the Enlightenment. Thinkers like Voltaire and Rousseau, and you can think about people like René Descartes, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Galileo, Copernicus—so all these people had a very significant, long-lasting effect on European intellectual tradition, and of course, Western intellectual tradition.

That has now not just affected Europe but really the entire world, and of course, it's here in the United States. These thinkers started to organize all their thoughts into commonplace books. Back then, there were no computers, no digital stuff, so it was just this gigantic book—literally a scrapbook—where they would paste all the kind of stuff that they ran across that was important to them: pieces of paper, clippings. It was a very messy, giant sort of ultimate notebook you might think for a thinker.

What was so significant about that is that when you take all these ideas that you randomly run across throughout your everyday life and compile them together into one source, you can look through it. It's all organized, and you can look through it very quickly. You can kind of scan it, get a picture of you, and refer back to it constantly. That has a very powerful effect on your mind.

It organizes this information in an interesting way where your mind can pick out new creative insights from all of that. So, that's what you need to have. Why do you need to have it? Because it organizes all of your learning, and most importantly, because it supercharges your creativity.

It's hard for me to articulate how significant my own commonplace book has been over the last five years that I've been keeping it. I've got hundreds of tabs, hundreds of categories in there, literally thousands of pages of information, and it's all really densely packed. It's not like I'm just randomly writing down my thoughts like in a diary. I do have some diaries in there that I keep, but mostly the information is like really dense lists of ideas and insights and stuff for my business, stuff for my personal life, stuff for my own growth, and just ideas that I find interesting.

All this stuff, when I look through it, organizes itself in a sort of organic way. Then, just by glancing at it for five minutes, I can get all sorts of spontaneous insights that would be completely impossible without this thing in place. Without it, I don't think Actualized.org would be possible.

I started my commonplace book in 2012, right around the time where I was getting the first inceptions for Actualized.org. What ended up happening over the next five years is that it just sort of built and built and snowballed on itself. Insights were had, creative ideas were had that would not be possible otherwise.

It's not just for my business, and it's not just because I teach personal development. It's significant for me, but also for my own personal growth. I've gotten so much of my own personal growth actualized because of this. In this book, I have my values, my purpose, various visions that I have for my business and for myself personally, various exercises that I've done over the years—hundreds and hundreds of various exercises, journaling exercises, and so on.

It just goes on and on. It's hard for me to even bring to mind all the stuff that's in there. There's quite a lot, which is why you have it. You just can't contain that kind of stuff all in your mind, you see.

So really, the commonplace book is like an extension of your mind. It overcomes the limitations of the mind because the mind thinks in a linear fashion, whereas this commonplace book is more like a tangled hierarchy, a sort of network, like a web, which is much more powerful than being able to just think linearly.

Of course, it also overcomes the problem of memory and all that sort of stuff. I actually bought a laptop specifically so that my commonplace book could be portable back in 2012. At the time, I was thinking, "Man, do I really want to spend $1,200 on a cute little portable laptop for this purpose?" I thought it was kind of frivolous and just wasting money.

But what turned out to be the case is that that one investment in the infrastructure of my life—and I've talked about in the past about building infrastructure for personal development, building infrastructure for your own success. I have a whole episode about that. Well, this is one of the most important infrastructures that I put into place in my life, and it has changed my life forever.

That's just been five years of this thing being in effect, so it's just gonna continue to snowball and snowball and snowball. What I've seen is that the growth from this sort of thing is just exponential. It also excites you intellectually; it excites you, it incites you creatively because you can always turn to this commonplace book. If you build it robustly, you can turn to it for ideas and inspiration that is just never-ending. It is infinite, and then you just add more and more and more to it.

Who is a commonplace book good for? Well, first and foremost, for sages and philosophers, for self-actualizers, for designers—any kind of designers, whether you're a software designer or a clothing designer, it doesn't matter. Artists, also any kind of artists: musicians, authors, and writers, researchers, scientists, engineers, architects, entrepreneurs, and of course, students.

So really, every human being, I think, needs to have one of these, especially if you're intellectually inclined. You know, some people hoard weapons as arsenals because they love guns. Some people hoard golf clubs or fishing equipment and tackle boxes because they love to fish. Or some people hoard collectibles, stuffed animals, or stamps and coins.

But you know what the most powerful thing to hoard is? Knowledge. Not just knowledge, but wisdom and also creative ideas. So that's what this commonplace book amounts to in the end. It's a hoard of the best of the best ideas.

What's really amazing about ideas is that they are the kernels and seeds of everything that you see around you in your life. So as much as we talk about non-duality and the evils and dangers of the monkey mind and how thinking is wrong and bad, yes, that's true on one hand. But then there's also the other side of that equation, which is that even though thinking can be problematic when you're doing consciousness work, it's also really important because thinking is what inspires you.

Thinking is what creates a vision, what motivates you to go out there and do stuff. In fact, what motivates you to go do consciousness work or to pursue enlightenment, and thinking is responsible for every single thing that you see around you right now.

So look around you. Look at the device or phone you're holding in your hand or the computer screen you're looking at. Look at the building that you're sitting in. Look at the chair that you're sitting in or the sofa you're on or the shoes that you're standing in. Look all around you. Everything you see started from a kernel of an idea that happened in the human mind. That's creativity at work.

So if you want to really be powerful at executing on your life purpose, if you want to contribute creatively to the world, there's nothing more important to you than having this very personalized commonplace book in place.

So let's move on to talk about how to actually keep one of these. How do you keep it? Well, of course, the preliminary question is: should it be digital or should it be paper? In the old days, it used to be paper. Nowadays, I definitely favor digital because there are just things that are possible with a digital commonplace book that are just not at all remotely possible in a paper form.

I get it; some people love the analog feel of pen and paper and notebooks, and I love that too. Sometimes I still take notes on pieces of paper, and I used to in the past. But the power of digital is amazing because we have software and tools these days that allow you to do things that are unthinkable for paper notebooks.

You would need a small personal library of notebooks to be able to do everything that one of these software can do. Search features are especially important because you'd have so much information, and you need to search through it quickly. You can't do that with paper.

Also, there's formatting functions. There's a lot of multimedia stuff. How are you gonna have links to internet pages or articles or videos or audios in your paper notebooks? It's just not gonna work. So you need some kind of digital repository. Digital is great because it can be very, very portable.

I definitely recommend you go digital, which of course then leads to the next question: which software is the best? There's a lot of software these days that's out there: Evernote, Microsoft products, Apple products, and all sorts of apps. You have stuff for your PC, you have stuff for your phone, you have stuff for your laptop, tablets—combinations of all sorts of things.

So I'll make it really simple for you. I found what I think is the perfect commonplace book note-taking software, and it's Microsoft OneNote. It's actually a piece of Microsoft software that I think most people completely overlook, and yet it's the most powerful piece of software in the Microsoft Office suite. It's more powerful than Word, more powerful than Excel, more powerful than PowerPoint, and yet most people don't really know about it and haven't really tapped into it.

What OneNote allows you to do is organize a bunch of digital notebooks and tabs, and it has all the features that you could possibly want. It's available for PC, it's available for Mac, and there are different versions of it. It's easy to get; it's pretty cheap to get. If you want to get a used version of it, you could if you're strapped for cash.

So that is my favorite software. Let's talk about the requirements that you need for a commonplace book software. If you're going to toy around with other kinds of software, keep in mind these requirements. This will show you why I think OneNote is perfect because it really fills all these features perfectly.

The first thing you're going to want is for your commonplace book to be portable. Now, it's a little tricky because portable doesn't necessarily mean that it's on your mobile phone. In fact, I don't have my commonplace book on my mobile phone. Portable, I mean laptop, because what I think you need for a commonplace book is a laptop with a real keyboard.

No, not an iPad; that doesn't count. You need a real keyboard, and not even some of those stupid flimsy Windows tablet things, which are like those two-in-ones with a sort of flimsy flip-out keyboard. You need a real solid keyboard so you can type fast on this thing, and it feels good.

What I recommend is getting a laptop, but not a huge chunky laptop. Get a really small one. I use an 11-inch MacBook Air. Apple has some nice light laptops, or you can find others. Chromebooks won't work at all because OneNote, I don't think, is available for Chromebooks.

So that's for portability. That allows you to use this commonplace book on your couch, in different parts of your house, outside with it, at Starbucks, on an airplane, in a car—that sort of stuff—very easily.

Now, other features that need to be there: you need a system of robust tabs, sections, and categories. You're gonna have a bunch of pages in it, but then those pages need to be organized in a multi-tier structure, and that's exactly what OneNote allows you to do. Some less robust note-taking software doesn't allow you to do this, and it doesn't have enough hierarchy, so it's going to be challenging for you to organize once you get hundreds and thousands of pages of notes and stuff in there.

You need, of course, a nice robust search function, and OneNote covers that. You want different rich formatting abilities. You want, of course, bolding, underlining, different colors, highlighting, and different texts and fonts, and you want all that to be very easily applied. Microsoft lets you do that easily.

Then you also want robust, easy-to-use bulleted lists. I think this is one of the features that I use the most within OneNote: bullet lists. I just have lists and lists upon lists, and a lot of these lists are tiered lists with different tiers and levels of indentation in them. I'll show that to you in the live demo.

You want to be able to not just make these lists but then quickly reorganize them all very easily, and that's something that OneNote is awesome at letting you do. You want to be able to create tables; those are useful. You want to be able to do interlinking between different pages, and that's something that I see that some less robust note-taking software doesn't let you do.

I don't just mean linking to a web page; I mean linking to an internal page or an internal notebook within your commonplace book. That's what lets you create this sort of Wikipedia effect. You want options for tagging. You want options for quickly saving and loading files. In fact, you want this to be completely seamless.

You want this commonplace book to be so easy to use that it's always on. You don't have to open an application; you don't have to load a file; you don't have to save a new file every time you jot down a note. That's what's so awesome about OneNote. It's completely seamless. I have it on 24/7 on my laptop. I never close the application. I never have to even click the Save button on it because everything is saved every five minutes automatically.

I don't need to create new files the way you would if you're working with Microsoft Word or something. You don't need to create individual files; all of it is saved into one file, and it's constantly open. You don't even need to waste time opening up the application. That's the ideal situation there because you have a lot of friction usually for taking notes.

To take a note when you get a random idea, you have to go get a pen, go get a piece of paper, write it down, file it somewhere, make sure that you remember that, then you have to organize that. That is an obstacle to you writing down all your ideas, and this commonplace book is supposed to make all that completely effortless and frictionless.

You also want local storage so that your files are stored locally, which is what OneNote allows you to do. Although some newer versions of OneNote are now designed to only work in the cloud, I've heard that from people. Definitely don't use those versions; use one that allows you to do local storage. There are some older versions you can buy which work perfectly.

As a bonus, nice features to have are the ability to make screenshots and screen clippings and insert that into your commonplace book, the ability to insert pictures, to actually record your own voice and audio, take audio notes, and stick them right in there. All of this OneNote lets you do: drawing little pictures and schematics and sketches.

As a bonus, of course, cloud sharing, cloud backup, and if you can get mobile access on your phone. But I wouldn't sacrifice all the above just to get mobile access. There are a lot of apps that are available for iPhone and Android users these days, which are all centered around mobile access, but then they lack a lot of these other features.

There is a OneNote for smartphones; you can get that. The trick there is that it then has to be stored in the cloud. I'm not sure how that works with local copies. I actually don't use it because I don't like taking notes on my phone. I do sometimes take notes on my phone if I'm in a bind and I don't have any other option—no piece of paper or anything. But usually, I'll write down notes on a post-it note and then I'll transfer them into my commonplace book at some other time.

So anyways, these are all the features that you really want, and OneNote offers it to you. If you could find some other application that does, then great. I haven't explored all of them. People will talk about Evernote; I doubt Evernote has all these features. It has many of them, but I don't think it has all of them.

If you're wondering whether you can keep a commonplace book just using Microsoft Word, definitely not. That's highly inefficient. Or if you're thinking about using Notepad, definitely don't use Notepad. Google Keep? I know that one; that's not robust enough either.

Maybe you're thinking, "Oh, maybe I can use some personal Wikipedia software." There actually is a possibility of setting up your own free wiki software and developing your own literal private wiki. I don't think that's ideal; it's cumbersome. There are all sorts of coding and stuff that goes into it, and it's just not as effortless as OneNote would be.

So that's my case for OneNote. I make a pretty powerful case for it because, well, I don't get paid for it. It's not a sponsorship or anything like that. I don't have any affiliate links for it. I'm just talking about it because I love the software. It's been really helpful for me in the last five years.

Don't be lazy or cheap when it comes to investing in your commonplace book. Invest in a good high-quality laptop, which is very portable, has a good battery life, and invest in one of these software like Microsoft OneNote. I actually use a version of Microsoft OneNote which is 2010. It's quite old, but it works perfectly for me. You can buy that on eBay for $50 to $100 if you're worried about the expenditures here.

Don't sign up for any stupid subscription services where they force you to pay every single month or every single year for this sort of stuff to have access to your own data. No, don't do that. Just go buy an old copy on eBay, and you pay once and use it for the rest of your life. It works perfectly, no problems. You don't need an internet connection; you just use it locally.

So without further ado, let's get into the live demo, and I'll show you how I run my own commonplace book. That'll give you some ideas for how you can set up yours.

All right, welcome to the live demo of my commonplace book. So this is my PC, and this is my desktop. I'll be showing you around here in a second. I am screen recording this, and if you're listening to me on iTunes or MP3 audio, that means that you should go check out the video because all the magic is gonna be happening here on the screen, and I don't think you're gonna get very much just by listening to me.

But anyways, let's get started. Here I have opened OneNote. This is Microsoft OneNote 2010 edition. It's a little bit old, but actually, it has all the features I want. You can check out the newest versions; there are some even free versions, but actually, there are limitations there that I don't like.

As is commonly the case with software developers these days, new versions tend to be less, not more, than they used to be, which is rather unfortunate. But you can experiment with that and just see what will work best for you, what you like best. If you want to buy this version, you can find a cheap copy on eBay very easily, a used copy.

So I am running this on a Windows machine. I'm just running it on my desktop here because it's easier to record. Usually, though, I run it on my laptop. Now, I told you my laptop is a Mac, so you might be wondering how do I run this on a Mac? Well, there are Mac versions, but I don't use Mac OS. Whenever I buy a Mac laptop, for example, I'll always install Windows on it just because I need Windows.

It's a lot more flexible; it allows me to do stuff that would be unimaginable to do on a Mac. All my software and all my knowledge is Windows-based, so that's just an FYI in case you were wondering about that disparity.

So here we are in OneNote. Here's how it works: you've got a section here on the left, you got a section at the top, and you've got a section here on the right. Then you got your formatting options up here.

On the left here, we have the highest level of organization. These are like actual digital notebooks, which contain tabs here, and then each tab contains pages that can go down here. You can see I've got three different notebooks, and you can have more. You can create as many as you want, but mine are Main, Misc, and Business.

If I click on Misc and Business, you see the tabs here change, and the pages also change because the pages are connected with the tabs. This is the highest level. So let's just take the Main, and then if we click on one tab here, like Blueprint, this is a product I developed, Fractionalize. That worked a long time ago; it's sort of antiquated, so I don't really recommend using it very much.

It's about four or five years old; maybe I'll work it out in the future. But anyways, you can see that this is the tab. There's a page here, and then there's a bunch of other pages. You can click on those, and you can see what's going on here.

So that's how it works—pretty simple. Let me show you how to create new tabs. If you want to create a new tab, you just click this button here. Boom! Got a new tab. We can name it; we can give it a title. Usually, I erase this stuff; I don't need the dates, although you can use those if you care about it.

Then you can just start typing away like this. If you've got an idea you got to write down real quick, that's your note right there. OneNote puts it into a little nice floating text box, which you can drag around, and you can resize.

What's really cool is that if I click here and I just start typing again, it'll create a second text box. You see how it works? These text boxes are very flexible; they are resizable. They scale and stretch as you type. They can go infinitely far down; there's no limit to how long your pages can be. They can go on forever.

So this is very convenient. By the way, if I want to recolor a tab, I can just right-click on it, choose a different color. Let's pick teal to see. Now it's teal-colored; this changes to teal color. If I want to create a second page, I can do that: Page Number Two and put stuff here.

Now I've got the first page and the second page. I can rename this Page Number One. There you go. Of course, we can change the order of these pages. We can add more pages— as many pages as you'd like. The order of these pages is easy to change like this, like that.

See? And of course, the tab itself, you can change the position of this tab. You can put it anywhere you'd like, like that. Let me show you some other features that we've got here.

Of course, you've got all your standard formatting functions. You can bold stuff, you can change the size of fonts to your heart's content, you can color them any color you want, you can highlight stuff in a ton of different colors, like so.

What else can you do? You can create lists. So let me show you how that works. If I want a list, I just click like this—very easy. I can also convert this entire thing into a list just by doing that.

Now, you might say, "So what? Every software has lists; Microsoft Word has lists." But not like these. Let me show you what I mean.

So let's say I type A, B, B, C. Here's what you can't do in Microsoft Word: you can't grab an item on a list and just drag it like this to quickly reorder stuff. Lists for me are the bread and butter of all my notes. I don't write long paragraph notes; I don't write diary entries. I make lists of stuff. It's very condensed; it's very easy.

Then what I do is I just manipulate the lists. I can just drag it to indent, create all sorts of deep structures like this if I want to. I can take this entire thing here and just drag it over here like that. See? Quickly rearrange stuff. This is impossible to do in most software, and yet this is something that I do all the time here. Super valuable.

What else I can do is I can use the tag functions, which are really nice. A tag is just a little icon that you put next to an item, like this: a star, question mark, a to-do box. You can actually check this off.

There are all sorts of stuff: exclamation points. But these are not just aesthetic; these are functional because if I click on this button, Find Tags, OneNote pulls up this tag search, which pulls up all the tags on every page throughout the whole notebook. I can quickly search through the specific items that I've tagged.

For example, I will use this gold star very, very often to tag the most important item. So if I have a list like this and I have this item which is most important, I will tag it with that gold star so that I can easily see it. Of course, if I drag it around, the gold star comes with it.

It doesn't even need to be a list item; it can just be a regular line. I can just put a nice little gold star next to it. Pretty cool.

What else can I do? I can create tables very easily right on the fly. You just type, and then you press tab, type, tab, type, tab, type, tab, and enter to create the next row like this. Of course, you can quickly resize stuff here. You can do things like that.

And of course, you've got individual text boxes. You can even overlap them in case you would want to do something so crazy. But yeah, you have all these kinds of options.

And that's not all; it goes on and on. We have all sorts of multimedia functions, which are really cool. Of course, you can insert images right into here. You can do screen clippings from the internet. You can do hyperlinks.

So if I want to turn this into a hyperlink to some online website, I can do that. Even better, let's say I want to turn this into an internal link. I want to make my own sort of personal Wikipedia. Let's say I have something important over there on some other page, some other tab that I want to link to.

I can just find that tab here, and then let's say I want to link to the Life Purpose page. See? If I click this, look what happens. It takes me to the tab, it opens the tab, and it takes me to the page. Not only that, I can even link to a specific line.

So if I want to link and have me jump right here, I can do that. That turns out to be a super valuable structuring tool. You can make some very complicated documents using all these sorts of structures, whereas with Microsoft Word, you couldn't do that because you have all sorts of different individual documents.

Linking them is a challenge because then you're renaming them. As soon as you rename them, that breaks your links, and you have to have folder structures, and you have problems. You can't rename your folders, so you see all sorts of complications arise that do not arise here.

Other multimedia functions: you can insert files like PDFs and so on. You can even record audio and video directly into here, and it will spit it out right here with a player. You can click the button, and you can play it.

So audio recordings, if I just click this button, I can record my audio. I won't do that now. Or a video, if you have a webcam, you can do that. There are all sorts of calendar functions, equations, and symbols.

For the artists in the audience, there are drawing tools, which are super cool. I'm just using a mouse here, so it looks ugly as hell. But if you had a tablet, one of those Windows machines with a tablet, then you could really do some creative stuff here.

You're not going to some third-party paint application; it's all happening right here very seamlessly, which is what's so awesome about it. Of course, there's a very powerful search function. So if I click Control + F, I can search and find stuff right on the page.

If I type in the letter "1," there you go. See what it did? It highlighted "1," "1," "1," "1." All the instances of "1" were highlighted. But what's really powerful about the search is there's an advanced search, which lets you limit where you're searching.

You can search on this page or on this whole tab, all these pages, or you can search across this entire notebook, all these tabs, or you can search the entire commonplace book, all these notebooks. That level of specificity is super useful to you when you've got a very large, bulky commonplace book going, which you probably will after years of doing this stuff.

Perhaps lastly, the most cool feature that I love about this is the auto-saving feature of OneNote. The way that I run OneNote is as follows: I just leave it on my laptop running 24/7. I leave it running for months at a time. I never open files; I never close files; I never save files; I never rename files. None of that ever happens.

All I do is I just open this thing, and I start typing away. The only things I have to name or rename or move are these tabs, really. I very rarely need to create a new notebook—just these tabs and then mostly pages, and that's it.

It auto-saves about every five minutes, so everything is saved. The program runs very stably; it doesn't crash. I don't think I've ever had it crash on me in five years of using this thing, so that's great.

Just try to imagine how you would pull that off with something like Microsoft Word, where you would have to be, again, renaming all your files, changing stuff. Even just opening a Word file takes half a second, but still, that's half a second too long.

Then saving it? Yet I remember to save it, and then you got to give it a name to save it. No, that's a pain in the ass. That's why you don't take notes as much because it's not effortless. When you have a system like this, it becomes so easy and so painless that you start taking a lot more notes, and everything just works. It's quite perfect.

So that's it as far as the features. Now let me show you how I organize my tabs. Let me just start by cautioning that, of course, this is a very custom thing that you want to customize to yourself. So don't try to copy me just to copy me. You are gonna have your own requirements.

If you're an artist or an engineer or a programmer or whatever, you're gonna need your own tabs, your own structure. But of course, some of this stuff is universal.

For example, let's start with goals. Everyone, I think, needs to have a goals tab. These are some of my goals—not all of them. Actually, some of these are outdated. A lot of my goals I just keep in my head these days; I bother to write many of them down.

But if you're starting off, like when I started off years ago, I would write down hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of goals. You can organize your goals by year, by month, by week, by day. You could have big goals, little goals; you can have business goals, personal goals, personal development goals, fitness goals—whatever.

So that's a great one I have. You can have different pages for different types of goals. I have some old pages here. I usually would organize goals by year, and I have different old years here.

Of course, I'm not showing you everything, so I'm gonna be going through these tabs here and showing you stuff. But don't get the impression that this is exactly how it is for me. I have deleted and moved and redacted some stuff here just to make sure that this information is not abused by people.

So you're getting just a little preview. Don't get the impression this is all that I had; these are all my goals. That's not how it is at all. This is just to give you an idea.

All right, speaking of ideas, the next tab is called Ideas. These are designed for typing any kind of random ideas I have for my business or for other stuff. That's what I have this one for.

Blueprint, I already showed you a little bit of this. This is a product I worked on a long time ago for Actualized.org. I don't talk about it much because it needs a lot more work to really be useful to people in the way that I'd like. Maybe I'll do the work later, but for now, I just want to use it as an example to show you how you might structure something a little more complicated in the sort of private wiki fashion.

See, I would have different pages. Click on them; I have hundreds of pages here. This is a really good way to organize a book that you might be writing or a big project you might be working on.

The Book Notes tab—you definitely want to have one of these if you're a voracious reader, like I encourage you to be. Here's just one example of a book and its notes that I took. Again, it's just a simple list with a couple of indentations here and there, but no fancy formatting—just very clean and simple.

Of course, don't get the impression this is just one book. For every new book, I would have a new page. Again, I removed some stuff here just to prevent people from abusing it because some of these books I put on my book list, and some of these I recommend in the Life Purpose course as perks and bonuses for people who support Actualized.org because this thing does take money to run.

So that's the Book Notes. I've got hundreds—if I keep scrolling down, you'll see hundreds and hundreds and hundreds—well, maybe not hundreds, but dozens at least. Many dozens of notes that I've taken.

Then I've got Product Notes, which is basically the same sort of tab as this one, except there I put all the seminars I watch, video courses I take, audio courses, that sort of stuff, workshops I go to, meditation retreats. I'll take notes on all those, and I basically just do one page per product.

TTC Notes—this is just some college lecture notes that I was taking here. Journals—this one you'll definitely want to have.

One of the problems when you have all these tabs and all these categories and all these pages is that when you have an idea, you're not quite sure where to stick it. That actually takes mental resources to figure out where does something belong because sometimes a thing belongs in three different places, and you're not sure where to put it.

In that case, what I do is I come here. I created just one generic catch-all chronological journal. So here, this is like my diary. If I want to jot down a quick idea, I just come up here on the first line and I type in today's date, and I jot down my ideas or whatever, and there it is.

Then I just keep doing that. You see? Then tomorrow, I'll do this like that, and it just keeps going. It keeps scrolling down and down and down and down. I've got, if I keep scrolling, there's literally hundreds of pages. It all goes all the way back to 2012.

Now, of course, I don't take notes here every single day necessarily. I mean, you could; that would be a journaling habit, and that's probably great if you're new to this sort of work. I don't find that I need to journal every single day. Maybe I will in the future, but usually, I only journal when I have something that I need to put there, which doesn't belong easily in some other tab.

A lot of the work that I do these days, I put into my Business tab rather than here in this journal. So, and of course, that was just one page. What I do on top of that is I created dedicated specific journals for specific things that I'm working on.

So if I'm doing yoga, I'll have a yoga journal. If I'm doing some other Sedona Method, I'll have a Sedona Method journal. If I'm doing some other kind of thing, like my meditation or my enlightenment or my trip reports or whatever I'm doing, I'll have a separate journal dedicated to that activity. So that can be quite useful.

The next tab is Quotes. I actually have an index here of different types of quotes: serious quotes, funny quotes. I also have other quotes that are listed in other areas, not here.

See, if I just show you the serious quotes, this is a list of all the most profound quotes that I've ever found. No, this is not the full list; it's just a sample. I can keep scrolling down; it'll continue for dozens and dozens of pages of awesome, inspiring quotes.

You can have different pages for different types of quotes; you can categorize and organize them however you want. I also have this Me tab. The Me tab is basically all the private personal stuff about myself, like my vision, my values, my greatest fears, my biggest obstacles and stumbling blocks, stuff that I need to work on, stuff that I have already solved in myself, you know, stuff about my health, etc.

I have different pages for all that sort of stuff. I'm not going to go into it because that information can get abused, so I'll just protect that privacy here for now. But you definitely want to have something like this.

In fact, if you took my Life Purpose course, there I showed you how to create a Me sheet. This is the Me sheet here, where I show you how to list in one area all your values, your strengths, your domain of mastery, your life purpose, and all that—how to figure it all out. That's what I cover in the Life Purpose course.

The next tab is the Actualized.org tab, which has a lot of different pages here that all have to do with structuring all the information for Actualized.org and for the business—not just for the videos themselves.

But here on this page, these are the video topics. I just have a long-running list of thousands of items. I can keep scrolling down, and it'll just keep coming down and down and down and down forever of all sorts of topics.

Now, of course, this doesn't mean that I'm going to shoot a topic on every single one. There's way too much for me to shoot; it would take me a lifetime to shoot them all. I literally couldn't do it in my lifetime. If I was shooting one every day, I couldn't do it. I would die from exhaustion.

So these are just ideas. I come here to inspire myself. Anytime I get a new idea, I just plop it on this list, and then later I come back, and I just scan through the list and find topics that I like and shoot stuff on that.

But again, this list goes all the way down, but I'm not gonna scroll down because I want to keep a little bit of surprise. I don't want to spoil the fun for you.

The next tab is a neurofeedback tab. I was doing some neurofeedback training, and I needed to take notes on it and have various logs and stuff. So here's an example of how you might do a chart.

For example, see if I do basically one row per week, and then I have columns for day—seven columns for seven days. If I succeed in doing my training that day, I just put an X like this. See? That's what these tables can be good for.

So that's how I did that. I mean, there's a lot more here, but I'm not showing it to you just because. Also, the other thing is that I noticed that when I show very detailed things to people, in a sense, it also is a disservice to them because they see it, and then what they do is they just start copying it like a monkey without doing it for themselves.

It's sort of like getting answers from the back of the book. Just because you have the answers in the back of the book doesn't mean you understand a damn thing. I don't want people going through this stuff and trying to copy all this stuff—not because it's gonna hurt me per se, but it's just gonna hurt you.

Sitting there poring over this information—that's not what you want to do, nor do you want to get so invested in my own life that you need to pour through this stuff. It's kind of silly.

Anyways, the next tab is Psychedelics, and here I have notes on various psychedelic substances. I have trip reports and all sorts of psychedelic-related stuff. For example, here I'm in a chart of various substances, methods of ingestion, dosages—small, medium, large doses, durations, notes, comments, and stuff about that.

This is very useful to me, but again, don't just copy blindly like a monkey because some of this stuff might be outdated; some of it might be wildly inaccurate. You can't just copy stuff like this and expect it to work. I mean, this is serious stuff. If you get one of these dosages wrong, you could kill yourself or have a terrible, terrible trip.

So be careful about that. You got to do your own research for yourself. I have various trip reports that I've written and insights from various trips and trip logs here where I keep a log of every trip I took, how long it was, what happened.

So these are just notes for myself to remember. So that concludes the first notebook. Then, of course, I've got the Miscellaneous notebook, which is just more random stuff.

Like I have recipes here that I like. I have my old PA log here. I have some old archive where I throw stuff I don't use anymore. I have coaching notes where I was taking notes on how to improve my coaching when I was doing life coaching one-on-one with clients.

Then I have my Business notebook. Business has a lot of stuff. Here's where I develop my courses. For example, the Life Purpose course was developed here. I have all these pages related to my Life Purpose course.

All of it is in there. Life Purpose books—those are related to the Life Purpose course. I have my book lists here with all the different book lists. I'm not showing it here so that not to spoil it for people.

The Reprogramming course—this is a new course I'm working on for reprogramming your subconscious mind. It's still in its early phases of development. Leo's Resources—also another thing I'm working for you guys is to get you some really good reviews of resources you can go to online, resources, seminars, and other places like that that would be great for your self-actualization journey.

Then the Epistemology book—this is actually my most voluminous tab. I have the most content here. I have hundreds, hundreds, hundreds, hundreds of pages. I can just keep scrolling down and down and down.

There's a lot of stuff here. This is for my book that I'm writing. Don't ask me when it's getting released; it's years away—maybe five years, maybe ten years. I don't know how long it'll take. This is very complicated stuff—very nuanced, tough.

There are insights here that I haven't shared with you guys and won't be able to share with you guys through videos, and maybe for years to come because it's very complicated. It's nuanced; it's very difficult to articulate sometimes, and it takes a lot of work to develop it. I've been working on it already for a year or more, and I've got all sorts of quotes related to different pages here.

I have various kinds of outlines. I have actual stuff that I've written—paragraphs and entire pages and chapters, some of it that I've written, and all of that is in here.

So there you go. Those are the notebooks. This is how it works. I showed you the formatting; you get the idea. I hope that this has inspired you. Make sure that you customize it and tailor it to your own needs, and if you're inspired, go start your own right now.

So there you have it. That's how you can set up your own commonplace book. Let me just guide you a little bit with the ultimate vision here. I want you to just imagine what will happen if you set this up in your life starting tomorrow, and then every single day for the rest of your life until you're dead—which will hopefully be decades and decades—you will keep adding all of the insights, all the juicy quotes, all the creative ideas that you have throughout your day, throughout your life, all the books you read, all the audiobooks, all the stuff you learn from me.

You just keep putting it all in there—all in there—all the stuff you find online, links, videos, audios, and pictures, and you just cram this thing full of that. Imagine if you had a resource like that in your life.

Then think about what your life purpose is, what your career is, and how that could supercharge the creativity in your career—whether you're an artist, a designer, a teacher, a serious student, a PhD student, a researcher, a scientist, whatever it is. Or maybe you're just doing personal development, and you just want to get the most out of my content.

Just imagine what would happen if you keep doing this. Imagine if you keep keeping journals and diaries and doing exercises within these journals, and then you can always reflect back, and you can keep building on that year after year after year. Imagine what that would do for you, and then go and do it.

That's it. This commonplace book is just a very practical technique. All right, I'm done here. Please click the like button for me and come check out Actualized.org. I've got my blog where I'm posting insights almost on a daily basis these days, the forum, which seems like the forum is getting fired up, getting better and better over time.

It seems like the people who were there initially, who were just kind of bullshitting and trolling and stuff, a lot of them left. Now what we have is we have people left who really care about helping you grow, helping themselves grow. So you can get some valuable insights and advice there and just some inspiration from fellow self-actualizers.

Go check out the forum, the Life Purpose course, the book list, and all have more resources for you in the future. So that's basically it.

But let me just reiterate that, see, this episode here—you might think, "Leo, why don't you make more episodes like this? It was very practical. Your other stuff is very abstract and theoretical and philosophical." I'm an extremely practical guy, despite what my abstract episodes might lead you to believe.

What you need to get good at is you need to get good at taking the theory and all the abstractness and then actually boiling it down to concrete stuff like this. Believe it or not, you can do that. Everything abstract I talk about, you can take and distill it down into concrete steps for how to actualize it in your life.

That's something you have to get good at. Don't expect me to be like a mother bird regurgitating every practical step-by-step technique into your mouth. You got to learn how to do that for yourself.

I talk about a lot of high-level stuff because if I have to go into every technical detail of how to actualize every big picture thing that I talk about, I would need ten lifetimes to do it. There's just so much stuff to talk about here.

All right, so the abstractness doesn't mean it's impractical; it just means you have to go the extra steps. You have to actually put some thinking and put some skin into the game. Start taking action, and that's ultimately one of what I want you to start doing: start taking action on everything that I'm saying.

All the little things I give you, little hints, little exercises here and there, little ideas for what you could do to get this stuff functioning in your life. Because if you're not getting it to function in your life, it's just mental masturbation.

It's just ideas. Ideas in and of themselves can be powerful, but you got to couple it with pragmatism and putting stuff into practice. Implementation—the most successful people have a rapid speed of implementation. That means as soon as they hear a cool idea, they go and they get to work to implement it into their life the very next day, just like you should be doing with this commonplace book.

Build your infrastructure for self-actualization. Build your infrastructure for consciousness work. Build your infrastructure for your life purpose, for your creativity, and stay with me for more in the future.