The First Mark in an Empty Notebook

There’s nothing like the smell of a brand-new notebook.

My current obsession is a sunflower-yellow Leuchtturm1917. It’s been sitting on my desk for days now — stacked neatly beside the others I’ve collected over the years. The Moleskines. The Muji specials. A few unpronounceable-but-beautiful Japanese imports.

Together, they form a tidy little graveyard of good intentions. Not because they failed me — but because I treated them like altars instead of tools.

This is the curse of the “perfect” notebook — or any beginning, really. It smells like possibility, that delicate, untranslatable feeling right before something begins. But the moment you open it, it whispers, Are you sure you’re ready? Which, translated, means: Don’t mess this up.

Experts will tell you to buy cheap notebooks so you won’t care. And sure — that can help. Lower the stakes, and suddenly the first step feels less frightening. That advice applies just as well to notebooks as it does to most beginnings we’re afraid to touch.

But the real solution isn’t lowering the stakes. It’s remembering your creativity was never meant to be precious in the first place.

A good notebook should hold your bad lines, wonky doodles, crooked openings, and half-born thoughts. That’s how it earns its keep. And honestly, that’s how you earn yours, too.

Beginnings don’t flow until you do. A single mark — however crooked — is what turns intention into life.

The moment pen touches page — idea becomes action — the notebook stops being a shrine and starts being alive. It becomes a practice. And practice is where all the magic lives.

My notebooks are filled with sideways beginnings: thoughts that wander off mid-sentence, doodles that look like static, grocery lists disguised as poetry. They don’t impress anyone, but they do something more important — they remind me I showed up. That I let myself be caught mid-thought instead of waiting to be fully dressed.

And isn’t that the point?

A clean notebook isn’t asking you to be brilliant. It’s asking you to pay attention — to notice what stirs, what whispers, the small details most people step over on their way to somewhere else.

Noticing is what gives the work its meaning. And notebooks — in all shapes and sizes — are where you give that noticing a place to live.

And if your notebook (real or imaginary) still scares you, begin with something small. Something so small it can’t possibly intimidate you: a sentence fragment, a doodle that barely qualifies as a doodle, a question you keep circling, a line you overheard and can’t explain, a moment that tugged at you for reasons you don’t yet understand.

Maybe it’s the first sentence of a book you’re not sure you can write. Or a sketch of a business you might one day grow.

Small is where beginnings learn to breathe.

And when you practice noticing, everything changes: your art, your business, your relationships, the way you move through a grocery store, the way you breathe when you’re stuck, the way the light suddenly looks different on your kitchen floor.

Noticing is what gives those moments weight — a sense of meaning, of being here instead of rushing past yourself. It’s also what keeps you human.

This is why the first mark matters.

Which brings me back to the page.

While I love a neat, dated journal entry as much as anyone, I’ve stopped pretending each page has to stay pure. Go back. Add to it. Cross things out. Layer doodles on top of thoughts and thoughts on top of scribbles. Let the page become a record of your aliveness rather than your tidiness.

Notebooks aren’t museums. They’re compost. Everything grows there — even you.

I know this, and I still have to remind myself. But when I do, I start getting out of my own way. And that’s when the first mark finally happens — not a perfect mark, not a profound one. Just a true one.

 Maybe that’s all a beginning ever asks of us: to be willing enough, awake enough, present enough to make a mark and let it stand.

Now, it’s your turn.

Make your first mark — in whatever notebook you’re holding. It doesn’t have to be good. It just has to be yours. Courage is a crooked line. Go ahead and make it.

The page — like your life — isn’t waiting for perfect.

It’s waiting for you.

P.S. This notebook isn’t a plan. It’s a practice.

I’m using it to stay awake to my life, to my work, and to what’s quietly asking for attention.
I don’t know where it all leads yet—and I’m letting that be part of the point.

I have a feeling the work, the business, and the life will sort themselves out from there.
If that sounds like your kind of experiment, welcome.