Pod Insights The Daily Stoic Premium (🔓) Get Over This Bogus Notion | How To Journal Like A Stoic Philosopher About this episode No matter how much philosophy you’ve read. No matter how much older you’ve gotten or how important your position or how many eyes are on you…it doesn’t take away natural feeling.🎥 Watch Scott Galloway's full interview here: https://youtu.be/678OhMsbMsU📓 Pick up a signed edition of The Daily Stoic Journal: 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on The Art of Living: https://store.dailystoic.com/Protect your journal from the wear and tear of everyday use with the Leather Cover: https://store.dailystoic.com/🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and 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
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:05 Ryan Holiday? Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.
0:56 Ryan Holiday? Get over this bogus notion. From the ages of 29 to 44, he didn't cry, not when he got divorced, not when his mother passed away. Like so many men, he had internalized that crying was a failure of masculinity, a sign of weakness. He was acting like a lowercase stoic. But then, as Scott Galloway told us on one of our most popular episodes of the Daily Stoic Podcast, something changed. At some point, he realized that tears aren't a sign of weakness. In fact, it's striking that of the few surviving stories about Marcus Aurelius that we have, almost all of them involve him crying. When his favorite tutor passed away, to give one example, Marcus sobbed uncontrollably. As people tried to calm him down, to remind him
1:39 Ryan Holiday? of the need for a prince to maintain his composure, Antoninus, Marcus's stepfather, told him to let the boy cry. Neither philosophy nor empire, Antoninus said, takes away natural feeling. On the podcast, which again is a much-listened, Galloway told a beautiful story of helping his son pack for boarding school and how he was hit with a sense of loss that parents feel as children grow older and begin to leave the nest. Overwhelmed by emotion, he left the room for a moment. But then, he said,
2:08 Speaker 01 And I think, well, I need to go back into the room to show him that it's okay to cry. But what I tell men, or young men, is if something moves you, try and lean into it and learn how to cry, because it's not like cathartic, but it informs what's important to you.
2:22 Ryan Holiday? Tears are not a sign that you are weak, but that you care. And if there's nothing that can make you cry, it doesn't mean you're a stoic. It means, as Galloway said,
2:31 Speaker 01 Otherwise, you're just sort of, as I was through 29 through 44, I was just kind of sleepwalking through life. I didn't really feel anything. So, men really need to get over this bullshit notion of masculinity is not showing your emotions. It is so important and all that. It's just so rewarding.
2:45 Ryan Holiday? No matter how much philosophy you read, no matter how much older you've gotten, or how important your position is, or how many eyes are on you, it doesn't take away natural feeling.
3:03 Ryan Holiday? In the year 170 at night on the front lines of the war in Germania, Marcus Aurelius, the Emperor of Rome, entered his tent. Perhaps it was before dawn at his palace, or perhaps he stole a few seconds to himself at the games, ignoring the carnage of the Colosseum. So, what was he doing? What was the most important person in the world, the last of the five good emperors? What was he doing? He was engaging in what you would call spiritual combat. What he was doing is journaling. And this is not just an ancient practice I'm going to talk to you about. It's something that I do. Every day, I journal in one to three of these different journals. It's a practice that's sustained me in having kids, in writing books, in running my own
3:46 Ryan Holiday? company, in dealing with adversity and difficulty. It's a habit that, as much as I have kept, it has kept me. And that's why in today's video, I'm going to show you not just the stoic practices of journaling, but some tried and tested and research-backed ideas about how to journal. And because, look, the best time to have started journaling was a long time ago, but the second best time is right now. And that's what I'm going to equip you with in today's video.
4:16 Ryan Holiday? I was visiting my friend Casey Neistat once in his studio and he had all these amazing journals, years and years, and they were, he wrote in on the spine, like the date or the year, and I could just see years and ultimately decades of this journaling practice. It was just a really impressive thing. I was like, this is the culmination of hundreds of thousands of hours of creative thinking and working and experiencing. Honestly, I was jealous and I said, oh, man, I wish I'd done that. And he said, well, why don't you just start now? And I did, and I haven't stopped since. And I think that's one of the first lessons you need to hear about journaling. Don't think about what type of journal you need. Don't think about how much time you should spend. Sometimes people are like, what's the best pen? What's it? Just start, right? You've got notebooks.
5:01 Ryan Holiday? You went to a conference and they gave you one. You've got this old half written one you used to keep notes at the office in. It doesn't matter. Just start, just start the practice. This is something that all fools have in common. Seneca said, they're always getting ready to start instead of just starting. One of my favorite journals is this one. I've kept this journal for nine years. This is my first one, which is five years. And I have a second one, which I am four years into. It's called the one line a day journal. And you just write one. I don't want to show you what I wrote, but you can see, you just write one line a day, every day for five years. You can see I've put some miles on it. It's falling apart. It's definitely seen better days. What I love about this journal is that I always have
5:45 Ryan Holiday? the time to put one sentence down. Sometimes when we think of habits or practices or people we want to become, we get overwhelmed at getting from here to there. And one of the best things we can do is start ridiculously small, one sentence. What did I think about today? What did I do today? What's going on today? Start there and then you build the practice. By I make time for this and then, oh, I'll pick up this other journal. Start something small. And Seneca, whose work survives to us largely in a series of letters, he writes to his friend Lucilius. He says, each day, just acquire one thing that will fortify you against poverty, against death, against misfortune. Pick one thought to digest each day. That's another easy place to start with a journal. Hey, I'm just going to think about one thing today. I'm just going to journal about one little thing. And you build from there. Journaling doesn't have to be this big.
6:29 Ryan Holiday? Romantic, efficient, practical. It doesn't have to be a big thing. Just one thing. James Clear told me he writes his pushups and how much he read each day in his journal. My friend, Austin Kleon, who I've interviewed a bunch, he says he keeps a logbook and he just writes down a simple list of things that happened each day, just some bullet points. Who did he meet? What did he do? And again, this is kind of priming the pump. So I said I use the one line a day. That's easy. I also just use like a random Moskine or random notebook that usually I got this at some conference or something. And so sometimes what I'll do is like, again, I don't want to show you my journaling, but I usually write on this page. This is where I do some free form journaling. But here, this is where I write how much I ran, other workouts I did, how far I walked. It's just something that lets me get started, right?
7:13 Ryan Holiday? So don't overthink it. Just do it. So when did Marcus Aurelius find the time to journal? He had books to read, he had laws to pass. He was pretty busy. We don't know exactly. He doesn't record timestamps in meditations, or at least the version that survives to us. But I get the sense that he did his journaling in the morning because he talks a lot about waking up in the morning. One of the most famous passages is, he's writing, he's like, "Look, when you wake up in the morning, tell yourself, people I meet are going to be obnoxious and meddling and ungrateful and dishonest and jealous." There's another famous passage where he's riffing on not wanting to get out of bed in the morning.
7:57 Ryan Holiday? I don't know, there's a freshness to that writing that makes me think he just struggled to get out of bed and now he was doing his morning journaling. Now Seneca is much more specific. Seneca tells us precisely when he did his daily reflection. He didn't do it in the morning, he did it at night. And he would say that when darkness has fallen and my wife has gone to sleep, "I examine my entire day. I go back over what I've done and I hide nothing from myself. I pass nothing by." And I like this idea that in the morning and at night, or in the morning or at night, we take a little time to think, we're either preparing for the day ahead or reflecting on the day just passed and also by definition, preparing for the next day.
8:39 Ryan Holiday? So taking a little time in the morning or at night, to me, this is the best time to do our journaling. Maybe you can effectively journal at 2:30 PM. That strikes me as odd. But again, I'm not going to judge you. I'm just encouraging you to do it. But to me, the morning or at night, the morning preparation, the evening review, this is the best time to do our journaling. And you know, Seneca would say that after he did his evening reflection, that the sleep which followed this self-examination was particularly sweet. I like to do my journaling in the evening for that reason. Helps me wind down from the day. Helps me process what's happened in the course of the day. And then I go, okay, tomorrow you're flying. Here's maybe how that
9:22 Ryan Holiday? could go sideways and how you could be prepared for it. Or, hey, you're doing this thing with your kids and it's going to be stressful and overwhelming. And here's how I want to show up as a parent. Or, hey, you know, it didn't go that well with my wife today. How can I do better tomorrow? I just use that time to kind of review what's happened and prepare for what is going to happen. Seneca says, you know, we reflect on that which we are about to do, and yet our plans for the future descend on the past. So that, to me, the evening is the perfect time. But the morning, if that's what worked for Marcus Aurelius, perhaps that's what's going to work for you. So when you journal at night, just think about some questions you can ask for yourself. How did I follow through on what I was supposed to do today? How could I have done better?
10:06 Ryan Holiday? Where could I have been more prepared? What did I learn today that will help me for tomorrow?
10:16 Ryan Holiday? Life is stressful. People are obnoxious and taxing. To me, Stoicism is not letting that get to you. I sometimes say that my journaling practice is about vomiting my feelings out on the page instead of on my colleagues and coworkers and family. It's actually a line from Anne Frank, whose famous diary survives to us, where she said that paper is more patient than people. I think about Marcus Aurelius, right? This is a guy who had plenty of things to be stressed and angry about. Things wouldn't have gone the way that he hoped. He would have made mistakes. People would- Have failed him, people would have betrayed him. Look, there's a guy who saw wars and plagues and natural catastrophes and financial crises. He had difficult family members.
10:58 Ryan Holiday? Almost every day would have brought not just one or two problems to deal with, but an unending parade of them. And when you read meditations, you can see what he's doing is processing that on the page instead of on other people. "Why should we feel anger at the world?" He writes in one passage of meditations. He's actually riffing on a famous play by Euripides. He says, "As if the world would notice." There's another passage. He talks about like when we're frustrated with people's behavior, we should turn around and ask when we were like that. We all have these impulses, these urges. We all have a temper. We all get frustrated. We all have resentments. Instead of dumping those on other people, dump them on the page. Work them out on the page.
11:41 Ryan Holiday? A journal is a place for us to process our emotions, dissipate our frustrations, get perspective about what we're feeling. I've never regretted anything I've written in my journal because the journal's just there for me. That's the purpose that it serves. I'm dumping it there instead of on other people.
12:05 Ryan Holiday? Why am I here? What am I feeling? What could I do better? On nearly every page of Marcus Aurelius's meditations, we see him questioning himself, the actions that he's taken, the choices that he's making, the path that he's on. He's asking questions of profound meaning like, why am I here? How should I live my life? How do I know what's right? And then he's asking questions about his impending mortality. He's living in a time of plague. He's getting older. How do I live in light of my own mortality? One of my favorite questions, he says, "Ask yourself, am I afraid of death because I won't be able to do what I'm doing right now anymore? What good is it to be remembered after you're dead?" He asks. He's asking questions about how to endure hardship.
12:48 Ryan Holiday? How do I make sure this doesn't harm my character? Why am I struggling to endure this? Why did I say this or do that or think this? He's asking questions about practical efficiencies like.
13:00 Ryan Holiday? Is what I am doing essential? Do I really need to be doing this? And his point is that I think a lot of the way our lives are set up is just kind of instinctual. It's habitual. We're just doing what we've always done. We're just thinking what we've always thought. Our assumptions remain unexamined. And what he's doing in the pages of meditations is asking questions. And this isn't just an exercise conducive to getting the mind going. It unlocks insights, understanding, self-awareness. I think one of the ways we built the Daily Stoic Journal, this is the Daily Stoic Journal. It goes along with the Daily Stoic. I have this leather cover that we make for it, too. There's a bunch of questions. Every day, it's a question that's built around the meditation in the Daily Stoic.
13:42 Ryan Holiday? So June 2nd, where have I lost the forest for the trees? Here's me April 8th riffing on what bad assumptions or habits or advice have I accepted? Here's one for January 21st. What am I getting out of my journaling practice? What's jerking me around? Do I really need to argue and quarrel so much? I remember I was in this kind of dispute. This journalist had sort of treated me very unfairly. It screwed me over. It sort of scooped something from one of my books and not credited me. And I do the Daily Stoic Journal myself. Maybe that seems weird, but I benefit from having these questions that I return to every year. And like three days in a row, the Daily Stoic Journal questions were about like, is this actually such a big deal? Have you actually been harmed by it? Is getting angry about it making things any better?
14:27 Ryan Holiday? And I realized in three consecutive days of working through this thing, that what I was getting so upset by didn't really matter, that that person acted the way they did because of who they were and they'd get their just desserts in the end. I was going to respond by not letting it get to me and not letting it change me as a person. And that's what really powerful questions do. We have a whole Daily Stoic video on 12 questions that are, that will change your life. If you want some questions to journal about, or of course, you can just do the Daily Stoic Journal. But the idea is, you know, what are some prompts? Like, I love journaling prompts. There's a great journal called The Five Minute Journal. It's just like one prompt, a series of things you fill in. There's amazing prompt-based, question-based journals out there. But the point is, find some questions.
15:12 Ryan Holiday? If you're not examining your life, as Socrates said, what kind of life are you living? And questions help us examine who we are, what we're doing, and why we're doing.
15:26 Ryan Holiday? Some people journal or keep a diary because they think they're really important and they're preserving a record of this for posterity. And definitely, society has benefited from some of these journals. There's a few that were publishable and certainly historians benefit from them. But most of us are not that important and most of what we journal about is of no value to anyone but ourselves. And that's perfectly fine. Why did Marcus Aurelius spend precious hours in his tent writing by lamplight? Or in the mornings as he's strained under all these wartime duties? It wasn't for us. This is not a book for the reader. This book is an accidental byproduct of something Marcus Aurelius was doing for himself. He was writing to himself. That's what Meditations translates to in Greek, was practicing the philosophy for himself.
16:10 Ryan Holiday? He was journaling as a means of self-improvement, not as a means of self-expression. Tim Ferriss has talked about his journaling habit and he says, you know, he's not journaling to be productive. He's not trying to find great ideas. He's not trying to workshop writing ideas. The pages, he says, are for him. He's trying to figure stuff out, trying to cage his monkey mind, which I think is an awesome way to think about it. Don't worry about publishing your journals. Don't worry about anyone else reading them. You don't even need to reread them yourself, right? You don't need to be a good writer to have a good journaling practice. This is for you, right? This is a practice for you. Doing it is what's getting you the rewards, not having done it. Doing it is the point.
16:54 Ryan Holiday? And so in that sense, Marcus Aurelius's Meditations is a true self-help book. It helped himself, not us. It helped him. And my journaling practice, my journals would stack up to here at this point. The benefit of that is not for you. I'm not going to publish any of that stuff. If they get burned up in a fire, I'd be sad just because they'd be gone. But I wouldn't lose anything because I gained it, the thing, by doing the thing.
17:23 Ryan Holiday? You know, it's funny, some academics and everyday readers have criticized meditations as being repetitive. Marcus Aurelius repeats himself a lot. And it's true, he does. But again, that's the whole point. We have the same issues over and over again in our lives. I know I do. I struggle with the same things over and over again. So Marcus Aurelius is writing about what he needed to hear. Stoicism is this process of repetition. The ideas are obvious and clear, but it's the repetition that allows them to become muscle memory, to let them seep in. You know, he's talking about memento mori. He says, "Don't live as if you have endless years ahead of you." He says, "Death overshadows you while you're alive and able to be good." He says, "You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think." If this was a book he was publishing, he would have just
18:08 Ryan Holiday? said that once in its best form. He needed the reminder multiple times over the course of however long he worked on meditations. If always acting with justice in mind, if always serving the common good instead of our selfish interests was easy and natural, he'd have just done it. But no, he needed a reminder of it. If our temper was easily tamed, he wouldn't have returned to the theme of anger over and over again. He clearly struggled with it. And he's getting this practice from Epictetus. Epictetus, this is actually on the back of the Daily Stoic Journal. It's one of my favorite quotes from Epictetus. Epictetus says, "Every day and night, keep thoughts like this at hand. Write
18:50 Ryan Holiday? them, read them aloud, talk to yourself and others about them." That's what Marcus Aurelius is doing in meditations. You know, Marcus Aurelius talks about how you have to return to philosophy, to not see it as an instructor, but as a soothing ointment, and that whoever we are, whatever we're doing, we can be practicing this philosophy. And so, my journals involve me talking about the same things over and over again, because I'm struggling with the same things over and over again. I'm working on the same things I've always been working on. I'm getting better. I haven't solved for them. And so, think about your journal as a place, a safe place, to return to the same core set of ideas and thoughts and struggles that you've always had. That's what journaling is to me. And it's the writing and the rewriting
19:34 Ryan Holiday? that allows us to have the insights to understand. The new things in a new way. And so when you read the repetition in meditations, you can almost start to understand it kind of as a prayer, as a process. He's reframing the wisdom, letting it seep into him, seeing it from slightly different angles each time, so that it could be translated into work and into actions. He says this in meditations, that the things that we think about determine the quality of our mind, that our soul takes on the color of our thoughts. And so what you write about, what you return to in your journal, what the thoughts that every day and night you keep at hand, the things that you write, that you read, that
20:16 Ryan Holiday? you talk aloud to yourself and others about, this is, in a way, what you will become.
20:27 Ryan Holiday? So one of the forms of journaling that I do doesn't come in a book, comes in note cards. Do you know what a commonplace book is? A commonplace book is an ancient practice. People have been doing them for hundreds of years. There's a great book called The Notebook that I read recently, that I interviewed him on the podcast, I'll link to that. A commonplace book is a place that you collect observations and quotes and ideas and diary entries and anecdotes. And as far back as the Greeks and Romans, the art of excerpting was this skill that people thought. Pliny the Elder, in the first century AD, so roughly the time of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, he says, "Never read without taking extracts." And so I keep a commonplace on note cards.
21:09 Ryan Holiday? When I read books, my copy of meditations is filled with an enormous amount of folded pages and notes, and I transfer those onto note cards. And I have tens of thousands of note cards that I have accumulated over the years. And this has become the building blocks for my books, for daily Stoic videos, for daily Stoic emails, for changes and practices I've done in my life. I want you to keep not just a journal or a notebook, but a commonplace book. If you've ever read any of Montaigne's essays, Montaigne's essays are the result of his commonplace booking habit, and a lot of it is influenced by quotes he clearly wrote down from having read the Stoics. Emerson was probably one of the most... Accomplished commonplace bookers in history.
21:50 Ryan Holiday? He kept so many notebooks filled with commonplace style writings and excerpting that he had to have notebooks like this that served as the index to tell him where all the stuff is. I have a video you should watch of specifically how I do my commonplace book that I think is really, really important and you can check that out too. But, but not just notebooking, like working through your thoughts, but also recording stuff that you like and that you want to use.
22:16 Ryan Holiday? Joan Didion, and this was actually her table. She would have sat here with a notebook at this very table, which is kind of incredible for me to think. She started journaling and a notebook habit when she was five or so years old. Her mother gave her a notebook to keep her busy and it did. She used a notebook as an author, she used a notebook as a reporter. But she would say that, you know, notebooks were not just a way to record quotes that she overheard on her travels or to write down things people said in interviews. It was more than just a professional bank account, as she said. It was a way, she said, of keeping in touch with herself. In a famous essay she wrote on notebooks, she says, "Some morning when the world is drained of wonder, when I am only going through the motions of what I'm doing",
23:01 Ryan Holiday? which is for her professionally writing. She says, "I will open my notebook and it will all be there, a forgotten account with accumulated interest paid passage back to the world out there." So she would find in her notebooks, things that she'd written down years previous that she didn't know she would need, and then it's exactly what she needed in this moment. Seneca talks about how we should hunt out helpful pieces of teachings and spirited and noble minded sayings, which we can apply. Not, he says, not archaic expressions or big wordy quotes, but you know, not extravagant metaphors, but just things you could actually use. His journal, his writing was a place for him to record things that he could use in his letters, in his essays, in his speeches, in his life.
23:45 Ryan Holiday? But I also think it's important, Joan Didion didn't just keep her notebooks because she was a journalist. She kept them, she said, "to keep on nodding terms with who she used to be." Her journal was a way to capture who she was in this moment, so that in later moments, she could look back and learn from that person. She could measure her growth and progress against that person. She could go back to who that person was, potentially. She says, "Remember what it was." To be me, that is the point of my journaling. There are so many amazing, productive and professional reasons to journal, but the real reason to journal is the reason that Seneca was doing it, and Joan Didion was doing it, and Marcus Rilis was doing it.
24:29 Ryan Holiday? To check in with yourself, to understand yourself, to get insights about the self, and to record them as you are in that moment, so you don't lose track of it.
24:43 Ryan Holiday? We've talked a lot here about starting a journaling habit, and that is the hardest part. Starting a journaling habit is hard, and you're going to wish you started sooner rather than later, so start now. But what if you have started? And then what if you fell off, right? We don't know when and exactly how Marcus Rilis wrote meditation, but he clearly did it over a long period of time, and there's not that much in here. So it must have been something he dipped in and out of, or he excised parts of it over time. But I want you to think about it more as a thing you are doing than as a thing you have done. Marcus Rilis talks about how when we're jarred by circumstances, that we want to come back to our good habits, that we don't want to lose the rhythm more than we have it. We want to come back to that harmony.
25:28 Ryan Holiday? So if you've fallen off, if you've stopped, if you screwed up, don't kick yourself, don't feel guilty, don't try to reinvent the wheel, just try to come back to it. When you're playing music and you come off the beat, the beat doesn't change, the beat goes on. Come back to it. The right path is still there, the road is still there. Pick up the journal and come back to it. It doesn't matter how long you've come off the habit. It's still a good habit to practice. It's not exactly waiting for us, but it's steady, it's ready for us. We can come back to the rhythm anytime we want. Eugene Delacroix, the famous French painter, he did that painting, Liberty Leading the People. He called himself a lifelong student of the Stoics. He said Stoicism was his consoling religion. And there's a great letter where he's talking about sort of falling off of his journaling habit.
26:13 Ryan Holiday? He talks about how his mind has been too occupied by scheming and distractions, but instead of giving in to that, instead of despairing, he just decided to go back to his core habit. And he says that, "I'm picking up my journal again after a long break. This is going to be my way of calming this nervous excitement that's been worrying me for too long. I want you to think of journaling as this consolation, this counsel, this source of relief. So you've started the habit, you've fallen off, come back to it. It's there, it's ready for you. It's never too late to start a journaling habit, and you're never too far gone not to pick up the habit again. I come in and out of it as Marcus Aurelius
26:54 Ryan Holiday? and Seneca and all the Stoics have to. What matters is that you come back to it, you keep it going, that as Epictetus says, "You keep these thoughts at hand. You speak them, you write them, you read them, you talk about them." That's what it is. And so I'm asking you today to make time, that's what it says on the cover of my Daily Stoic Journal, "Make time for journaling. Keep the habit, and it will keep you."
27:20 Ryan 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.
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