Leonard E. Read recorded his deeds and thoughts in a private journal, which he kept faithfully for over 10,000 consecutive days. He had once shunned such a practice, considering it a waste of time. “To spend as much time reporting as living and doing, he thought, cuts experience in half,” as his biographer Mary Sennholz related.
But he came to realize the error in that way of thinking:
“It overlooks the most important experience of all, namely, concentration, which writing of almost any sort imposes.”
And concentration is key to living and doing well. Thus, journaling does not merely report past experiences and deeds, but improves future life and action as well.
Whenever you’re feeling vague and aimless, settling down to write something coherent, clear, and purposeful can induce you to marshal your thoughts and thus give your consciousness itself greater coherence, clarity, and purpose. Writing soon after you wake up in the morning can thus give your day a powerful kickstart.
Journaling can also improve one’s life and conduct by fostering reflection and accountability. “Recording what one does and thinks each day,” Read wrote, creates “a forceful tendency to act only in ways that are recordable.”
Read’s friend and compatriot Henry Hazlitt also commended the power of writing to boost concentration:
“One incidental advantage of the habit of writing out one’s ideas is that it promotes concentration as almost no other practice does. As one who has written daily newspaper editorials or weekly magazine columns for many years, I can testify that nothing forces one to pull one’s thoughts together more than deciding on a topic, sitting before the typewriter, feeding in a clean sheet of paper, and then trying to frame one’s exact theme, title, and opening paragraph.
Francis Bacon summed it up with unsurpassable conciseness: ‘Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.’”
Daily writing for publication can be an especially potent aid to concentration, because it forces you to structure your thinking even more in order to make your ideas make sense, not only to yourself, but to others.
So, to really super-charge your intellect and intentionality every day, it can be a great morning ritual to write a daily journal entry followed by writing and publishing a daily blog post (for example, on Substack or Medium).
In the musical Hamilton, the title character “wrote his way out” out of the tragedies that befell him. Similarly, with a morning ritual of journaling and blogging, you can write your way into having a great day.