In July 1960, a twenty-six-year-old Englishwoman with no university degree stepped off a small boat onto the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika. She was carrying very little. The luggage that mattered fit in a canvas shoulder bag.
I have read a lot of origin stories for famous scientists, and most of them involve laboratories, advisors, big grants, and a tradition stretching back through citations. Jane Goodall’s origin story has none of that. She arrived at what is now Gombe Stream National Park with a few notebooks, a couple of pencils, and a pair of binoculars she had used as a girl in Bournemouth. More than sixty years later, the chimpanzees of Gombe remain among the longest-studied wild primate populations on earth. That research started with one woman writing down what she saw. Goodall died on 1 October 2025; the notebooks – and the science still coming out of them – are what this piece is about.
In her own memoir, Goodall describes the kit she brought:
“I started with paper, pencil and binoculars. Next I acquired a camera, a small telescope and a manual typewriter for transcribing notes.”
That is, more or less, the whole list. The story of how she went from those tools to rewriting what science thought it knew about being human is, at its heart, a story about a notebook. I want to look at how she used hers.
1. Show Up With Less Equipment Than You Think You Need
Goodall’s mentor was the paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, who had chosen her partly because she had not been trained in primatology. He wanted someone whose mind was not already organized into the categories that mid-century animal science used. So she arrived at Gombe in a way that would terrify a modern field researcher – alone in the bush, no formal protocols, no team, just her mother Vanne in camp for the first months because Tanzanian authorities would not let a young woman live in the forest by herself.
What she had was a notebook and the willingness to write in it.
I think about this a lot when I am about to start a new journaling experiment and I find myself shopping for the perfect leather notebook or a fountain pen with the right line width. The shopping is not the work. The shopping is what we do instead of the work. Goodall’s tools were laughably simple. The output – decades of observations that revised the human story – was not.
If you have been waiting for the right notebook to start a journal, this is your sign. A spiral pad and a ballpoint will do. The same instinct that worked for Leonardo da Vinci’s pocket-sized observation journals and Albert Einstein’s plain travel diaries works for you. The tool is not the bottleneck.
2. The Field Note Is the Science, Not the Report About the Science
Most people assume the “real” science happens in the published paper and the notebook is a rough draft. Goodall’s career inverts that. Her published books and papers came years – sometimes decades – after the events they describe. The primary record was always the field notebook.
Here is an entry from one of her early Gombe books:
“Wednesday – 10th August. Woke to realize that it was going to be quite impossible to hear chimps however close they might be. The wind was quite gale force…. At 2pm I happened to see 2 chimps – miles and miles away. They were moving up a tree, but almost as I saw them, they vanished. They were right at the top of the furthest away mountain.”
There is no theory in that entry. There is no triumph. There is only what happened. The wind, the distance, the disappearance. And yet entries like this one, stacked up over months and then years, are the actual material that her later writing was made of.
I have started treating my own journal entries the same way. The page is not a draft of an essay I might write someday. It is the science itself. Whatever I make later – a newsletter, a blog post, a long conversation with a friend – is the report.
Try this for a week: end each day with three sentences of plain observation. What did you actually see, hear, or do? No interpretation. No mood adjectives. Just the record.
3. Naming Is a Scientific Act, Not a Sentimental One
When Goodall began identifying individual chimpanzees, she gave them names. David Greybeard, the gentle male with a silvery chin who was the first to accept her presence. Flo, the matriarch with the tattered ears and the bulbous nose. Her daughter Fifi, her son Flint. Later: Goblin, Frodo, Gremlin, Satan.
The scientific establishment of the early 1960s thought this was unforgivable. Animals were supposed to be numbered. Naming, the argument went, projected human qualities onto creatures that did not possess them. Cambridge faculty asked her to renumber. She refused.
She turned out to be right, and the reason she was right has to do with what naming makes possible on the page. A number is a placeholder. A name is a hook. If you write “Chimp 4 groomed Chimp 7 for eleven minutes,” you have a data point. If you write “Flo groomed Figan for eleven minutes,” you have a relationship – the same relationship that will show up in next week’s entry and the next year’s, and after enough entries you start to see a personality.
Goodall’s per-individual approach was so unusual that her early papers had to fight to get published. But by the late 1960s, primatologists everywhere were doing what she did. The naming was not sentimental. It was a technology for keeping track of difference over time.
You can do this in your own journal. Stop writing “my coworker” and “my brother” and “the woman from yoga.” Use names. Even shorthand names. Patterns appear faster when the people on the page have edges.
4. Build a Character File for Anything You Want to Understand Deeply
Goodall’s most ingenious innovation was the character file. Every evening, she would write up her field notes in chronological order. Then she would type clean copies and cut them up – literally, with scissors – so that every observation about a single chimpanzee could be filed under that chimpanzee’s name.
Flo had a file. Fifi had a file. David Greybeard had a file. Over years, each file became a portrait, built up from thousands of small entries.
This is the same trick – on much longer time scales – that Benjamin Franklin used in his self-tracking journal and that Thomas Edison used in his structured lab notebooks. You write once in time order, then you re-file by subject. Both views are useful. The day-by-day view shows you what happened. The by-subject view shows you what a person, project, or pattern actually is.
I keep a version of this for the people I want to be a better friend to. After a phone call, I write a few lines in my regular journal. Once a quarter, I move those lines into per-person files. It feels mechanical until the moment, six months later, when I notice that someone I care about has mentioned the same fear in three different conversations and I have been treating each one as fresh news.
Try this: pick one person, project, or worry that you keep coming back to. Start a dedicated page just for that subject. Move existing entries onto it as you find them. See what shape it takes.
5. The Big Discovery Will Probably Hide Inside an Ordinary Entry
On a November morning in 1960, Goodall watched David Greybeard at a termite mound. He picked up a piece of grass, stripped the leaves off it, poked it into a hole in the mound, waited, withdrew it covered in termites, and ate them. Then he selected a new piece of grass when the first wore out.
She wrote it down. Carefully:
“He reached up and appeared to ‘test’ 3 or 4 pieces of straw before finally breaking off a piece about 2 1/2 feet long. Holding it in his left hand he broke it off with his mouth and returned to his place with it in his mouth. Then ran it through his fingers pulling it through his right hand with his left, then back…. Then lifted it, coated with termites & ate them all, using his lips and tongue.”
She did not know, in the moment, that she had just collapsed a definition that had stood for a century. Human beings, the textbook said, were the toolmaking animal. Other species used objects, but humans were the only ones who modified objects for a purpose. David Greybeard had just done exactly that. When Goodall cabled Leakey with the news, his reply became famous: “Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.”
What I take from that entry is the tone. It is not breathless. It is not labeled “BREAKTHROUGH.” It is just the careful description of a few minutes with a piece of grass. The historic discovery is sitting inside a paragraph that, on its face, looks like every other paragraph in the notebook.
This is the strongest argument I know for keeping a journal even when nothing seems to be happening. You almost never notice the important entry while you are writing it. You notice it later, on a re-read, when you realize you were watching something take shape.
6. Patience Is the Method, Not a Personality Trait
For the first several months at Gombe, Goodall could not get within five hundred yards of a chimpanzee before they fled into the forest. She climbed the same ridges every morning. She sat in the same spots. She wrote in her notebook about not finding anything.
She has said in interviews that those months almost ended the study. She was running out of funding and had nothing to show. What she had was field notes – mostly negative ones – and a routine. She kept the routine.
Eventually David Greybeard came into camp on his own, drawn by bananas left near her tent. Then he allowed her closer in the forest. Then the others followed his lead. The trust that opened up the entire study was the product of pure persistence. There was no shortcut for it, and there was no personal trait that made it easy. It was a method she had decided to use – return to the same place at the same time and write down what you see – and she ran the method long enough for it to work.
I think this is the lesson Bruce Lee’s training journals point at, too. The journal is not the place where you describe your discipline. The journal is the discipline. The act of opening it on a Tuesday when nothing interesting is happening is the work.
Try this for thirty days: write three lines a day at the same time of day. The content does not matter. Only the consistency matters. At the end of the month, read it through.
7. Write So You Can Be Cited Decades Later
For years, Anne Pusey’s center at Duke held the Gombe materials. In March 2022 the collection moved to Arizona State University’s Institute of Human Origins as the Gombe Chimpanzee Archive – thousands of field notebooks, character files, photographs, and typed transcripts. Researchers are still publishing peer-reviewed work that draws on entries Goodall wrote in 1962. ASU has been digitizing the handwritten notes with AI so sixty-plus years of paper can become a searchable scientific dataset. The chimps in those early entries are gone. The notebooks are not – and they are still producing science after the notebook-keeper is gone.
This is the part of her practice that I think is least appreciated outside of science. She wrote as if she would need to be cited. Dates at the top of every entry. Times noted when possible. The names of the chimps spelled the same way every time. Weather. Location. What she saw, in the order she saw it. None of it was for an audience. All of it was for the long record.
I try to bring a small fraction of that discipline to my own journal. Not because anyone will study it after I am gone – they will not – but because I would like to be able to study it when I am sixty. Date every entry. Note the weather. Use the same name for the same person. Boring on the day. Priceless in ten years.
The same instinct guided Martin Luther King’s careful sermon notebooks – documents that could be picked up by a future reader and still mean something specific. Future-you is a future reader. Write so they can use what you wrote.
8. The Notebook Becomes the Bridge Between Observation and Advocacy
Later in her career, Goodall stepped back from full-time field research and spent much of each year on the road for conservation. Books such as Reason for Hope (1999) and The Book of Hope (2021) read less like field science and more like testimony. The chimpanzees of Gombe remain under pressure. Habitats are smaller than when she arrived. The forests around the reserve have been cut down.
In a 2002 TIME essay she wrote a line that is often quoted from her later hope books:
“The greatest danger to our future is apathy.”
She died on 1 October 2025. What remains usable for the rest of us is not a living campaign schedule – it is the method on the page. The journals carry her from the careful young observer in 1960 to decades of advocacy. The bridge between observation and commitment was the act of writing things down, day after day. The notebook was not just where the science lived. It was where attention became responsibility.
That is what I think we are doing, in a smaller way, when we keep a journal. We train the muscle of attention. We decide that the world is worth recording. Apathy is the absence of that muscle. The notebook, used regularly, is still a practical antidote – and at Gombe, the archive itself is the proof that careful notes outlive the note-taker.
Quick Reference: Goodall’s Notebook Practice
- Tools: Paper, pencil, binoculars. Later: camera, small telescope, manual typewriter.
- When: Dawn to dusk in the field. Re-write and clean up under a kerosene lamp at night.
- Format: Chronological field notes by day, then individual character files cut and pasted (literally) per chimpanzee.
- Naming: Every chimp got a name, not a number. David Greybeard, Flo, Fifi, Flint, Goblin, Frodo.
- Discipline: Same routine, same locations, every day, for years. Negative days recorded as faithfully as positive ones.
- Archive: Held 2011 to 2019 at Duke via Anne Pusey’s center; since March 2022 at Arizona State University’s Institute of Human Origins (Gombe Chimpanzee Archive), with ongoing AI digitization of handwritten notes.
What to Read Next
For more on the practice of observation in journals, see Leonardo da Vinci’s pocket-sized notebooks, Charles Darwin’s “I think” notebook, and the full hub of famous people’s journaling habits.
If Goodall’s approach speaks to you, the simplest place to start is the same place she started – a notebook, a pencil, and a habit. I write a free newsletter on building a sustainable journaling practice, with a 6-step starter guide for new subscribers. You can join here.
Featured image: Jane Goodall in Paris, June 22, 2010. Photo by Nicolas Richoffer, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0; resized. ShareAlike applies.
