Jacob Woliver

Enjoy the Process

I was meditating today with a 10 minute breathing exercise. The whole way through, all I could think about was wanting to check how much longer I had left. After struggling with that for a while, I had an epiphany - I do this in all areas of my life. I am constantly rearranging my class schedule to see if I can graduate faster, planning my next career goals, and making long lists of projects I want to complete to be better at computer graphics. Gosh darn heck it, my last post was about how to imagine your future and approximate it.

But this loses sight of enjoying the process. It’s always about having done something, not the doing of something. Always living in the past tense of having accomplished or the future tense of accomplishing never gives you time to just accomplish. I need to learn how to enjoy being in a moment and soaking that up completely. The goal isn’t to be great or successful, it’s to learn as much as I can. This Viktor Frankl quote from Man’s Search for Meaning is really impactful for me:

Don’t aim at success - the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. … Then you will live to see that in the long run - in the long run I say! - success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.

That quote is powerful and shows the direct pursuit of greatness is empty. It is the journey of learning and growing that is the meaningful part. When I was pasting this quote, I wanted to shorten it further by removing “in the long run I say!” But then I realized that is the most important part. The repitition is there to make a point - being good at anything takes a long time, so it’s better to stop always looking to the future and just be present. When the actual goal is a devoted pursuit to something other than success, enjoying the process is so important. People love Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 Hour Rule, but I think Peter Norvig’s Teach Yourself Programming in 10 Years hits more home for me. At the very beginning, he asks:

Why is everyone in such a rush?

Why am I in such a rush?

I think all of this exposes a really interesting intersection between success and happiness. Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You helps shed some light on this topic a little more. In it, he explains that the idea of “follow your passion” is not only an empty thing to say, but can also be harmful to people. Instead, he says you should work to be the best that you can at something; that is a far better predictor of happiness and job satisfaction than some amorphous “following of passion.” This idea is codified in the book as Craftsmanship, which is exactly everything that has been explored in this post. Don’t look to be successful, just hone your craft until you are so good that you are the best at it.

I need to be better about enjoying the process and getting as good as I can at programming, then success can come if it feels like it. To make this more actionable, some things to implement in my life today are:

These are much more meaningful endeavors. They also sound much less fatiguing. I don’t have to think about the future, I can just enjoy each activity as it comes, day by day. Revel the time it takes, why be in such a rush?