Back To Process

“When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running. And a system can be successful in many different forms, not just the one you first envision.” -James Clear

“We can develop different processes simultaneously—one for our day jobs, one for our passion projects, one for the way we shop for groceries. And we can scale our processes, thinking about them on the level of lifelong goals and on the level of how we run our days. However, process-based thinking isn’t as simple as wanting a thing and creating ways to work toward that thing. To accomplish anything challenging and worthwhile, we have to care enough to push through the times when we want to stop or give up—when our phones are too tempting, or when the prospect of another job interview makes us nauseous, or when it’s the end of the workday and we don’t really want to do all those sit-ups because it would be a lot easier to flop onto the couch and watch TV. Sometimes we call this desire “passion.” Sometimes “motivation.” Sometimes “grit” or “determination” or “resilience.” But really, it’s this: in the long run, it feels better to do it than to not do it. As in, we like it. That’s the trick: turning the pursuit of a long-term goal into something that’s inherently enjoyable by figuring out what it is we love about the day-to-day of working toward that goal.

This is turning our process into our product—setting a long-term goal, coming up with a system for how to arrive at that goal, and then becoming so captivated by our system that the goal stops being a destination and starts being a signpost on the route to fulfillment, meaning, and long-term satisfaction.” -Paul Shirley, book The Process Is The Product

Here’s the thing…having a long-term goal or desired result is necessary at the start. It leads you to trying and iterating and eventually figuring out a process.

But then what happens is you fall so in love with the process that you no longer really care about the goal or desired result. You just want to keep doing the process.

And finally, the kicker…when you keep doing the process for a long period of time, you very often stumble into achieving the original goal or desired result. Sometimes, in ways that are bigger and better than you ever could have imagined.

And once you achieve said goal, you’re like “That’s cool…Now. How do I get back to process?”