I don’t want any of your statistics; I took your whole batch and lit my pipe with it.

I hate your kind of people. You are always ciphering out how much a man’s health is injured, and how much his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he wastes in the course of ninety-two years’ indulgence in the fatal practice of smoking; and in the equally fatal practice of drinking coffee; and in playing billiards occasionally; and in taking a glass of wine at dinner, etc. etc. And you are always figuring out how many women have been burned to death because of the dangerous fashion of wearing expansive hoops, etc. etc. You never see more than one side of the question.

You are blind to the fact that most old men in America smoke and drink coffee, although, according to your theory, they ought to have died young; and that hearty old Englishmen drink wine and survive it, and portly old Dutchmen both drink and smoke freely, and yet grow older and fatter all the time. And you never try to find out how much solid comfort, relaxation, and enjoyment a man derives from smoking in the course of a lifetime (which is worth ten times the money he would save by letting it alone), nor the appalling aggregate of happiness lost in a lifetime by your kind of people from not smoking. Of course you can save money by denying yourself all those little vicious enjoyments for fifty years; but then what can you do with it? What use can you put it to? Money can’t save your infinitesimal soul. All the use that money can be put to is to purchase comfort and enjoyment in this life; therefore, as you are an enemy to comfort and enjoyment where is the use of accumulating cash?

It won’t do for you to say that you can use it to better purpose in furnishing a good table, and in charities, and in supporting tract societies, because you know yourself that you people who have no petty vices are never known to give away a cent, and that you stint yourselves so in the matter of food that you are always feeble and hungry. And you never dare to laugh in the daytime for fear some poor wretch, seeing you in a good humor, will try to borrow a dollar of you; and in church you are always down on your knees, with your ears buried in the cushion, when the contribution-box comes around; and you never give the revenue officers a full statement of your income.

Now you know all these things yourself, don’t you? Very well, then, what is the use of your stringing out your miserable lives to a lean and withered old age? What is the use of your saving money that is so utterly worthless to you? In a word, why don’t you go off somewhere and die, and not be always trying to seduce people into becoming as ornery and unlovable as you are yourselves, by your villainous “moral statistics”?

Now, I don’t approve of dissipation, and I don’t indulge in it either; but I haven’t a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices. And so I don’t want to hear from you any more. I think you are the very same man who read me a long lecture last week about the degrading vice of smoking cigars, and then came back, in my absence, with your reprehensible fire-proof gloves on, and carried off my beautiful parlor stove.

When you’re making the decision on which tools to use to manage your journal, it is important to keep three questions in mind:

1. Is it easy to use?
2. Is it available anywhere and at any time?
3. Will I still be able to use it faithfully in five years.

If you are looking at a piece of software or technique that answers no to any of these three questions, I would suggest putting it away. You’re supposed to be writing in your journal every day; you don’t need to be reading a manual on some complex method of writing, or frustrated that you left your journal at home when you’re on vacation, or wondering what you’ll do when the technology you are using is no longer available (thus losing all of your records).

What have I chosen as the go-to tool for keeping a journal?

• Evernote.

The software is easy to use, goes with me wherever I have an internet connection (as well as on my smartphone) and the company is not likely to disappear in the next few years (I pay for a premium account to help make sure that stays true).

With Evernote I can very quickly type a written account of the day’s events, or I can shoot a quick video/audio clip if I don’t feel like typing (it’s amazing how much emotion you can hear in your own voice when you listen back over the clips). Tagging each of my daily entries keeps me organized and makes it possible to do a search back for a specific time of my life or subject that I might have researched in the past, and organizing my notes into Notebooks helps streamline that even more.

There is also a really clever feature of Evernote that makes it indisputably the champ of my journaling tools, and that’s in its Android app. I keep my phone with me at all times because I’m using it constantly for various work- and play-related tasks throughout the day, so when it comes time to write in my journal, I never have to search for it (like I did with my old moleskine notebook). I wake my phone up from sleep, launch the Evernote app, type out my journal (or record a quick audio clip) and sync it to the cloud.

Evernote is literally transforming the way that I live my life, and in more ways than just journaling. But alas, I shall leave those stories for another day.

Until then, please take my recommendation sincerely as you keep up with your own journaling. Evernote is the way for me, and it might be the same for you as well. Of course, if this isn’t the right solution for you, that’s no problem. Just use something, because otherwise you’re really missing out.

I don’t mean “things” like groceries that you need to buy or an appointment with a doctor. I mean important “things”, the types of things that have a significant affect on who you are as a person. Who you are, what you like, what you struggle with on a daily basis… you know, things that only you will probably ever notice or control.

Over the last few months I’ve been taking a lot of time to consider these “things” each and every day, and that simple habit has caused a lot of changes within me. It’s the reason why I got back into the food industry after 10 years of forcing myself into other fields.

For a good chunk of my life I had forgotten who I was, and I’m only glad that I was able to recognize early on that I have not been acting as the person I was created to be.

It’s easy for us to forget these things, because we’re always so busy trying to remember everything else. We have schedules to follow, deadlines to meet, bills to pay, events to plan and friends to please. It’s not uncommon knowledge that the Western World is a very fast-paced culture and more often-than-not, we aren’t really quite satisfied with the way our lives are going.

Why not?

I can’t speak for everyone, but certainly the reason for my discomfort, lack of direction, unhappiness and confusion was caused by a lack of knowledge of myself. By forgetting who I was and the type of person I had always wanted to be, I was leading myself into a lifestyle that was wholly different from the type of lifestyle that would satisfy me. The desire in my heart was not lining up with who I was, and many problems (inevitably) rose out of that.

Steve Jobs put it eloquently when he said this,

“For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

That act of looking yourself in the mirror each day is more directly the act of looking into yourself and your life to find the core of how you feel about any given activity. Much like The Pause is meant to help you with each potentially destructive decision that comes your way, this time of reflection in front of the mirror is meant to keep you on track with what your greatest desires are, and to never forget them.

Now, you can do that in front of the mirror each day and it will more than help a little bit, but that is only the first step to looking into your heart to see where you are in life. In 10 years of being dissatisfied with my life and trying to figure out where I needed to go next to get back on the right path, I have not found a single other method that is more efficient at helping me see what type of person I had become (and remember the type that I wanted to be).

That method I’m talking about is, of course, keeping a journal.

It takes a while to build the habit, and requires the proper tools and atmosphere to really get the mood right and pour out your innermost thoughts on paper. But when the act finally does click and you find yourself actually getting to know the real you, you will find that all of the practice and forcing yourself to write a few embarrassing sentences each day was well worth it.

In the time that I had started writing in my journal I not only recognized that I was in a career field that was leaving me with an empty heart, but I also began to see the real me beneath all of the masks (we all wear a ton of them everywhere we go). I reflected on the activities of every single day within my journal, and eventually I could recognize exact moments in my life when I was not being true to myself.

It is a very powerful skill to be able to know who you are, and I’m not so sure that many people today possess it. If you don’t, then getting into the habit of keeping a journal is the way to go.

It doesn’t have to be long or beautifully worded or even have any meaning to it at first. Just take a few minutes at the end of each day and write about any arguments you had, any goals you surpassed, fun moments that made you laugh or fleeting thoughts that left you sad, even writing out your dreams is totally fine. As you continue to write each day, you’ll begin to see patterns in your activities and discussions, your beliefs and convictions, what makes you happy and what makes you infuriated.

Those recognized patterns will then lead you to either develop some of them further or to remove others completely (I’m in the process of ending a very cynical phase of life right now while also growing my ability to make the people around me feel welcomed). No one can tell you what is on your heart and what needs to change – only God and you can do that. A regularly kept journal will keep you from forgetting exactly what it is your heart has been trying to tell you.

“One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.” – Franz Kafka

Keep a journal. Don’t make it public like a blog and don’t stress when you miss a day or two, but keep one and don’t let it leave your thoughts for very long if you can help it. You will find that, in time, it was one of the best decisions you could have made for yourself.

There is one little habit I’ve learned that has changed everything else in my life.

The pause.

When we fail, it’s because we act on urges without thinking, without realizing it. We have the urge to eat junk, and we do it. We have the urge to check email instead of writing a chapter of our book, and so we open our inbox. We have an urge to smoke, to drink, to do drugs, to chew our nails, to play a Facebook game, to procrastinate, to skip a workout, to eat more fries, to criticize, to act in jealousy or anger, to be rude … and we act on that urge.

What if instead we learned to pause after each urge? What if we stopped, looked at that urge, paid close attention to what it feels like inside our bodies, but didn’t act?

The urge would no longer control us. We would be able to make conscious choices that might be healthier for us, help us be happier.

If we can pause, we create space. Space to breathe, to think, to be without acting.

The pause is the answer to so many of our problems. Such a small thing, and so powerful.

To develop the pause, notice your next urge. Is it an urge to go check something online? Or eat something you know isn’t healthy for you? Pay attention to the urge, learn as much as you can about it. If you act on it after the pause, that’s OK. Just notice it, and pause, and pay attention.

Do it again for the next urge, and the next. You will get good at it with practice, and you’ll have lots of opportunities to practice.

The urges won’t go away, but your ability to pause will get stronger. And when you have the pause, you have everything.