Journaling is such an important part of my life. 

I think I’ve always instinctively believed this, but like most good things, good habits of my life, I dragged my feet over it.

Like writing itself—I spent so many years dabbling instead of diving in. How many novels or short stories or articles could have been written in the gaps I left in my years? Though I have journaled practically all my life, I haven’t consistently journaled all that time. 

Still, the few entries I wrote when I was a kid are a delight to read. Going back through them every now and then reminds me of who I was, what I was hung up on, what I wanted to change. 

It’s funny, but a lot of my journal entries show that I’ve faced the same personal challenges forever. I don’t know if that means I’m a slow learner, or if these are flaws in my personal character, or what, exactly. I just know that there are themes that have carried through in my life, from page to page, year after year.

The key, then—I say this thinking maybe this is something I’ve ignored—the key is to look back, reflect on these journal entries, find those common themes, then commit to doing something about them.

For example, stress and anxiety are something I’ve written about at length over the past several years. I have at least five years of entries in my Day One journal that reflect on anxiety, and what a challenge it has been in my life. And what I notice, as I look back, is that my strategy for dealing with that anxiety is always pretty much the same.

And obviously it hasn’t been working.

There is that pesky definition of insanity floating around, that it is “doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result.” My strategy for managing my anxiety is, in fact, insanity. I keep doing the same stuff, and I keep doing the same result.

If you always put a cup of salt in our cookies, they’re always going to taste bad, no matter how carefully you kneed the dough or how many chocolate chips you add. Doing one thing better, adding something good, isn’t enough. Take the salt out.

That brings me to an important part of journaling—review.

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Ryan Holiday, author and stoic philosopher, points out that journaling daily is an opportunity to review your day so that you can decide what went right, what went wrong, and what you can do better tomorrow. I think looking back at past journal entries is about the same thing.

Look back, review what you’ve written, and you can find the trends and the repeated occurrences. And when you see them, you can strategize around them. You can see what works and what doesn’t, and you can plan to do something different for once.

A lesson I apparently am still learning.

But it all starts with taking the time to keep a journal, and with doing that consistently.

When I’m talking to other authors about writing and editing, I like using the metaphor of a sculptor working with marble: You can’t carve David if you don’t have the block of marble to work with. 

In that metaphor, I’m telling writers to focus on their rough draft first, without worrying about editing, and then come back and chip away any errors or mistakes or rough language during editing. But the point is you can’t edit what you haven’t written.

And you can’t review journal entires if you haven’t written any down, either.

Journaling isn’t easy. It’s a discipline. But it’s one that has so many perks and benefits, it would be crazy to avoid it. 

You don’t have to overthink it. What you write doesn’t have to be glowing prose. It doesn’t even have to be spelled properly. Free write. Put thoughts down. Ignore the mistakes, ignore everything your fifth grade English teacher taught you. Just put down your thoughts, your fears, your joys, your worries—everything that is you goes on the page. 

Looping back to Ryan Holiday, this video was a great list of tips for “journaling like a pro”: https://youtu.be/ZVeUIclaMTE

My own tips are a bit more mundane. 

I use Day One, an app that is available on desktop computers, smartphones, and smart tablets, and that syncs with the cloud. I have dozens of journals in that app. And I use tagging for each entire, extensively, so I can sort back through and find common themes. The app does something wonderful—it shows you all the entries for a given day, going back to the earliest days of your journaling. I couldn’t possibly recommend this app high enough, it’s a vital part of my daily habits.

I also use Moleskine notebooks. My personal preference is for the little 3x5 gridded notebooks. I number the top corners of each page, and I start each day with the date, the time, the temperature, and the location I’m writing from. I also start each entire with “3 pieces of wisdom,” which are thoughts I have or quotes I’ve heard that feel wise to me, feel like good advice I should follow. And then I fill the entire page with raw thought, unedited and unplanned, until I come to the end. I write about anything and everything. It would be a very boring read for anyone but me, and sometimes even me.

I currently keep two Moleskines, actually. The one I described above is my “reflections” journal. Then there’s another one that I think of as my “planning” journal. In this one I write down my 5 Critical Tasks for the day, and I strike through each task as it’s created. I also do little thumbnail sketches in this journal, jot down quotes, jot down things I want to remember or tasks I want to add to my schedule. I make notes about book or business ideas. It’s a dumping ground, and I love it. It’s the most unorganized writing I do, and I love it.

The point is, journaling is the chisel and hammer I use to chip away the rough edges of myself, so I can shape myself in new and beautiful ways. Over the years, the specific practice for my journals has shifted and evolved. I change things up from time to time. I add this or subtract that. But I have come to recognize with absolute certainty that journaling is the key to my personal growth. 

Journaling is how I tell myself who I am, and who I can become.

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You will know them by their fruit.

Resolutions are overrated. Discipline is freedom.
Kevin Tumlinson | WrittenWorld.us

I don’t really do “resolutions.”

I have, in the past. But like most people I’ve discovered that I have a tendency to overdo it. I decide, resolutely, that I’m going to, say, exercise every day, lose twenty pounds, learn to play an instrument, learn to speak another language, reorganize my closet, travel more, write more, etc., etc., etc. Big piles. Big goals.

The trouble is, when we do this we’re setting ourselves up for failure.

Don’t get me wrong: All of these “big goals” can be good for us. It’s good to want to get in shape, to lose weight and exercise more. It’s good to want to learn new things, and go to new places. It’s just the pressure we put on ourselves to “do it all now” that winds up being bad. That’ll tank your energy faster than anything. And no energy, no go.

Every new year, I pick a word. The word of the year. And that word is my guidepost for everything I do over that year.

This year, the word is commitment.

I have always hated commitments. Such a typical guy thing, right? But putting your word on something, and then have to live up to it or risk looking like a fool or a failure or both… ick. No thank you.

Except…

There’s a phrase I’ve encountered quite a bit since I started studying stoicism (oh yeah … I study stoicism! I’ll fill you in on that later): “Discipline is freedom.”

I like this phrase because it’s demonstrably true. If you are disciplined about how you eat and how you exercise, you’re free to have dessert without guilt, from time to time. If you’re disciplined with saving and investing your money, you’re free to buy a house or a car, or take a trip, or buy yourself something nice. Discipline really is freedom.

And to become disciplined requires commitment.

There’s another rule about commitment that I follow, though: Tell no one of your plans until you can prove your commitment.

I like this, too, because I’ve come to understand that sharing my plans with people is the quickest way to suck all the energy out of them.

This is the other problem I always have with resolutions. People always ask you about them, around this time of year, as if they wouldn’t know exactly what you’re going to say. There are, essentially, three recurring New Year’s resolutions, let’s just face it.

But if you do happen to have something unique and original—”I’m going to write a blog post every single day for the whole year!”—as soon as anyone hears it you get the standard “response of discouragement.” Their eyes widen slightly, they inhale, they blow out their breath as they shake their head. They say, “Man, I’d never do that.” Or worse, they actively warn you against even trying it.

Most of the time these are meant to be well-meaning comments. They don’t think you’ll pull this off, and they don’t want you to fail. So the best way to avoid failure is to not try.

The thing is, who’s really to say whether you could or could not pull off something like daily blogging? There are people like Seth Godin who have literally blogged every single day for years. No one is going to tell him he can’t do it, at this point.

Casey Neistat, a popular YouTuber and filmmaker, did a daily vlog—that’s a video blog, fully produced with high production value—for 800 days straight. I did the math: That’s two years, two months, and ten days. For more than two years Casey produced high-quality video, without missing a beat. I have trouble posting something once a month.

So it might be unlikely that someone could succeed at a “big goal,” but it’s not impossible. It’s just that Seth Godin and Casey Neistat didn’t go out and say to everyone they know, “I’m going to do this.” Instead … they just did it.

They told no one of their plans until they could prove their commitment.

There’s a reason this sort of thing works.

From a psychological perspective, our brains don’t really know the difference between energy spent doing something and energy spent talking about doing something. We are, for the most part, wired for story. As long as the story is active and engaging, we pay attention. We stay focused. But when the story is complete… we’re done.

It’s wired into us. We crave novelty and satisfaction. And the former wears off once the latter has been fulfilled.

Talking about what we’re going to do is telling a story. We’re giving it our energy. We’re putting it out there for others to scrutinize. And once we have their feedback… story over. The energy fades. We’re not as excited anymore.

If we could tell (and better yet, show) all of our friends and family the amazing progress we’ve made in going from fat and flabby and weak to thing and muscled and strong, we’d get a little kick of adrenaline and endorphins that would make us feel great! But we can get a sort of pseudo endorphin kick by just skipping all the hard work and talking to someone about what we’re gonna do. We skip the line. We take our reward early.

The trouble is, it’s hollow and meaningless. Taking the reward before the work robs us of the real heart of the story.

So, I’m a Christian. And in the New Testament there’s this passage:

6 “Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.

2 “So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 3 But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

Matthew 6:1-4

Don’t worry, you don’t have to be a Christian or even a believer to see the wisdom in this. But it’s exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about. When you talk to people about what you’re gonna do, you essentially “receive your reward in full.” You get all the gratification, then and there, and it feels empty. It lacks substance.

There’s probably a stoic version of this, but I’m kind of new to the philosophy, and haven’t come across it yet.

The whole point here, when we boil off the excess, is that resolutions, especially publicly made resolutions, lack any real power. They’re a story, but they’re like the Cliff’s Notes version. The real story is our commitment.

If discipline is freedom, then commitment is the key to achieving everything we ever wanted. It’s real power. Super power.

And it can’t be faked. You can write it down, post it on Instagram, make some YouTube videos about it, but that’s all meaningless. It’s doing that proves your commitment.

Which reminds me of another passage from a wise sage:

“Do. Or do not. there is no try.”

—Yoda, Jedi Master

So, I’m not going to talk about my New Year’s resolutions. Although I can say that what you’re reading, right now, is a part of the commitment I’ve made for my life, going forward.

And no … it’s not daily blogging.

You’ll just have to stick around and see what I produce. Because it’s my consistent actions and results that demonstrate my commitment. And I can’t fake those with platitudes or inspirational quotes or selfies of me at the gem.

One last bible verse, to sum this up:

You will know them by their fruit.

Matthew 7:16

Look at what I produce. Look at what anyone produces. You’ll know our commitments by our fruit. You’ll know who we are by what we produce in the world.

Here’s to 2020, and the commitments and disciplines that will enable us to produce good fruit in the world.

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Kevin Tumlinson is an award-winning and bestselling thriller author and podcast host. He travels the world looking for interesting tidbits of history and culture to fold into his work, and spends much of his time writing from hotels, cafes, coffee shops, and the occasional ride line at Disney World. Find more of Kevin and his work, including novels and podcasts, at KevinTumlinson.com.