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How to Build a System to Understand Yourself
The Human Log
The log is an interesting invention. It began with 16th century ships — surrounded with water, no land in sight, no sense of direction, and no sense of speed. What did you have to compare your speed with anyway?
The sailors were ingenious. They used a log — a real piece of wood — attached to a string. They’d throw it in the water and use it to measure speed. Then they’d track this speed over time, in a logbook.
That’s the origin story of log books, now known as logs.
Over time, the logs grew to track even more information. The sailors felt that tracking their speed wasn’t enough. They filled gaps in their measurements — the weather, incidents, and the last time someone cleaned the toilet.
The idea? If you have a log, you can figure out what went wrong. You can figure out where you made mistakes. If the ship crashes, you know the last state it was in, thanks to the logs.
This concept has creeped into almost everything we build.
Airplanes have black boxes for the same purpose. Like every episode of Air Crash Investigation says — you’re lost without the blackbox. They’re more durable than traditional log books, since they have to survive the plane crash.
