I journal a lot. Across all my journals, I’ve written at least seven-hundred and fifty thousand words.

From the many avid journalists I’ve spoken to, a common practice is to write, shut the journal, and never look at it again. But, this is a mistake in my opinion. There’s a ton of self-improvement to be found in reading your entries.

When you read your journal entries, you’re forced into thinking about your past thinking (I call this “retrospective metacognition”). Metacognition, on its own, means thinking about your current thinking.

There are two major limitations to this…