AD ASTRA PER ARDUA

THE PROCESS IS THE PRODUCT

From Chapter One

To start, it would probably be helpful for me to define what I mean by a process.

A process: the systems, rituals, and routines we use to accomplish a long-term goal.

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.

This task is both easier and harder than it should be.

Easier because it doesn’t require any special skills.

Harder because it requires a willingness to direct awareness to how we feel—-a skill we all have, but also a skill that can gather rust in a world that carpet-bombs us with demands on our brains.