JUSTIN LANGER: What a Roman philosopher from 2000 years ago has in common with Daicos, Smith and Dusty

There are crates of journals in my garage.

They may be collecting dust, but every time I open them, I am fascinated by their insights.

The attention to detail in those pages, the strong talks to myself, the goals and dreams, the experiences of yesteryear, they all re-enforce how prized these journals were/are to me as a tool; almost as prized as my old cricket bats.

On Monday night, there was a moment in Nick Daicos’s Brownlow Medal night that really caught my attention.

Amid all the talk about his extraordinary football ability — the 47 votes, the record, the three years of standing near the trophy without touching it — he spoke about his discipline of keeping his journals every night.

He described how his 20-minute journal ritual not only helped him as a player but also as a leader.

“I really want to work on my leadership,” he said. “Being a team-first guy.”

Daicos is clearly a deeply reflective young man, someone who thinks about his game, asks questions, studies others and deliberately searches for ways to improve. His humility and curiosity reveal a trait of all the greats.

“What I can improve on, or what can the team improve on,” is always on his mind.

At 23, with the game’s highest individual honour in his hands, there is maturity in the second half of his thoughts. The very best are as interested in others as they are in themselves.

This is where his thoughts on journaling become so interesting to me.

By spending 20 quiet minutes at the end of a day with a pen and a blank page forces him to slow down in a world that rarely does.

Most of us who’ve kept a journal started out using it as a performance tool. I certainly did.

My books are full of notes on my technique, notes on a bowler I’d face in three days’ time, goals for the summer written down in ink so they couldn’t wriggle away, advice from people I admired, copied out word for word so I wouldn’t lose the inspiration.

And a fair bit of what you’d politely call a stern talking-to addressed to the only person in the world who needed to hear it — the man in the mirror.

I wasn’t the most talented cricketer in any team I played in. Not close. But I had work ethic and discipline. Not only work on my body but also on my mind.

This is where journaling comes in. Looking back, I’ve come to believe my journals weren’t a record of the career, they were the blueprint for it.

They were also the blueprint for my constantly developing character. As a player, coach, parent and mate, I not only asked “How did I perform today?” but also, “How did I make the people around me better today?”.

Who among them needs encouragement? Who needs challenging? Who is struggling quietly? Who did you barely speak to today? What makes each person tick? And what can you do tomorrow to help them become better?

Over time, those questions can transform leadership, as Daicos alluded to. Because you stop viewing teammates simply through the lens of what they can do for the team, and start understanding what you can do for them.

Daicos isn’t the first Brownlow medallist to find this out with a pen in his hand.

In 2017, two days before the AFL grand final, Dustin Martin sat down with a reporter and talked about a little blue book.

It was the Resilience Project journal, Hugh van Cuylenburg’s creation, built on three simple pillars: gratitude, empathy, mindfulness.

Dusty had been filling it in every day for more than 600 days. He was going to fill it in again on the Friday evening, hours before he ran out onto the MCG in front of a hundred thousand people.

“It’s helped me be calm and in the moment this season,” he said. “It’s also helped me feel grateful for all I’ve got . . . for the opportunity to play footy for a club like Richmond.”

Martin, tattooed from foot to neck, 36-vote Brownlow winner, a triple-Norm Smith medallist, a premiership, sitting quietly with a notebook, reflecting, planning, empathising. Very cool.

Australian cricketer Steve Smith was using the same journal that year.

He told the same reporter about hitting two sixes to win a game off the last over in the Indian Premier League, and everyone asking the next morning how on earth he’d slept.

“I had a cracker of a sleep,” he said. “Because I was just chilled out. I wrote about it in my journal. This stuff really works.”

So why does any of it work? I used to think it was discipline for its own sake. Turns out the science has caught up.

There’s a study out of UCLA, run by a psychologist named Matthew Lieberman, that used brain scans to watch what happens when people put their feelings into words.

The amygdala, the alarm bell in your head, the thing that floods your mind before a big moment, or after a bad one, quietens down.

“Naming it, tames it”, as I found out years ago. Which means all those notes I wrote to myself at all hours of the day and night, weren’t self-indulgence, they were helping to regulate my mind.

And none of this is new. Not remotely.

Nearly 2000 years ago a Roman philosopher named Quintus Sextius went to bed each night having put three questions to himself.

His student Seneca thought enough of them to write them down, which is the only reason we have them.

What bad habit have you cured today? What fault have you resisted? In what respect are you better?

Seneca took up the practice himself, and his description of it might be the finest thing ever written about keeping a journal.

The lamp is out. His wife, he says, is “long aware of my habit” and has gone quiet. And in the dark he goes back over the whole day, every word, every deed. “I conceal nothing from myself, I omit nothing.”

Then comes the line that makes so much sense to me.

“How delightful the sleep that follows this self-examination, how tranquil it is, how deep and untroubled, when the soul has either praised or admonished itself.”

Now read Steve Smith again: “I had a cracker of a sleep, because I was just chilled out.”

Two thousand years apart. A Roman senator and a kid from Sydney who’d just won a game off the last over. Same practice, same claim, almost the same words.

But maybe the real value of keeping a journal is simpler than any of the research.

Writing creates awareness. Awareness creates intention. Intention, repeated every day, creates behaviour. And behaviour creates culture.

You don’t have to write pages. Any minutes will do it. What did I learn today? Who did I help? Who do I need to understand better? Where did I fall short? What will I do differently tomorrow?

The best leaders aren’t necessarily the people who have all the answers. Often, they’re simply the people disciplined enough to keep asking themselves better questions.

Which brings me back to the crates.

My Mum kept a journal for each of my four daughters and all her grandkids. She started the day each of them was born, and she wrote in them for years; the small things, the ordinary days, the observations of a grandmother watching four girls become themselves.

Before she passed away, she gave them to the girls.

Every journal I’ve written about here was, at some level, written by someone for their own benefit. Dusty’s calm. Daicos’s rehab. Smith’s strategy. My own blueprint in the garage. The writer was always the beneficiary.

Mum’s weren’t. She sat down, year after year, and wrote for four people who wouldn’t read a word of it until she was gone.

There was no performance gain in it. No amygdala to quieten, no goal to hit, no game to win. Just the decision that these girls’ lives were worth the ink.

She had been answering the question long before I thought to ask it. How did I make the people around me better today?

A gift, a treasure, impossible to define. I’ve stopped trying.

I wonder where I got the discipline from?

Buy a notebook. You’ve no idea the power in it. Or hopefully you already do.