You can leave such a book for your own family. What are the key lessons you've learned in your life? Are you ready to share them with your children and grandchildren - or with your friend, siblings, parents, and grandparents?
What you've gleaned from your life experiences can make things easier for your children or your relatives. In fact, the lessons you've earned from trial and error can be the perfect gift for everyone in your life - or for one person who matters to you. Here's how to commit your insights to writing and share them with your fellow life travelers.
Carry a pad of paper around with you everywhere for a week.
Jot down your thoughts and observations as they occur to you. Don't judge them. Just make note of them.
Add personal stories and memories, as they come to mind. Again, don't edit your thoughts. Just commit them to paper.
Take a few days to go through your notes, and underline the most important passages, and make additional comments in the margins.
From this, distill the lessons you most want to share with others: your perspective, your values, what matters most to you, and your reactions to the world around you.
Find a beautiful journal or blank book - one that you feel a strong connection with. You might find it at a bookstore, an antique store, an online auction site, a craft store, or even a flea market. Where you find it doesn't matter. How you feel about it does.
Fill the journal with your own instruction manual for life. Make sure to include a title and your name.
Find a special person to share it with, and turn the presentation of the journal into a celebration.
If you don't feel comfortable writing your notes and stories, you can dictate them into a portable tape recorder, and later, you can transcribe them into a journal. You don't have to be a bestselling author, academic, or philosopher to create a instruction manual that can helped your loved ones every day of their lives... and be passed on to future generations as well.
Author Bio
Joe Vitale is the author of the book, Life's Missing Instruction Manual (Wiley, March 2006).
Berni's Comments: While cleaning out my mother's old office and basement after she passed away, I found all sorts of things she wrote and created which I didn't know existed. I started reading her old copies of personalized greetings cards that she would write and print up on her computer, then send to all of her friends that needed a little cheering up. First, I cried. Then laughed. Then cried and laughed some more.
It actually became a little game as I had to sort through a mountain of files and other stuff. She wrote a little poetry, and even a couple of songs! (And I thought my songwriting ability came only from my father...) I even found some landscape drawings (she always loved landscapes and still life). Then surprise of all surprises: I found some large ceramic plates that she had painted in a sort of black iridescent paint with beautiful autumn and winter colored hues depicting these scenes as well. I have never really seen anything like them. I remembered she painted and fired a couple of them at Aunt Helen's house. At the time, my Aunt Helen was a ceramic teacher (who still has a studio in her basement). These pieces have become family keepsakes and treasures because my mother actually signed and dated them!
I never thought I'd find so many precious memories, which really have become my mother's own Personal Instruction "Manual" for Life.
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