You’ll Be Happier If You Love the Journey More Than the Destination

In my last article I wrote about why the journey is more important than the start.

Today I’m going to go further and argue that the journey is more important than the goal itself.

The Receding Horizon

What happens when you chase the horizon line? It keeps receding from your grasp. The horizon represents the edge of what you can see. Once you take a step towards it, you can see a little farther.

Right now there are plenty of results in your life that you can’t “see.” If your goal is to make six figures a year it’s because you can’t yet see yourself making seven.

But on the road to your goal, you’ll begin to see more and more. You’ll see how many opportunities there are to make money. You’ll see how your skills and abilities increase along the way. You’ll see how early results start to compound.

By the time you are close to your goal of making six figures, $100,000 won’t seem like the ambitious goal it once was. It will seem like a boring inevitability.

The closer you get to a goal, the less satisfied you’ll be with reaching that goal.

Getting Through the Dip

With virtually any project, there’s going to be a major delay between cause and effect, between sowing and reaping.

Seth Godin calls this “the dip.” Todd Henry, in his book Die Empty, calls it the lag.

Whatever you call it, it’s real. You start a project and your excitement and motivation are high, until the work gets hard and the fruit of your labor is nowhere to be found.

It always happens this way because gaining momentum is an exponential growth curve. The problem with being on an exponential growth curve is that it doesn’t look like an exponential growth curve at first.

Many people don’t make it through the dip. The way I see it, there are only two ways to make it through: you can either muster all your willpower to doggedly stay the course, or you can fall in love with the journey.

If all you care about is the mountaintop, the climb is going to be rough.

A better strategy is to learn to enjoy the ascent.

Conclusion

It’s on the journey that you grow. On the journey that you prove yourself. On the journey that you produce your best work.

Fall in love with the journey and you’ll be more likely to stay the course and more likely to be satisfied as you approach the finish line.

This is the fourth in a series based on my article 30 Lessons About Life You Should Learn Before Turning 30. Shoutout to Dr. Christine Bradstreet 🌴 for the idea to turn the post into an in-depth series.