How to Journal Like Tim Ferriss, Haruki Murakami, and Julia Cameron

I've noticed that most people quit journaling because they're doing it in the wrong way. And I don't mean that there's one specific end-all be-all way of journaling, but most people are trying to use a very simplistic method of journaling that's actually kind of hard. Because you think about journaling as just like putting your words and thoughts down on paper. The problem is, is that you're mostly mining your inner life for those words to go on the paper, and that can be a little scary. But once I started thinking of journaling as a set of tools, and in this video I'm going to show you 5 different journaling tools that you can use, everything got a lot easier because I started applying the need that I had for a particular type of journaling to a journaling tool that I knew was readily available to me. And once you match each of these methods to the need that you have, journaling actually gets a lot easier. Now, these 5 journaling methods are not just random tips that Matt thought of when he was trying to find good video topics. They've actually been used by people that I admire, people I've been following, people that I read, people you've probably heard of as well, except for one person. I'm talking about people like Tim Ferriss, Julia Cameron, Haruki Murakami, and my friend Kevin Dahlstrom, who's probably the one that you haven't heard of yet, unless we're also friends. And you know, there might, might be some people that view that know who Kevin is. And each one of these people developed or popularized a specific type of journaling to solve a specific type of problem or overcome a challenge. In this video, I'm going to break down each of these journaling methods, show you how to do it, and hopefully you won't feel like you're doing journaling wrong. Anymore. Because you don't need a perfect journaling routine, you just need a tool for the season that you're in. Hey, don't leave the video, but if you want a printable overview of these 5 journaling tools that you can use, just fill out the link in the description below. Fill out the link, click the link, and give me your email so I can send it over to you. That's all you have to do to get these 5 journaling methods. Okay, back to the video. Now let's go ahead and start with a method that helps you get crystal clear on the direction that you're headed with your life. The first one is from my friend Kevin Dahlstrom, and he calls it ideal end state. Now, this is something that I do at the end of a year, at the beginning of a year, something that helps me stay focused on the type of life that I want to be living and the life that I'm pursuing. This is the page that I wrote out this year for the ideal end state. And really what you're just asking yourself is, who do you want to be? What do you want to do with your time? Where would you be? And how do things look and feel? And this is really a vibe question. And all you're going to do to get started with this is just make some bullet points. Everything that we're going to talk about— maybe not everything we're going to talk about, but a lot of what we're talking about in journaling as just a way to get started is just to make bullet points. Just make short sentences, get yourself going. And this in particular, because it can be a little overwhelming to think about what do I want my life to be like. Now, the reason that I like to do the ideal end state at the end of the year or the beginning of a new year is that it helps me overcome the challenge of drift or not feeling aligned. You know, I talk about alignment a lot with the weekly review— wins, results, alignment, and where to pivot. And so when I do the ideal end state, it really helps me connect to my purpose, to the type of life that I want to be living, and to like this, you know, this place, this, uh, vibe, this experience that I want to continually be striving for in my life. So this ideal end state is something that you can do right now. It's just 4 questions. Make bullet points and start to see what your life could look like when you start to put it into a definitive frame. But I understand that even with a lot of clarity, fear can kind of set in. You can think about like, well, what if this doesn't go right? Or what if I quit my job and I'm not going to have enough money to pay for things? Well, That's what this next journaling method is going to help you with. Fear setting is a journaling practice that was popularized by Tim Ferriss. He did a TED Talk about it. He's done podcast episodes about it. I actually did a video about it in the past, but it started with the Stoics. I believe it was Seneca, or was it Epictetus? One of the two. I should know this. I'm going to look it up real quick. Fear setting. It is Seneca. And the idea is this: most of the time, and I'm very not guilty of this, but a goal setter, but if you were also a fear setter, what if you wrote down everything that you're afraid could happen and slowly go through and dissect that and analyze it and start to, for me, realize, oh, that's, that's not so bad. I don't have to be as afraid of it as I thought I was going to be.

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality, by Seneca the Younger, who's a famous Stoic writer. That took me to his letters, which took me to the exercise, premeditatio malorum, which means the premeditation of evils. And in simple terms, this is visualizing the worst-case scenarios in detail that you fear preventing you from taking action so that you can take action to overcome that paralysis.

The problem that I realized I was doing it, that this type of journaling helped me solve. I had a lot of avoidance that I was just like categorizing as cautious, like, well, I'm being cautious. No, you're avoiding the thing that you should be doing, the thing that you feel like you need to be doing. That's, that's it. It's not caution, it's avoidance. And the thing that I saw, like, through this journaling practice is that the fear would shrink when it was specific. If I wrote it down and said, this is the thing, I was like, oh, It's, it's actually not that bad when you actually say it. Austin Kleon said in his book, I think it was Show Your Work, and I don't remember who he's quoting, but it's like secondary quotations that he said he saw a quote once, is like, the demons hate fresh air. When you actually bring things to the surface, they lose a lot of the power. And that's what the fear-setting journaling method will do for you. But sometimes I've noticed that fear isn't actually the main problem that I'm facing. Sometimes it's just noise. And that's what this next method really helps with. Morning Pages might be the most famous type of journaling method. It's one that I've talked about in many of my prior journaling videos, but it started with Julia Cameron. And what she advocates for, what Morning Pages is, is to write down 2 to 3 freehand, I think, in the notebook, pages of handwritten journal notes entries. Diary, however you want to frame it. And I find morning pages to be really useful when I have some anxiety, when I might be spiraling a little bit, when I just have a lot of noise in my head, a lot of messy thoughts, a lot of like, ugh. Then it helps literally just to write those things down. And that's the point of morning pages. It's not to say, oh, like, it's not to really give you any kind of prompt. The only prompt is to write down what's on your mind. And if you're. If what's on your mind is, oh, my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, for two pages, do that. I bet it'll help, to be honest, because the point of morning pages is basically just to clear the mental pipes and not to analyze it, not to think, is this going to be useful in the future? Or like, I can't possibly write this down for two pages. You need to be like Bart Simpson at the chalkboard. Be like, I will not overanalyze my writing. Or I think morning pages is This is so dumb. If you just do that, okay, but that's like— some people get burnt out on morning pages because like they just keep writing down top of mind stuff and that doesn't feel very useful. That's why, again, like all of these, I like to look at this and think of this as a tool. So when you feel like you might have some anxiety, when your thoughts are kind of spiraling, spiraling, when you feel like clogged up creatively and mentally, use morning pages to clear the pipes and keep going. And once you've cleared the pipes, now it's time to, like, you know, fill things up with what's good in your life, the things that you're grateful for. And I bet you can already tell where this next method is headed. Now, if you've done any journaling, if you've read anything about journaling or watched any videos about journaling, you have come across gratitude journaling, and for good reason. It is scientifically proven to make you feel better, to help you feel calmer, to make you feel connected with people. And in fact, that connectedness is something that I want to point out to you real quick because this isn't quite journaling, but my friend Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky, who has this great book that's about to come out called How to Feel Loved— you can check it out in the description below— but she actually was a part of a study that focused on 6 different types of gratitude practices, and the one that stood out more than any other was the long-form gratitude letter. Now, long form can be whatever it means to you. But when it was written specifically to a person, here's the thing: even when it wasn't sent to that person, if you just wrote it, then you would feel more grateful and more connected to that person that you wrote it to. Now, what I want to encourage you to do as like a starting point for gratitude journaling is I think of it as like noun gratitude journaling, where you're just writing down and thinking about what is a person, a place, or a thing that you are grateful for today. So when you narrow it down to those like 3 and make kind of a mini list, then that is something that can get you started. And if there's one that really stands out to you with the person, place, or thing, then continue to write about it a little bit more. Gratitude journaling is really helpful when you start to feel negative. It's kind of the perfect anecdote for that feeling like a negativity bias or feeling disconnected. And what the science shows literally is that it can reframe your experience experience without shifting away from the pain. And this is something that is really important in all kinds of journaling and also mental health. And I'm not a mental health professional, but when you can see the good in a situation without completely like pushing away the pain or the frustration or the sadness that you feel, that is— not to sound like an AI bot— that's a real game changer. It really is for like helping you feel better, more connected, and happier for the life that you have and the people that you're around. One of the biggest benefits of journaling overall is the presence that you feel in the moment and with the things that you're writing about. And this last journaling method, this last tool in your kit, is all about presence. It's about witnessing what's going on and not trying to interpret everything that has happened, which is again another common reason that people get stuck with journaling. It's like, I don't know what's going on in my rich or not rich inner life, just notice what's going on around you. I've talked about Austin Kleon's Logbook Method in the past. It is a really good way of just recognizing and recording what's going on. But I've started to learn and read more Haruki Murakami, and he practices a type of observational journaling. It's not quite observational comedy in the way that, like, Jerry Seinfeld does it, but it is a way of noticing and witnessing. And like Austin Kleon, recording just in a more literary way the type of things that are going on in your world every day. In a way, this is what Murakami was doing when he wrote What I Think About When I'm Running. What I think about when I think about running? Let me check. By the way, I'm using this tool called Monologue as voice-to-text transcription. It's amazing. You can get a month free and the link in the description below doesn't really do anything. It's not like an affiliate thing. I just think it would be cool for you to use. Check it out. What I talk about when I talk about running. Okay, so Murakami practiced this in public with us when he wrote his book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Now we're talking about Murakami, who is one of the great authors of the past 20, 30, 50 years. And so when he does observational journaling, it might sound a little bit more poetic and wonderful than when you and I do it. But listen to this right here. I have it, you know, I have it over up on my Readwise, another great tool. But he says, I look up at the sky wondering if I'll catch a glimpse of kindness there, but I don't. All I see are indifferent summer clouds drifting over the Pacific, and they have nothing to say to me. Clouds are always taciturn. I probably shouldn't even be looking up at them. What I should be looking at is inside of me, like staring down a deep well. Can I see kindness there? No, all I see is my own nature. My own individual stubborn, uncooperative, often self-centered nature that still doubts itself. Well, I mean, if that is not observing the world around you while also being honest about the world inside of you. I like that passage because it really like gets to the heart of journaling, why it can be really helpful, but also why it can be really painful. How many of us are willing to write down on the page whether it's through like morning pages, observational journaling, logbooking, whatever it might be, and say something like, my own individual stubborn, uncooperative, often self-centered nature that still doubts itself. That's what's tough. That's what's tough. But that's also what's very beautiful and very helpful about a journaling practice. So I want to ask you, which of these 5 journaling methods do you need right now? Do you need practice and proof with the Murakami method? Do you need to look at what you're grateful for and feel connected to those around you and the things that are happening in your life? Do you need to do morning pages and just pull the anxiety apart and let yourself bleed onto the page, you know, metaphorically speaking? Or like, do you need to like do some fear setting? Is there something that is worrying you that you can say is like, it's this, it's this, it's this, it's this? Put all those things on the page. Or let's go back to the beginning. Do you need to define an ideal end state? Do you need to have a sense of purpose and direction? We'll use ideal end state from my friend Kevin Dahlstrom. These are all ways that you can use journaling as tools instead of just like open-ended blank pages that make you stressed out all by itself, because that's not what journaling is supposed to be. Journaling is a way to self-discovery and to growth. And with these 5 tools, you'll be on your way. So what I want you to do is just pick one to start with, the one that resonated the most with you. Don't try and overthink it. The rest of these are going to be here when you need them. And then let me know in the comments which you'll be starting with. I can't wait to hear from you. Thanks for watching. Bye. Oh wait, I didn't mean I was done yet. If you want the 5, like, method PDF download so that you can reference this, just click the link in the description below and I'll send it right to you. Okay. All right. Now I'm good. Thanks for watching. Bye.