Enjoy the Process

This is a difficult post for me because my mind immediately goes to everything that's difficult for me to be disciplined about:

• Leg day
• Dishwashing
• Laundry
• Dusting and vacuuming
• Reading and writing
• Anything requiring calling and scheduling an appointment
• Shaving

I know that there are many more for others, from calling their friends and family to saving money every paycheck to doing their homework. There are many things in life that require frequent or strenuous work to attain or maintain. The problem with most things in life is that they want the outcome but they don't want to do what it takes to get that outcome. You want the body but don't want to do the exercise; you want the clean house but don't want to do the cleaning; you want the degree or money but not the studying or working. This is not easy.

But there are only a few things you can do to increase your likelihood of doing anything:

• You can make the outcome more believable or desirable.
  
• You can make the process getting the outcome easier or more desirable.
  
• You can do something else that is more desirable to you in exchange for that outcome.
  
• You can focus on a greater outcome that the immediate outcome gets you, like money for a better quality of life for your family.

Two of those four items listed here are ways to motivate you to go through the work necessary to get your outcome. If you want to be the world's strongest man, you'll work yourself to exhaustion over and over again in the gym. If you want to buy your dream home, you'll work countless hours building your wealth to acquire it. As the saying goes, someone with a "why" can bear almost any "how".

But if you want your life to feel more effortless vs. feeling like it was a daily grind toward success, you might want to focus on the other two items: enjoying the process and/or delineating roles so that you do what is preferable to you. This is the best thing you can do because it reduces the willpower required to be disciplined in your daily routine.

So how do you learn to enjoy the process? There are plenty of techniques, so let's just go through a few:

• Learn to Love the Challenge – Some of the best people in their fields are successful by doing the things that no one likes to do. Whether it's loving squats because gym rats often skip the exercise or working on having a beautiful motherboard that no one would see (see: Steve Jobs and his infamous insistence that the Apple II's design be beautiful inside and out), you can focus on things that are difficult or that people don't like because they are difficult or people shy away from them.
• Make the Process Rewarding – The most obvious way to do this is to track your progress to motivate yourself over a long project or to break it down into smaller parts that can show more tangible progress over time. I call this the "World of Warcraft" approach because it famously did that in the mid-2000s when it provided a deluge of dopamine-delivering rewards for playing the game: level-ups, new abilities, new items, new equipment, new locations, new enemies, and greater statistics. But anything you can do to enhance the process, from rewarding yourself for good habits to turning the process into a game, will work.
• Commit It to Muscle Memory for Multitasking or Distraction – The most famous recent example of this is the explosion of podcasting and audiobooks, which people listen to while commuting or doing manual tasks, but the idea here is to take repeatable tasks that are not challenging or rewarding and distracting yourself during them. Most people consume media, such as the original version of listening to music in a vehicle (fun fact: Motorola is a portmanteau of Motorized Victrola), to make the time go by. However, others use manual tasks as ways to meditate, tune out, or otherwise enter a state where they get lost in what they are doing and so time goes by faster.
• Find Something You Love to Do – This is the most obvious option: do something you enjoy doing. The good news is that not everyone wants to play sports or video games. Plenty of people love to build things, write or play music, or direct a play. Some people like the low accountability in their day job of being a custodian so that they can flex their responsibility muscles in their personal lives. No matter what, there is a way to either find something that you enjoy doing or, at least, something that you don't mind doing at all so that the time passes by more quickly or pleasantly. The fact that effort-intensive hobbies like gardening and auto detailing are popular just shows how there are plenty of activities you can find that don't feel like too much of a chore to perform.
• Optimize the Process for You – There is an example in Atomic Habits about making your habit easy to do, such as leaving your gym clothing next to the door so you just need to grab it and leave when you're ready instead of having to exert the extra effort of getting ready to go. This hurdle-reduction minimizes both the barriers to entry but also the time for you to come up with an excuse. But there are other examples, such as dividing up a process so you do the parts that you like the most and partner with others who do the parts that you don't like that they actually do. There are plenty of ways to improve the process to make it more enjoyable, but note that I've even seen approaches where they make the process take longer but no one minds because it's much more fun. Brainstorming sessions, team-building exercises, and other activities are examples of spending time doing something that seems less productive but has long-term benefits to productivity and performance.

I'm sure that there are more, but hopefully this gives you a list of ways that you can use to find more enjoyment in the process vs. just the outcome. This is an important focus that has become overlooked in modern society's ubiquity of options for instant gratification. After all, why cook a meal when you can just microwave it? Why go out shopping or make something when you can just order it on Amazon at the click of a button? While there is nothing wrong with exercising those options, it does take away from the idea that this time saved could be focused on productive activities and not just more time for leisure or entertainment.

One final thing I want to note here is that I have found that just convincing yourself that you do like the process does help a little in getting you over the hump. Yes, a lot of it is focusing on the outcome, like reminding yourself about the muscular physique you can have or the endorphin high you'll get from exercise, but I have found that telling myself over and over again, "Love leg day," and, "You'll have no problem doing it once you've started doing it for five minutes" are good reminders that nothing is as bad as you make it out to be. I actually got myself for a while to get over the "hump" of taking the first step toward going to the gym for squats or going to do the dishes when I shifted my mind away from the dread of doing the activity. I also find that the more you hold off, the more you'll hold off in any activity where work piles up, from dishes and laundry to e-mails and appointments because it'll require a lot more work in a single sitting to catch up. So doing a little more frequently seems to be easier than having to block a huge amount of time to do a lot at once; however, you might be the opposite where you prefer to do a lot once per month, quarter, or year instead of more regular activities.

Whatever you choose to try, it will be very valuable to you to enjoy the process. After all, the majority of life is "the process" of living; you only enjoy the high of an achievement for maybe a few days at most before it goes away and you want something else. So if you don't enjoy the process, you'll spend the majority of your life miserable. Yes, we live more and more of our lives with free time instead of having to work, but the increasing rates of anxiety and depression show that this is ironically backfiring and causing people to have less enjoyment in their lives. In fact, one could argue that the anxiety and depression is a signal that they have learned to dread "the process" in life—social engagements, responsibilities, etc. are weighing people down instead of giving them meaning. If you want to avoid that trend, you'll need to do something different than jumping into the world of instant gratification and digital voyeurism (where there will always be someone showing off the best parts of their lives to make you feel inadequate). The fastest way to doing that is to learn to enjoy the process of living your life and not to focus so much about the outcome and how it compares to everyone else's outcomes. Do that, and you will feel much more at peace with your life as it is and how it's progressing.