From Chasing Goals To Falling In Love With The Process

Finding joy in being, not achieving

We’ve become fixated on outputs, goals, and results while increasingly neglecting and even skipping the process, learning, experience, time, and wisdom involved and needed to create an output or achieve a goal.

“In so much of life, outputs are what’s visible, they’re what people observe, evaluate, and discuss, even though the energy and concentration and commitment results from inputs. Whether you’re a carpenter or potter or chef, the consequence of your labor surfaces in a momentary, almost forgettable finale, with the process of building the structure or shaping the clay or cooking the meal demanding most of your time. To walk around the world is to see the completed, polished products of all this labor—while almost always overlooking the time that’s required for even the smallest creation.”

Charles Schifano

The result of this output-fixation in today’s world?! Sameness, mediocrity, dysfunctional gadgets, meaninglessness, ugliness, accelerated time, education that teaches nothing, and an alarming lack of true wisdom and tacit knowledge.

And while the whole productivity, self-optimization, and convenience frenzy is all about making the process shorter, faster, easier, and more automated, we’re losing something critical:

“The problem with taking an AI-first approach to tasks is that it robs you of everything that you would have gained by doing the work yourself.

I don’t write to simply generate a 1,200 word output. I consider writing to be an extension of my curiosity, and the writing process itself is what turns a rough idea into a finished product. […] Writing is a metamorphosis that turns vague abstractions into novel ideas, but you have to go through the writing process to connect the various points along the way. […]

An over-dependence on artificial intelligence is often just lethargy disguised as efficiency, and the “outsource everything to AI” crowd ignores the fact that the work is often more valuable than the output.”

Jack Raines

Or as

L. M. Sacasas

puts it more broadly: