What Makes You Happy Without Making Progress?

Let me ask you a simple question: Would you rather spend your entire life feeling like you need to be better, or would you like to be able to enjoy each experience as it comes without worrying much about where it’s going?

This is something that’s been on my mind a lot recently as I’ve tried to figure out where I want to go with this blog. I started this blog for several reasons, chief among them the potential to help other new parents like myself navigate new and unfamiliar financial waters. As I’ve gained experience and learned from other bloggers, I’ve learned about potential ways to grow my audience, expand my reach and potentially even make a little money.

Those possibilities are exciting, but they’ve also turned my focus a little bit away from my original intent. I’ve started focusing more and more on stats that tell me how well my site is doing, which takes my energy away from the simple enjoyment of writing useful content. And while there’s certainly value in learning how to expand my reach, I’ve also found that it’s changed some of my expectations and some of my desired outcomes, and to some extent has decreased the happiness I’m actually getting from the experience.

Our culture has taught us that we have to focus on progress

I think this process is similar to what many of us go through in many different aspects of our lives.

• When we meet a new romantic interest, learning about the person and building a relationship is fun and exciting. But can we form a relationship that we’re happy with once that newness wears off and the progress slows down?
• When we first start making money, it’s exciting to be able to afford some new things and improve our lifestyle. But that can feed a desire to earn more and buy more, and can lead us down an unfulfilling and potentially dangerous financial path.

So much of what we work for in life requires progress for us to feel like it was worthwhile. When we’re saving for a future goal, we want to see our account balance hit a certain target. When we put time into our careers, we want to get that next promotion or a bigger payday. When we work out, we want to be able to run further, or faster, or lift more weight.

Goals are good, as is the push for progress. Goals help us strive for a better life and take concrete steps to get there. Progress is what allows us to become better parents, better spouses, better friends. These are the things that bring us closer to living our ideal lives.

But there are problems that arise when we focus too much on progress and not enough on the process, such as:

1. Overemphasizing the end result, and
2. Failing to enjoy the present moment

Overemphasizing the end result

One of my favorite sketches from Carl Richards, a financial planner who literally illustrates his points, is one depicting the Things That Matter vs. The Things You Can Control. The point being made is that within the universe of things that matter, there is a limited amount of them that you actually have any control over, and success is derived from focusing only on that limited overlap.

I can see a natural extension of this to overall happiness as well, and specifically to the problem of focusing on the end result of your actions. Because the fact of the matter is that no matter how hard we work at something, the exact end result is often out of our control. We can save as much money as possible and follow all of the best investment practices, but we can’t control our returns. We can pour our heart and souls into being the best parents possible, but we can’t dictate exactly who our children will become. We have a lot of control over our processes, but when it comes to the outcome we’re often at the whim of many factors beyond our control. If our only focus is on the outcome, we can quickly become frustrated and disappointed with what was otherwise an enjoyable process.

The other reality is that while we might start out with a vision in our heads about how we want things to turn out, that vision could very easily change during the process. It’s extremely possible to end up somewhere completely different than what we first intended, and that new place may be just as good or even better. But if we’re laser-focused on a specific outcome, we might fail to appreciate our newly-found landing spot for the good it has to offer.

Failing to enjoy the present moment

If we’re constantly looking to achieve the next thing, how do we ever learn to simply enjoy where we are? How can we ever feel satisfied with our lives if our focus is always on the next step?

This is such a simple concept but it’s one that so many of us, myself included, often fail to really think about. We get fixated on reaching the next step, on checking off the next item on our to-do list, and before we know it years have gone by and it’s hard to say whether we really enjoyed them. Sure we might have been productive, but to what end? What good is productivity if it’s not something you’re actually enjoying? What good is reaching the next milestone if it doesn’t help you enjoy the present state of your life?

Find the things that make you happy without making progress

To me, this all leads to a very simple concept. If we want to be happy, we need to balance our desire for improvement and progress with parts of our lives that we can be happy with regardless of the outcome. In other words, we need to find the things we enjoy simply for the process and try to make them more prevalent. This might be time alone with a significant other or simply playing in the backyard with our kids. It might be a pick-up basketball game where the score doesn’t matter as much as the enjoyment of playing.

But it extends beyond finding things where the outcome doesn’t matter. It involves taking the things where the outcome DOES matter and switching our focus from that outcome to simply enjoying the process.

• Can we find work we enjoy whether or not it results in the next big sale, or positive attention from our boss, or whatever outcome it is we think we want?
• When we invest, can we stop worrying about whether we beat the market or what our account balance is at this exact moment? Instead can we focus on the process of setting goals and saving regularly and find contentment in the fact that we’re doing things the right way?
• For me specifically, can I enjoy the process of writing and expressing ideas without relying on visits and pageviews to tell me whether it was a worthwhile endeavor?

Happiness is a tricky thing, one that I certainly haven’t mastered. But I think if we really want to find happiness in our lives, we have to view it as a process rather than an outcome. The reality is that there is no single thing we can achieve that will make us happy. Instead, we have to focus more on enjoying the steps along the way without concern as to where exactly they’re taking us.

We have to find the things that make us happy without making progress.

Photo courtesy of Rigor Mortisque