5 Life Changing Journaling Habits from the Stoics

I wake up I don't touch my phone I spend some time outside with my kids and then the next thing I do is I sit down with my [Music] journals so I've been journaling off and on for most of my life you know I started when was a kid I would stop I would get started like a lot of people it was a habit that I knew was important but it just never really stuck I remember I was visiting uh my friend Casey neistat and he had all these amazing journals like years and years of

his creative thinking on shelf in his office and I was like that's so cool I was like I wish I'd done that and he said why don't you just start now and I remember I bought this m this is when journaling really stuck for me and it's become part of my morning routine I'm Ryan holiday I've written now 11 or 12 books I don't even know about stoic philosophy I've been lucky enough to speak all over the world to the NBA the NFL Special Forces and sitting Senators but I've been on this philosophical Journey this

journey through stoicism for a decade and a half now and a huge part of that Journey has been journaling in fact you could really argue that stoicism and journaling are inseparable from each other um and actually in two or 3 days I will be starting my fourth goar around of the daily stoic Journal I know it's a little weird to do your own journal but it's basically just a prompt each day like uh uh how am I preparing in the offseason for what what is to come and you reflect on that in the morning in

the evening how can I see these difficulties as a lesson and a test um so each day there's a question and you explore that question and I'd use uh usually a blank Journal too I have a gratitude Journal I have uh this one line a day Journal I have a bunch of different journals I do but I've been doing this now for a long time and I've been studying some of the great journaling practices of creative people and leaders and thinkers and philosophers of course so today's episode I want to give you a bunch of

secrets to being a great journaler to getting the most out of your journaling practice here we go the first lesson I would give anyone about journaling is like just start don't stress about tools don't stress about time don't stress about how much how little should you read it like just do it right actually one of the journals that I love I love this one line a day Journal it was helpful for me when I was getting started cuz it's just you write you just write one thing every day I've done one line a day now

for five years I'm almost finished with this um but the idea is everyone has time and The Willpower to write one sentence a day so don't start by saying oh I want to write you know 10 pages or I want to spend 30 minutes journaling just like with meditation don't start with an hourong solo meditation start with 1 minute or 5 minutes right start really small so the idea is to build the Habit build the momentum uh get into it make it a habit uh and then you can build so I started with something like

the on line a day journal or the daily Stoke Journal is is an easy one too cuz it's prompt the five minute Journal is great you've got five minutes you know so do something that helps build the practice maybe just start a workout Journal just log your workouts or a reading journal or a food journal like start something that's more of a practice um and then it's it's it's building the skill The Willpower for you to do it on an ongoing basis Walter Isaacson when he was writing his epic biography of Steve Jobs talked about

how they went and they tried to find a bunch of old documents and journals that uh Steve Jobs had done on one of the early macintoshes and even Steve Jobs with all his Computing genius and access to the best programmers and you know designers and engineers in the world couldn't manage to get these files off this Old Mac and Walter Isaac was joking about how absurd that was you know you couldn't access these files that were just uh you know a decade a couple decades old at most and yet he could spend hours pouring over

the journals of Leonardo da Vinci don't think of journaling as this epic thing but but it also is important and and there's something important about doing it on physical paper I think it's good to be free of devices anyway to have something that's not digital but I just love the idea that you know 6 700 years later or whatever Da Vinci's journals are still legible and usable but things that you did two iPhones ago are lost to all time epic tius says every night keep thoughts like these at hand write them read them aloud talk

to yourself and others about them I think this is an important part stoicism isn't this thing that you just absorb one time and that's just in your brain and you have it forever It's actually an ongoing process an engagement with the ideas over and over again one of the criticisms of Marcus aurelius's meditations by academics who don't get this is that it's kind of repetitive it's repetitive sure but he was doing it over a long period of time he might have wrote one entry and then another one 7 years later it could have been s

days apart but this is what he needed this is what he was struggling with he wasn't writing the journal for you uh he was writing them for himself and actually in cidian that's uh what we what survives to us from epic cheetus it it's this idea of at hand it's it's their for you it's almost like a weapon so when you think of journaling don't think of it as putting down your thoughts necessarily for history performing for history although that could be cool depending on what you're experiencing but think about it also as a process

that you are engaging in even though I know about and write about stoicism I also explore it privately in my journal every day because I need reminders of the ideas and spending time with them writing them down reminding myself of them keeping them at hand as epic said says uh is a hugely beneficial exercise for me I'm sure many of you uh read Anne Frank's diary when you were in school or you've heard of it um you think about how insanely stressful and scary that would be it'd be insanely stressful and scary to be a

13-year-old girl let alone locked in an attic with your parents and another family worried about what's happening in the world but she has this great line in her diary that I think about she says paper is more patient than people instead of vomiting your thoughts on your employees on your friends on your co-workers on the driver in front of you who's taking forever um put it on the page the page is forgiving and patient it keeps Secrets it doesn't care doesn't care if you're contradicting yourself it doesn't care if you're being uh a baby it

doesn't care if you're whining just put it down on the page the page will help right and I love the idea of having distance between you and your thoughts part of the reasons we're worked up and anxious and stress is that we're trapped in in our heads with all this stuff right and you get it out and you see it from a distance and you go I don't even agree with my own thoughts here right I don't even like this I'm not going to choose to carry this around so putting it down on the page

is just really important what's really interesting about philosophy is that that's what Marcus aurelius's meditations was it's one of the few philosophical books that we have that wasn't published as a book he wasn't the the most powerful man in the world wasn't writing what he thought he was writing what he felt he needed to know for himself and it's only a complete accident that this work survives to us he'd probably be mortified that we're reading his his diary or Journal but he's dead so it doesn't matter um the the point is it it's philosophy is

not just this thing you read about one time and understand it's an active practice it's something you're doing with yourself it's a dialogue with oneself I talked about the missile crisis a little bit um what I think is so fascinating about the Missile Crisis is that we have Kennedy's Doodles and notes from the missile crisis on legal pads he would write these things to himself sort of reminders he would write missile missile missile he' write consensus consensus consensus he was journaling out working out what he was thinking as he was thinking it journaling is not

the only way to do this I know people that doodle in the morning or sketch that but the point is to have kind of a a a creative practice um where there are very low stakes and it's just sort of a getting the juices flowing uh Julia Cameron calls U morning Pages a sort of a form of spiritual windshield wipers and I really like that analogy Kennedy really liked uh boating and so he drew these pictures of sailboats you can imagine in the entire world is about to blow itself up if and if he's not

careful he's going to contribute to that the the idea of of just getting out of that zooming out think sort of calming his mind you can see what how valuable and important that would be think about the stresses of the Missile Crisis it makes sense why he's riding on he he wants to dump out his anger and his frustration and his fears and the ideas that he's workshopping where there are low stakes so he can perform better where there's really high stick so I think journaling is a really important part of it if you want

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