Do This Every Day | Clarify Your Intentions

The pages were a safe space. A place away from the intrigues of court. A place away from war and death and pestilence. A place to process his stress, his anxieties, his fears. We can see in Meditations what these meditations were doing for Marcus Aurelius—they were doing what journaling can do for all of us. Give us space to think, space to calm down, space to get perspective, space to be grateful, space to remind ourselves of what’s important.-And in today's Daily Stoic journal reading, Ryan reminds us to clarify our intentions, that all of our efforts must be directed towards something which makes us less distracted along the way. When we clarify who we want to be and where we want to be we define our own success.✉️ 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.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

• 0:39Ryan Holiday?

  "The pages were a safe space, a place away from the intrigues of court, a place away from war and death and pestilence, a place to process his stress, his anxieties, and his fears. We can see in meditations what meditations was doing for Marcus Aurelius. It was doing what journaling can do for all of us, give us space to think, space to calm down, space to get perspective, space to be grateful, space to remind ourselves of what's important." It's also interesting, though, to see that Marcus Aurelius was tough on himself in his journal, too. That he didn't just use the space to snipe at others or judge them, he was also asking himself some hard probing questions. "What am I doing

• 1:20Ryan Holiday?

  with my soul?" he asks in Book V. And then he says that he, that you, need to interrogate yourself to find out what inhabits your so-called mind and kind of soul you have now, a child's soul, he says, an adolescent's, a woman's, a tyrant's soul, the soul of a predator or its prey. Marcus Aurelius was an all-powerful emperor. No one was interrogating him, no one else was subjecting him to these tough questions. So he knew that if he didn't do it, no one would. Well, today, few are concerned with your soul because it's nobody else's business. So if you don't interrogate yourself about it, if you're not examining your own mind, who will? If you're not using the pages of your journal to get to self-awareness, to get to clarity, how? Will you ever get there?

• 2:05Ryan Holiday?

  That's what I do in my Daily Stoic Journal. I bust it open every day. I brought it with me. I'm recording this on vacation with the family. Brought it with me as I always do. And after I wrap this up, I'm gonna go sit in the other room and do my nightly journaling. I keep my Daily Stoic Journal in this little cool leather case. It holds some note cards and a pen. Also protects it when I throw it in my bag or my kids knock it off the nightstand. So you can check all that out at stewart.dailystoic.com. You can get the Daily Stoic Journal anywhere books are sold. I also just started now for the eighth year, my one line a day journal, which I love. I grabbed that on Amazon, but we sell them at the Painted Porch also. I also just write in a blank journal. The point is find something that works for you, whether it's the Daily Stoic Journal or anything, five minute journal.

• 2:50Ryan Holiday?

  My sister just sent me a picture of her using the five minute journal this morning. So the point is find a journal that works for you. Start a journaling habit. This is the great time of year to do it. And I hope to hear from you, not soon, but in a long time. You tell me, I heard you on this podcast. And now for the last several years, I've been doing a journaling habit and it's made a huge difference for me. I've gotten to know myself better and all that. That's what today's message is about. Get after it.

• 3:30Ryan Holiday?

  Clarify your intentions. This is the January 5th entry from the Daily Stoic. I am holding the cloth bound edition. We have a leather bound edition, but today's entry starts with a quote from Seneca. He says in On Tranquility of the Mind, "Let all your efforts be directed to something. Let it keep that end in view. It's not activity that disturbs people, but false conceptions of things that drive them mad."

• 3:58Speaker 01

  And then I write, "Law 29 of the 48 laws of power is plan all the way to the end." Robert Greene writes, "By planning to the end, you will not be overwhelmed by circumstances and you will know when to stop. Gently guide fortune and help determine the future by thinking far ahead." And as it happens, the second habit in the seven habits of highly effective people is, "Begin with an end in mind." Having an end in mind is no guarantee that you'll reach it. No Stoic would tolerate that assumption, but not having an end in mind is a guarantee that you won't. To the Stoics, false conceptions are responsible not just for disturbances in the soul, but for chaotic and dysfunctional lives and operations.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  When your efforts are not directed at a cause or a purpose, how will you know what to do day in and day out? How will you know what to say no to and what to say yes to? How will you know when you've had enough, when you've reached your goal, when you have gotten off track, if you have never defined what those things are? The answer is that you cannot, and so you are driven into failure, or worse, into madness by the oblivion of directionlessness. One of my favorite quotes from Seneca, and actually Montaigne quotes it as well, he says, "If you know not what port you are sailing to, no wind is favorable." If you don't know where you're trying to go, if you don't know what the end is, if you don't know what you want your life to look like, what you want this project to look like,

• 5:24Speaker 01

  if you haven't defined what success is to you, you're gonna have a real hard time, not just getting there, but making every individual decision in the course of your life. When I consult with people, that's one of the things I ask them almost always, especially authors, I go, "What does success look like to you?" Because so often, we just go, "I want what that person has, and that person has, and that person has, and that person has," right? This is what Rene Girard says, "We don't know what we want, so we want what other people want." We just sort of default to the defaults, and we haven't actually thought about how that fits for us, what that means to us, what that actually looks like, if we'll actually be happy with that thing that we're sacrificing and working so hard for.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  So when you clarify your intentions, when you get clear about what you're trying to do, who you're trying to be, who you want to be when you get there, you're going to be in a tough spot. And so at the beginning of a year, it's a great time to think about that, to think about who you want to be, to think about what you want to do, to think about what success looks like, and define it concretely, not abstractly, but concretely. You know, the reason Robert talks about planning all the way to the end is he talks about, like, this isn't just a problem of somebody at, you know, step zero, not knowing where to go, but this is the person who on step 99 doesn't stop after one more step. They go through that, they keep going, and they turn, they snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  They go too far, they go past the mark they aimed for. So you plan all the way to the end so you're not taken to excess, so you're not distracted, and so you know how to plan, what to do, you know what's important. If you don't know where you're sailing, no wind is favorable, right? You can't ask for directions to a destination you haven't defined. So today, here at the beginning of the year, let's spend some time defining precisely that, our intentions, our goals, what success looks like to us.

• 7:30Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us, and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode.