“Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter. And lead pencil markings endure longer than memory.” —Jack London Each morning, usually after a long walk on my farm, I go upstairs to my office and pull out three small notebooks. In the first one—a small blue gold leafed notebook—I write one sentence about the day that just passed. In the next, a black moleskine, I journal two quick pages about yesterday’s workout (how far I ran or swam), what work I did, any notable occurrences, and some lines about what I am grateful for, what I want to get better at, and where I am succeeding. And then finally, I pick up The Daily Stoic Journal to prepare for the day ahead by meditating on a short prompt: Where am I standing in my own way? What’s the smallest step I can take toward a big thing today? What blessings can I count right now? Why do I care so much about impressing people? What is the harder choice I’m avoiding? Do I rule my fears, or do they rule me? How will today’s difficulties show my character? The whole ritual takes maybe 15 minutes and then it’s done. By the time I am finished, I am centered, I am calm and most importantly, I am primed to do the actual creative work by which I make my living. Nor am I the only one who swears by this quiet, sober exercise—professional writer or otherwise. Some of history’s most respected men and women journaled in one form or another: Oscar Wilde. Susan Sontag. John Quincy Adams. Anne Frank. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Virginia Woolf. Henry David Thoreau. Joan Didion and of course, Marcus Aurelius too. (A full list would be impossible). I came to journaling myself from two very different paths. First, the Stoics were such ardent journalers that it is possible to say that journaling is Stoicism. (More on this down below). Second, I remember visiting the filmmaker Casey Neistat’s studio and seeing shelves and sh