You Can’t Make Them Appreciate It |The Most Important Thing You Can Do Every Day

You do a lot. You try hard. You hold yourself to high standards—higher anyway, than most people. You’re not exactly a reincarnation of Cato but still, you’re doing great. But do people appreciate this? Not really. Not nearly enough. But as we’ve said before, appreciation and recognition is not a thing we control. It’s not something that’s up to us. The line from that play about Cato, the one the Founders were so fond of, reminds us that we can’t demand a good reputation but we can deserve one. So it goes for appreciation. Besides, Marcus Aurelius would remind us that this appreciation and recognition is “the third thing”—the thanks on top for a person simply doing what needed to be done, as a parent, as a leader, as a human being. We don’t need that. It’s extra.-And in today's Daily Stoic video excerpt, Ryan talks about how Journaling is not just a little thing you do to pass the time, to write down your memories—though it can be—it’s a strategy that has helped brilliant, powerful and wise people become better at what they do. Whether you’re brand new to the concept of journaling or you’ve journaled in the past and fallen out of practice, this ultimate guide to journaling will tell you everything you need to know to help you make journaling one of the best things you do in 2020 and beyond. You’ll learn not only how to journal, but also the about the benefits of journaling, the famous journaling of the past 2,000 years, the best journals to use, and more.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:23Ryan Holiday?

  You can't make them appreciate it. You do a lot. You try hard, you hold yourself to high standards, higher anyway than most people. You're not exactly a reincarnation of Cato, but still, you're doing great. But do people appreciate this? Not really, not nearly enough. But as we've said before, appreciation and recognition is not a thing we control. It's not something that's up to us. That line from that play about Cato, the one the founders were so fond of, it reminds us that we can't demand a good reputation, but we can deserve one. And so it goes for appreciation. Besides, Marcus Aurelius would remind us that this appreciation and recognition is the third thing, the thanks on top for being a person, simply doing what needed to be done, as a parent, as a leader, as a human being. We don't need that. It's extra.

• 1:08Ryan Holiday?

  So let us strive to be worthy of appreciation, but indifferent to whether we get it. Let's keep trying. Let's keep holding ourselves to those standards. Let's make Marcus and Cato and ourselves proud. If anyone notices, great. If not, well, that's not why we did it in the first place.

• 1:40Ryan Holiday?

  The page is forgiving and patient. It keeps secrets. Doesn't care if you're contradicting yourself. It doesn't care if you're whining. Just put it down on the page. The page will help. 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. It doesn't have to be this intense journaling conversation for pages and pages and pages. Start small and then build.

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  So I've been journaling off and on for most of my life. You know, I started when I 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. And I remember I bought this moleskine. This is when journaling really stuck for me. And it's become part of my morning routine. 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. 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.

• 2:55Ryan Holiday?

  So in 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.

• 3:10Ryan Holiday?

  I think the easiest way to start a journaling habit, and I've recommended this a bunch of times. I use a journal called the One Line a Day Journal, but you go through it and you just write one sentence every day. So there's a mothering version, and a father version, and a parenting version, and a college. There's all these different versions. I just have a one, and I write one sentence every day. It is really easy to write one sentence per day. So instead of thinking about this, how do I, how do I start journaling? How do I have a journaling habit? It's more like, what is the least amount of journaling that I can do and start there? It could just be writing down a quote from one of the Stoics each morning and then kicking it around. It could just be, you know, keeping a workout log. Like, start with something really small or easy, and I think that's a way to start, start the journaling. There's some other great journals.

• 3:54Ryan Holiday?

  The Bullet Journal is great. The Five Minute Journal, also really easy. Like, starting a journaling habit is hard. Journaling for five minutes is easy. So when, when you think about these habits that are intimidating or difficult, or that you've tried and failed that before, I think what the Stoics would recommend is start with something really easy and build on it. Epictetus talks about fueling the habit bonfire. Like, how can you just get a spark going and then add? To it from there. So it doesn't have to be this intense journaling conversation with yourself for pages and pages and pages. It takes years to work. It's like if you wanted to start meditating, meditate for 30 seconds. Don't try to meditate on a 30 day silent meditation retreat. That's going to be really intimidating and hard.

• 4:35Ryan Holiday?

  So start small and then build. You know, my journaling habit is probably seven or eight years old now. And as a result, I've worked myself up to a place where it's natural and effortless. And when I don't do it, it's almost painful, but it took me a while to get there. And this one line a day journal was a big breakthrough for me.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  I started a practice that I've been doing now for 35 years, which is every weekend I sit down for, you know, 20 to 30 minutes.

• 5:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  And I write down my key lessons of the week professionally and personally. The things that actually frankly often were painful because our painful life lessons are the raw material for our future wisdom. So I would actually sit down and write down, okay, I put that idea out to my leadership team. But the two critics in the room who are always critics, like, like said all kinds of terrible things about it. My lesson to myself is why don't I go to the critics before I present it to the whole group?

• 5:32Ryan Holiday?

  They don't shit on it.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Exactly. To get their fingerprints on it. And so like, okay, let's try that. And it worked. But anyway, at 28, that sounded, I mean, at 63 now, I get it. But at 28, I didn't know that. And so what I do is I make like bullet points of the key lessons of the week. And then how it will serve me in the future.

• 5:50Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  And.

• 5:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. What journaling does is allow you to see patterns, right?

• 5:55Speaker 01

  Pattern recognition is wisdom.

• 5:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, of course.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  And so the bottom line is this is something I've been doing. And then I brought it to my leadership teams at Joie de Vie, my boutique hotel company at Airbnb and now at MEA, Modern Elder Academy. Where once a quarter, we sit down as a team and we say, what was our, each of our biggest lessons of the quarter?

• 6:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  And how will it serve us moving forward? Number one. Number two is what was our biggest team lesson? And so I'm a, I'm a big believer, you know, Peter Drucker coined the term knowledge worker in 1959, saying that the world will be ruled by knowledge workers with computers. And, and he was right. But the truth is, we sort of moved, I think, to the wisdom economy instead of the knowledge economy. Because in an era of AI, where

• 6:40Ryan Holiday?

  Facts, figures, info.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  It's all commodified. Yeah. So wisdom becomes the scariest resource. So how do we create wisdom workers? How do we create wisdom management and wisdom practices? So what I just described here is the wisdom practice of a leadership team.

• 6:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Sorting through what was learned in the last quarter, sharing it, because it's a vulnerable process. But also, it means that your skin knee means I won't have to skin my knee, because I'm learning from you. Wisdom is not taught, it's shared.

• 7:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  And being able to sort of understand that is so critical in the era we live in.

• 7:16Ryan Holiday?

  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 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 Isaacson was joking about how absurd that was. You know, you couldn't access these files that were just, you know, a decade, a couple decades old at most. And yet, he could spend hours poring 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

• 8:01Ryan Holiday?

  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, six, 700 years later, or whatever, da Vinci's journals are still legible and usable, but things that you did two iPhones ago are lost the whole time.

• 8:23Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius's Meditations is itself, I think, an insight into why he was a great leader. He's not publishing this book the way that people might publish today. Like a CEO is writing memoirs or a how-to book because they want to get some attention. Maybe it's good PR, right? It furnishes their image. Marcus Aurelius wasn't intending anyone to read Meditations. He was writing it to himself, whether he's leading the Roman army, whether he's dealing with business in Rome, whether he's traveling. He's writing these notes to himself about how to be better. Meditations is a book for Marcus to be, as he says in Meditations, he says, "You have to fight to be the person that philosophy tried to make you." Well, that's what he's doing in these pages of his journal,

• 9:05Ryan Holiday?

  talking to himself about where he fell short, talking about where he could do better, right? He's doing a kind of a daily interrogation, also a restatement of values and principles. And I think it's important that he's doing this on the pages of his private journal, not vomiting his stress or his disagreements or his grievances on other people. And I think journaling is a really powerful trait for leaders. I try to do mine in the morning or in the evening before bed. But it's just taking a few minutes. It calms me down. It allows me to get a little distance from myself and my thoughts. And from this clarity, you can then go back to what you have to do and carry that with you.

• 9:49Ryan Holiday?

  This has become a little bit of a ritual for me. It's the sixth time I've done this. I finished my fifth Daily Stoic journal. This is my leather cover for it. So, see, I did it.

• 10:05Ryan Holiday?

  Journal every day. And I have this cool leather cover on it to preserve it because I beat the crap out of it. Started this September 22. And then picked a new one. Slides in. This at first.

• 10:26Ryan Holiday?

  Tonight I'll do Seneca's exercise of the day in review. In the morning, I'll do Marcus's sort of day ahead. And that's the Daily Stoic Journal, which is a daily must have habit for me. On the front of the cover, it says, "Make time," because that's the hardest part about journaling. You've got to make time for it, you've got to do it. And even though I've done now these exact pages a half dozen times, I get something new out of the question each time, because all of the questions are the same. I am different, and that's the process of using the Daily Stoic Journal, which if you don't, you shouldn't.

• 11:02Ryan Holiday?

  I find when I journal, just the distance, getting it from here to here, it's not very far.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  No.

• 11:08Ryan Holiday?

  It's a huge difference. Because now I can be like, "That's insane."

• 11:11Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 11:12Ryan Holiday?

  "Don't tell anyone that."

• 11:13Speaker 02

  "Don't tell anyone, that's stupid."

• 11:14Ryan Holiday?

  "That's not a good way to treat people," or "You're not being nice to yourself here." "That sounds silly when you say it out loud." And then it's not here, it's here, but I think also, more importantly, it's not there. It's not there. It's not on the person in front of you in traffic. This is a safe place.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  That's a safe place, just like a counselor should be a safe place. If they're not working their own agenda, it should be a very safe place.

• 11:37Ryan Holiday?

  I'm sure many of you read Anne Frank's diary when you were in school, or you've heard of it. 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 coworkers, on the driver in front of you who's taking forever, put it on the page. The page is forgiving and patient. It keeps secrets, doesn't care if you're contradicting yourself, it doesn't care if you're being... 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 stressed is that we're trapped in our heads with all this stuff, right?

• 12:20Ryan Holiday?

  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. These are some of Kennedy's doodles during... The Cuban Missile Crisis, he was writing notes to himself, thoughts, but you can see his sort of brainstorming, working out of the stressful situation he's in. And this is what journaling can help us do. I was in Milan a few years ago and I got to see some of Da Vinci's journals, right? And I think it's also important, just as a creativity exercise, right? The journaling, the working, the sketching out, this is what creates the work, right? You can't have The Last Supper without the journals, right? So the idea

• 13:02Ryan Holiday?

  of exploring, keeping a commonplace book, a place you collect ideas, you work out your thoughts, this is a really important exercise.

• 13:15Ryan Holiday?

  Epictetus 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, 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 seven years later. It could have been seven days apart. But this is what he needed. This is what he was struggling with. He wasn't writing the journal for you, he was writing them for himself. And actually, in Coridion, that's what survives to us from Epictetus,

• 13:59Ryan Holiday?

  it's this idea of at hand. It's there 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 Epictetus says, is a hugely beneficial exercise for me.

• 14:39Ryan Holiday?

  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 because 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. 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 10 pages," or "I want to spend 30 minutes journaling." Just like with meditation, don't start with an hour-long solo meditation. Start with one minute or five minutes, right? Start really small.

• 15:23Ryan Holiday?

  So the idea is to build the habit, build the momentum, get into it, make it a habit, and then you can build. So I started with something like the one-line-a-day journal, or the Daily Stoic journal is an easy one too, because 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, and then it's building the skill, the willpower for you to do it on an ongoing basis.

• 16:00Ryan Holiday?

  When I wrote The Daily Stoic eight years ago, I had this crazy idea that I would just keep it going. The book was 366 meditations, but I'd write one more every single day, and I'd give it away for free as an email. I thought maybe a few people would sign up. Couldn't have even comprehended a future in which three-quarters of a million people would get this email every single day, and would for almost a decade. If you want to get the email, if you want to be part of a community that is the largest group of Stoics ever assembled in human history, I'd love for you to join us. You can sign up and get the email totally for free. No spam. You can unsubscribe whenever you want at dailystoic.com/email.