When Will You Start Doing This?

It’s just not true.

The Stoics were not magically stronger, wiser, or more mentally tough than you.

In fact, they were exactly the same as you.

They cried. They loved. They felt frustration. They had expectations. They had desires.

And when things didn’t work out for them?

They got upset.

But it’s what happened next that separates them from us.

The one habit that Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca—a slave, an emperor, a power broker, and playwright, respectively—had in common?

Journaling. 

Epictetus said that philosophy was something his students should “write down day by day,” that this writing was how they should “exercise themselves.”

Seneca said the key was to put the day up for review, to “go back over what I’ve done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by.”

Marcus, of course, said less on the subject of journaling, but left us the greatest lesson of all: his example.

They were not the only ones to practice the habit of writing.

But in Stoicism, the art of journaling is more than some simple diary.

This daily practice is the philosophy. 

Journaling is Stoicism.

That’s what you must understand.

To journal is to have a direct conversation with one’s self.

Are we moving in the right direction?

Are we keeping the promises we’ve set for ourselves?

Where are we falling short?

It’s not enough to simply hear these lessons once; instead, one practices them over and over again, turns them over in their mind, and most importantly, writes them down and feels them flowing through their fingers in doing so.

It’s as if you’re both the teacher and the student.

Jordan Peterson said that “you should treat yourself as a person you’re responsible for helping.”

Well, journaling helps you do exactly that.