Writing yourself reveals how you judge

Today’s reflection

Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) was a French thinker and essayist who examined human judgment and certainty amid the Wars of Religion and political conflict. In “To the Reader,” the preface to the 1580 first edition of the Essays, he says that he will not dress himself up to win public favor but show himself in his ordinary, natural manner. He then writes that he himself is the matter of his book. Today's English sentence is a short direct quotation from Charles Cotton's translation; the Korean is a natural translation. Montaigne's self-observation is different from self-absorption. He examines failures of memory, bodily change, habit, fear, and other people's examples while exposing how his own judgment can shift. The fact that he revised the Essays throughout his life is itself instructive. A record is not a final verdict that says, “This is simply who I am.” It leaves evidence of how the present self judged, giving a later self something concrete to examine.

1. Writing yourself is not declaring an identity but preserving observable scenes. A sentence about what made you pause reveals more than saying, ‘I am cautious.’
2. A record creates a more honest comparison point than memory. It reduces the temptation to rewrite an earlier judgment once you know the outcome.
3. Revision is not a failure of consistency. When the original grounds and the new grounds remain visible, the change itself becomes an asset for future judgment.

Meeting notes and work retrospectives often preserve outcomes and tasks while erasing what we treated as fact, what we felt, and what we assumed. That makes recurring errors difficult to trace back to habits of judgment. A short record of facts, emotions, assumptions, and expectations creates a comparison point when results arrive. Leaders can see what they noticed accurately and where confidence outran evidence. A decision record is not an image-management document; it makes judgment into a process that can learn.