It's clear that journals or knowledge-management databases are great tools for self-improvement over time and in retrospect...
I inevitably get a couple of sentences into the entry when I say to myself, "What am I doing -- nobody wants to know this!", and I delete was a had just written. "What a useless waste of resources," I think, and, "How can all those people just keep blabbering on and on about..."
Looking back on things I wrote months, years ago, can fill me with horror and can also key me into realizations that had been altogether buried by the barrage of noise that is life in this age of information. "Oh. I wrote that?"
All my old notebooks have most of the pages ripped from their bindings.