This week’s exercise is simple: Take a few minutes each day to write about the admirable character traits of your friends and acquaintances. Choose a time of day when you’d like to do this exercise, and write it down.

Then, every day, write a few sentences concerning the person whom you admire, as well as to rate your mood before and after the exercise. If you find you have a lot to write, you can always download spare journal pages from our website, or write out what you admire about the person on your computer or tablet instead of just writing a paragraph.

Answer the following questions each day. Be sure to rate your mood at the beginning and end of each writing session. Rate your level of cheerfulness from 1 to 10, with 1 being the lowest.

1. Whom will you be writing about?
2. What character trait of this person do you admire?
3. What do you find admirable about this person and why?
4. Rate your cheerfulness again on a scale of 1 to 10.

Be sure to keep these points in mind when writing:

• The focus should be on what character traits you admire about the person, not material or superficial aspects that are not in that person’s complete control.
• The person does not have to be a saint. Just focus on one thing you admire about that person, even if they have flaws. If flaws do come to mind while writing, try to stay focused on what you admire, and don’t write about what’s not admirable.
• These can be friends, family, or acquaintances. You don’t have to know the people well in order to find something admirable about them.

To print a blank version of this prompt, please go to our web page for the book: theexperimentpublishing.com/?isbn=9781615195336.

One of the main reasons for doing this exercise that Marcus suggests is that it’s a wholesome way to lift our spirits. We can take an educated guess as to why he thinks this is the case. First, it focuses on the positive. Marcus implies throughout his Meditations that he may have been surrounded by people who were difficult to work with or be around. Focusing on the positive aspects of both friends and difficult people may have lifted his mood. Second, recollecting how others have positively influenced him may have instilled a sense of cheerful gratitude. Book I of the Meditations is almost exclusively devoted to this exercise. Marcus reminds himself of the virtues he learned from others throughout his life, which also serves as a reminder to work on exemplifying those character traits as much as possible. Finally, focusing on what’s in a person’s control (i.e., their character) may have helped Marcus practice the dichotomy of control, taking his mind off of dispreferred indifferents whose outcome he could not completely control. But this is mostly speculation!

Your goal this week is to find out if and how this exercise may help you.

Did you find that Marcus’s experience was true for you? Did focusing on the virtues of others around you raise your spirits? Were there other positive, unexpected side effects? Take a few minutes to write about your experience.

That’s it for the Discipline of Desire! You’ve spent the past seventeen weeks focusing on reducing your desires and aversions to external things. Now it’s time to retake the brief quiz that started off this section to see how much progress you’ve made in the discipline. Take the quiz on the next page now.