7 Ways Marcus Aurelius Will Help You Journal Like A Pro

Almost 2000 years ago, Marcus Aurelius stole time away from his incredibly busy life full of obligations to write in his journal. By some incredible stroke of luck, that journal survives to us today. And though it is full of countless pieces of wisdom and important lessons to us, perhaps its greatest teaching is held in its very existence. The fact that this person who thought so deeply and was so highly effective took the time to regularly write out his thoughts is one of the most important things we can take away from "Meditations." In this episode, Ryan Holiday discusses 7 strategies that can help you develop a highly effective journaling habit. To learn more about journaling, check out our article "How To Start Journaling, Benefits of Journaling, and More": https://dailystoic.com/journaling/Watch this video: https://youtu.be/ZVeUIclaMTETalkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Visit talkspace.com and get $100 off your first month when you use promo code STOIC at sign-up. That’s $100 off at talkspace.com, promo code STOIC. As a member of Daily Stoic Life, you get all our current and future courses, 100+ additional Daily Stoic email meditations, 4 live Q&As with bestselling author Ryan Holiday (and guests), and 10% off your next purchase from the Daily Stoic Store. Sign up at https://dailystoic.com/life/ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck 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.

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:49Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

• 0:55Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another Weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. We've obviously talked a lot about journaling here on the podcast. On our Monday episode, we take an excerpt from the Daily Stoic Journal. We've talked about journaling before, but what I wanted to give you guys today was some real journaling tips and practices, lessons I've taken from Marcus Aurelius, from the Meditations, and from the Stoics in general that have sort of helped me design my journaling process. As I talked about in Stillness is the Key, the list of people who regularly journaled or have journaled in their lives is like conically long and preposterously diverse. There's a reason this habit is so prevalent

• 1:38Ryan Holiday?

  in successful, talented, wise, accomplished people. It's because it calms the monkey mind, to use Tim Ferriss's phrase. It's spiritual windshield wipers, to use Julia Cameron's phrase. And it fits Epictetus's dictum, which is, "Every day and night, keep thoughts like these at hand. Write them, read them aloud, talk to yourself and others about them." That's really what the Stoics were doing with their journaling, sort of the interplay, the dialogue with the philosophy. That's what this is about. And so today, I give you seven strategies from the great Marcus Aurelius that will help you journal like a pro.

• 2:21Ryan Holiday?

  In the year 170 at night in his tent on the front lines of the war in Germania, Marcus Aurelius, the Emperor of Rome, sat down to write. Perhaps it was before dawn at his palace in the city, or perhaps he stole a few seconds to himself during the games, ignoring the carnage on the floor of the Colosseum below. The exact location is not important, what matters is that this man, known today as the last of the five good emperors, sat down with a journal to write, not to an audience or for publication, but to himself, for himself. Then, as in now, people wondered, how did Marcus Aurelius become Marcus Aurelius?

• 3:05Ryan Holiday?

  How did he avoid being corrupted by power and broken by stress? Well, he would have pointed to a single thing, to this activity, his most important daily practice, journaling. His favorite philosopher Epictetus observed that people work on their bodies but not on their soul, and that is why Epictetus recommended that every day we should keep our philosophical aphorisms and exercises at hand, that we should write them, read them aloud, talk to ourselves and to others about them. And that is why Marcus Aurelius journaled as well. It was for him what scholars have come to call spiritual combat. He was writing as a way to build his soul, a core, an inner fortress, something that

• 3:49Ryan Holiday?

  fate and chaos and hysterics and vice and outside influences and external forces could never penetrate and break down. So if you want to live a good life, you have to build your spirit, you have to build that inner fortress, and journaling is one of the most time-tested and research-backed ways to do it. And here are seven strategies from the Stoics to journal like a pro. Prepare in the morning. Despite his admitted struggles to get out of his warm, comfortable bed in the morning, Marcus Aurelius seems to have done most of his journaling first thing in the morning. When you wake up, he wrote, "Tell yourself that the people I will deal with today..."

• 4:29Ryan Holiday?

  will be meddling ungrateful arrogant dishonest jealous and surly they are like this he said because they can't tell good from evil we can imagine Marcus taking his journal and in it thinking about all the things he was likely to face in the day and how he wanted to be ready for them and how he wanted to respond to them a healthy mind should be prepared for anything he said we should be like a wrestler waiting poised and dug in for sudden attacks like Marcus you should prepare plan and meditate on how you aim to act each day you should do this in your journal envisioning everything that may come and preparing your best response to them keep it to yourself why did Marcus Aurelius spend those precious hours in his tent writing by the lamplight

• 5:15Ryan Holiday?

  even on the days he strained under the burdens of his wartime duties it wasn't for our benefit no he wasn't writing for an audience he was writing for himself and in fact what is now published as meditations was originally titled to himself as Tim Ferriss has said of his own journaling habit I don't journal to be productive I don't do it to find great ideas to put down prose I can later publish these pages aren't intended for anyone but me most people drop the journaling habit or never begin out of fear or intimidation they think they're a terrible writer that they don't have good ideas or thoughts to write about that no one will want to read anything they write

• 5:56Ryan Holiday?

  well that's the great thing about journaling no one has to read it not even you one translator calls meditations a self-help book in the most literal sense and that's what journaling is it's self-help help for you for yourself repeat the most important things it's hard to miss the repetitions in Marcus Aurelius's writing in fact it's a common criticism that meditations is too repetitive but this misses the point it's supposed to be repetitive he was reminding himself of the most important things stuff like remember your mortality not to live as if you had endless years ahead of you he writes death overshadows you

• 6:39Ryan Holiday?

  While you're alive and able to be good, you could leave life right now, he says. Let that determine what you do and say and think. He talks about remembering our duty to the common good. Undertake nothing for any reason but the common good, he says. Thought and action resulting in the common good, what you were born to do, he says. Have I done something for the common good? Then I share in the benefits. Remember to keep returning to philosophy, he says. Not to think of philosophy as your instructor, but as a soothing ointment. Philosophy, he says, rests in its embrace. No role is so well suited to philosophy, he says, as the one you happen to be in right now. Remember you can get through this, that's what he's reminding himself.

• 7:22Ryan Holiday?

  If it's humanly possible, he says, you can do it too. Ask, why can't I endure this? You'll be embarrassed by the answer, he says. The impediment to action advances action, what stands in the way, becomes the way. The act of sitting down and journaling, writing and rewriting about ideas from the earlier Stoics. This was a meditative experience for Marcus. It was almost like prayer, reframing the wisdom over and over and over again, until it became muscle memory, and then that muscle memory could be translated into works. Marcus would have agreed with Aristotle that we are what we repeatedly do. He said, the things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.

• 8:06Ryan Holiday?

  And so too, your life takes on the color of what you write about in your journal. Take it out on the page. Like us, Marcus would have had plenty of things to be stressed and angry about. Things didn't go the way he hoped, he made mistakes, people failed him. There were plagues and wars, natural catastrophes, financial crises, family difficulties. It would have been almost daily that Marcus dealt with one problem or another. And yet, it's nearly impossible to find an account of him losing his temper, let alone letting stress overwhelm him. This makes sense, a study by Cambridge University found that journaling, when stressed, results in improvements in both physical and psychological health. And why should we feel angry?

• 8:49Ryan Holiday?

  Angry at the world, Marcus wrote in his journal, as if the world would notice. And he said, when frustrated with someone's behavior, we should turn around and ask, when you have acted like that? We all carry destructive thoughts, but we should remember, as Anne Frank said, that paper is more patient than people. We should put our angry thoughts down on the page, leave them there, rather than projecting them or hurting others with them. Copy down your favorite quotes. The Roman writer and philosopher Seneca said it brilliantly. We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teachings and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application,

• 9:30Ryan Holiday?

  not far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors in figures of speech. We should learn them so that words become works. Page after page, we see quotes from interesting things Marcus Aurelius read or overheard or observed. That quote about feeling angry at the world? That came from the 5th century playwright Euripides, who he quotes another half dozen times in Meditations. He quotes comedies and tragedies. He quotes the teachings of Epictetus. He quotes Sophocles. He quotes philosophers like Herakles, Socrates, Democritus, Epicurus, and Plato. He quotes the poets Empedocles, Pindar, and Menander. Marcus talked about going straight to the seat of intelligence. He said that's where he liked to go when he needed encouragement,

• 10:14Ryan Holiday?

  and that was what his journal was made to record and remember. Ask yourself tough questions. On nearly every page, we see Marcus questioning himself, the actions he takes, the choices he makes, the path he is on. Why am I here? How should I live my life? How do I ensure that what I do is right? How can I prepare and protect myself against the stresses and pressures of daily life? How should I deal with pain and misfortune? How can I live with the knowledge that someday I will die? Am I afraid of death because I won't be able to do whatever I'm doing right now anymore? What good is it to be remembered after you're dead? If it doesn't harm my character, how can it harm me? When have I messed up like this person? Why can't I endure this or that?

• 10:59Ryan Holiday?

  Why did I say or do this or that? Most of what we say and do is not essential, Marcus writes. If you can eliminate this, you'll have more time and more tranquility. Ask yourself at every moment, is this necessary? Most of what we do is not essential. Most of it is instinctual, or it was foisted on us by someone else. Most of it actually isn't working for us. We might be better and happier if we changed. And that starts by asking ourselves the tough questions in our journal every single day. Review the evening. The best way to improve is to review. Each evening, the Stoics believed, you should examine your day and your actions.

• 11:41Ryan Holiday?

  As Seneca put it, "When the light has been removed and my wife has fallen silent, aware of this habit that's now mine, I examine my entire day and go back over what I've done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by." Ask yourself, did I follow my plans for the day? Was I prepared enough? What could I have done better? What did I learn today that will help me tomorrow? Some 2,000 years after Marcus made it a practice, a study conducted by the Harvard Business Review found that participants who journaled at the end of each day had a 25% increase in performance when compared with the control group who did not journal. As the researchers conclude, "Our results reveal reflection to be a powerful mechanism

• 12:23Ryan Holiday?

  behind learning," confirming the words of the American philosopher John Dewey. "We do not learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience." This is the path that greatness requires: self-awareness, self-reflection. Journaling is uniquely suited to do that. Marcus knew this, and he proved it. So what are you waiting for? Start journaling. And who knows, maybe in writing exclusively to and for yourself, you'll accidentally produce something that survives and teaches and helps people for centuries to come. As Bran Blanchard writes of Marcus Aurelius, "Few now care about the marches and counter-marches of the Roman commanders. What the centuries have clung to is a notebook of the thoughts of a man whose real life

• 13:09Ryan Holiday?

  ...was largely unknown, who put down in the midnight dimness not the events of the day or the plans of the morrow, but something of far more permanent interests, the ideals and aspirations that a rare spirit lived by. And so it will be for you. So start now, today. And if you are looking for a journal, and obviously here we recommend the Daily Stoic Journal, which is a journal we designed based on the Stoic practice of journaling. It helps you prepare for the day ahead, sets your intention for the day, and then at the end, it helps you review that day to make sure that you're tackling your philosophical journey as Marcus Aurelius, as Seneca did, as Epictetus did. It's got

• 13:51Ryan Holiday?

  close to 20,000 words of Stoic meditations and wisdom inside it. Hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world have benefited from this journal. You can check that out at dailystoic.com/journal.

• 14:08Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at dailystoic.com/email.