Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I've never written any... — Anne Frank

Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I've never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.

Author: Anne Frank

Insight: There's something deeply human about Anne's worry here, and it still resonates today even though we're drowning in documentation. She was convinced that her teenage thoughts—messy, shifting, ordinary—wouldn't matter to anyone. And yet she was writing anyway, which reveals something important: we don't actually need permission or a guarantee of an audience to make something worth doing. We just need the act itself sometimes. What's interesting is that this doubt she expresses has probably paralyzed more people than anything else. How many of us have stopped ourselves from writing, creating, or sharing because we assumed nobody would care? We've turned Anne's hesitation into a reason not to try. But she didn't let it stop her. She wrote the diary not because she was certain it would matter, but because the writing mattered to her in that moment—as a way to think, to feel less alone, to make sense of her world. The real twist is that the things we think are too small or too personal often end up being exactly what connects us to others. A thirteen-year-old's honest confusion about life can teach a forty-year-old something true. The musings we're sure nobody wants to hear might be the ones someone desperately needs to read.

Source: The Diary of a Young Girl, p. 11, Bantam Books, 1995