Paul Assaiante has been referred to as the “winningest coach in college sports history.” Though he’s not a household name like some other legendary coaches, it’s not because of an absence of performance. His lack of notoriety may be that his sport is less well-known than others. His world is the game of Squash. He’s coached his men’s college team to remain undefeated over 12 years. In a book Run to the Roar, Assaiante writes, “Life is not just about peaks and valleys, about wins and losses. Life is about the journey. You hear that all the time. You’ve got to absorb that. You’ve got to know that. The journey has to become the destination because there is no true destination. There is no endpoint. There is no goal. All rivers run to the sea and yet the sea is not full. Life goes on; accept what life gives you. The sun rises the morning after you win the championship or lose in the first round.”
Assaiante’s perspective is different from what many of us default to. For most, we’re like the kid in the backseat of their parents’ car on a family road trip. We’re asking over and over, “are we there yet?” or “When are we going to get there?” We want the end, the destination, the podium, the credential, the prize, the reward, the outcome. We’re putting up with the process. We’re not in love with it. The wise, like Assaiante, recognize that there’s Joy in the Journey.
Yes, it’s good to have a direction. Things are clearer when we’re driving to a definite destination. Nonetheless, the path to progress may remain a mess. “A goal”, as Bruce Lee offered, “is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.” Progress is not guaranteed. Nor, is it necessarily linear. On an episode of The Knowledge Project, performance coach, Todd Herman, offered a distinction between “go to goals” and “go through goals” as an explainer of differences between the average and high performers. Go to goals are the domain of those that are looking to find an end to their efforts. They believe that once they accomplish x, they can coast. Herman pointed out the problem with go to goals noting that President Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the moon was only part of the process. Sure, getting a man to the moon was an aspirational aim. Yes, it would be a monumental achievement. However, it’s only half the battle. The real goal would be bringing the person back to earth. Then the goal would be to communicate the power of human ingenuity to pursue great aims. In other words, the power of Kennedy’s land a man on the moon goal lied in its go through goal aspect. It was much more of a continued process than simply an end point.
Those that are geared to go through goals recognize that the achievement of x is the beginning of the next leg of the journey. Goals exist in perpetuity. Once a goal is achieved, the next one must be developed. Amateurs believe that a destination is desired whereas professionals accept that the destination is the journey. One wants the path to end whereas the other is content with continued commitment. Go through goals are the purview of masters which can be contrasted with go to goals pursued by the mediocre.
The first chapter offered a quote from Mark Twain which captures the value of go through goals. Twain wrote, “To live a fulfilled life, we need to keep creating the ‘what is next’ of our lives. Without dreams and goals there is no living, only merely existing, and that is not why we are here.” Twain realized that goals guide and inspire our actions. We need not just occasionally but throughout our lives something to which to aim.
To joy in the journey is to have faith in the power of the process. It’s narrowing your focus from an uncertain, foggy future to what you can do today. The idea of ten thousand hours as the amount of time of committed practice required to produce talent across several domains was popularized in the past 15-20 years. Some see 10,000 as too high a price to pay. Others see it as a grind through which to grudgingly slog. The best view 10,000 hours as the minimum price to pay and look forward to investing several multiples of that effort over many decades. Dedication to top performers isn’t daunting, it’s desirable.
Adam Grant writes in Hidden Potential, “the best way to unlock hidden potential isn’t to suffer through the daily grind. It’s to transform the daily grind into a source of daily joy.” Staying in the game is the best way to give yourself a chance at achieving success. Patience is a superpower. It’s not about revving at 110% for as long as you can as things will start to break down. Body, mind, and spirit will suffer and cease when pushed too hard for too long. We’re looking to pick a pace that will keep us in the race. Your ambition is to survive the battle of attrition. Sustaining the game is a marker of progress. The best find a way to turn the tedium of practice into the pleasure of play. They relish the routine and take joy in the journey.
The journey can ebb and flow. It can involve periods of pushing interspersed with periods of taking it easy. Rest and recovery are part of the program. A balance keeps you buoyant. It lifts your spirits and keeps you afloat. Balance is the opposite of obsession. Obsession is constant redlining which leads to exhaustion.
The journey includes ups and downs. You will make progress, you will hit plateaus, you will encounter setbacks. You will find some days tough and some days easy. The journey is anything but straight and predictable. Success is a mess. I heard someone recount a parable worth considering. It went something like there is a ladder with three people on it. One person is at the top of the ladder, one is midway, and one is at the bottom. Which one would you want to be? The answer for peak performers is to be the one that is still climbing. Satisfaction is found in the struggle. It’s found in the doing. It’s not found at the end. It doesn’t matter whether you’re at the start, the middle, or nearing the end of your journey, fulfillment is found in continuing to climb. Put differently by professor and podcaster, Andrew Huberman, “Dopamine is not about the pursuit of happiness it is about the happiness of pursuit.”
Seeing progress and feeling that progress is being made are powerful motivators. This is the fuel that feeds the journey. Stagnation and setbacks stunt the desire to keep exerting effort. There are few worse feelings than continuing to push when no progress is being made. We need to know that these periods are inevitable as part of our journey. We can have faith in our process and stay the course. We can take time to reflect, review, and refine our approach. We can chart a new route to evade an obstacle and make progress another way. We can take a break and rest for a moment. All are parts of our journey. All can be moments to maintain motivation and take joy.
We’re exposed to overnight successes, quick-fixes, hacks, short-cuts, and more in our immediate gratification focused world. In a world that is flooded with messages valuing instant gratification, dedication is looked at with disdain. Gordon Livingston observed in Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart, “The slowness with which productive change actually takes place does not play well in an impatient society. Where do we find the determination and patience required to achieve the things we want?” Patience is a superpower. Where we take pleasure in the joy of the journey, patience is embedded. We aren’t rushing to the end. Ryan Holiday wrote in an email, “if you can understand that all good things take time, that it’s a process, you’re almost always going to be more successful.” To James Clear, “Patience is a competitive advantage. In a surprising number of fields, you can find success if you are simply willing to do the reasonable thing longer than most people.”
Professor Angela Duckworth writes in Grit, “Many of us, it seems, quit what we start far too early and far too often. Even more than the effort a gritty person puts in on a single day, what matters is that they wake up the next day, and the next, ready to get on that treadmill and keep going.” Too many of us view patience as a nuisance. The best view it as a virtue. Yes, patience is a superpower available to everyone. High performers take to heart Hofstadter’s Law. Hofstadter’s Law suggests that everything complex takes longer than expected. This is the case even where you’ve factored in the idea that things take longer than expected into your planning. Not just accepting but embracing Hofstadter’s Law is the path to seeing life as a journey. Our objective is to stay in the game and give ourselves a chance.
Ryan Holiday has observed the power of Hofstadter’s Law in his own progress writing in a blog post, “I started blogging in 2005. My first book came out in 2012. The Obstacle is the Way came out in 2014…and took six years for it to hit any bestseller list. I didn’t hit the New York Times Bestseller list until 2019 on my 13th book.” That’s tortoise like progress, but dramatic progress, nonetheless. Holiday continues, “That’s life. That’s how success works. … The point is: It always takes longer than you want. So, one of the most important habits is the habit that makes all other habits possible: patience.”
James Clear, author of the blockbuster selling book Atomic Habits, echoes Holiday’s ode to patient plodding writing in a blog post, “It took me… 200+ articles before I got a book deal. 250+ articles before I got major media coverage. 100+ interviews before my book hit the bestseller list. You need a lot of shots on goal. Not everything will work, but some of it will. Keep shooting.” It’s a theme Clear returns to again and again. In a separate tweet, Clear wrote, “The best exercise for gaining strength is not missing workouts.” Finally, Clear gives us “It’s better to do less than you hoped than nothing at all. No zero days.”
Former NBA coach, Kevin Eastman, writes in Why the Best Are the Best, “What I have learned from studying the journeys of successful people is that it takes a lot of years to become an overnight sensation.” In other words, as Dr. George Sheehan wrote in Running and Being, “The spectacular things are the routine things done every day, consistently.” It’s not glamor and glitz. “A modest but regular schedule, if it really is regular, produces wonder,” writes Piers Steel in The Procrastination Equation.
Ralph Emerson exhorted us to, “Adopt the pace of nature, her secret is patience.” Two thousand years prior to Emerson, Epictetus observed, “No bull reaches maturity in an instant, nor do men become heroes overnight.” Affirming the power of the wisdom of waiting, a Chinese Proverb as recounted by Bodhi Sanders in Warrior Wisdom “states that one doesn’t plant a forest in the morning and cut logs in the afternoon. It takes time for the tree to grow.” This has been echoed by the Malaysian politician, Tunku Abdul Rahman, who noted in Leaders of New Nations, “Some people think that as soon as you plant a tree, it must bear fruit. We must allow it to grow a bit.” The most proven process for progress is that of nature. “The evolutionary journey is not grandiose, but gradual. It’s about doing something—even small things—every day, not waiting for huge leaps and otherwise doing nothing” write Alan Weiss and Marshall Goldsmith in Lifestorming. Investing legend, Peter Kaufman, gives us, “The most powerful force that could be potentially harnessed is dogged incremental constant progress over a very long timeframe.” Finally, Morgan Housel in The Psychology of Money affirms the power of patience writing, “The big takeaway from ice ages is that you don’t need tremendous force to create tremendous results. If something compounds—if a little growth serves as the fuel for future growth—a small starting base can lead to results so extraordinary they seem to defy logic.”
When everyone is imploding from their impatience, seek to model the message of the Latin phrase “Festina Lente” which means to make haste slowly. Commitment is choosing consistency over intensity. Progress is more a product of what you’re doing every day as opposed to what you do on a single day. Joy in the journey flows from staying in the game. You’re not racing to the finish line. You want to slowly savor the steps on the road of life. Be less worried about making magic and adopt Napoleon Hill’s advice suggesting, “If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.”
