Be prepared with a process, not a solution.
The Why: It makes the incoherent more coherent. Without a process, confusion sets in.
Process transforms any challenge into a series of small steps. Taken one by one, process will enable us to reach any goal. Process requires time and teaches patience. Process rests on a solid foundation of experience and embodies trusting in our unfolding potential. If you have a good process, clients will be happy to pay you for it.
In any process, skipping a vital step can mean the difference between success and failure. Checklists may be old school, but they work.
Process paves the path between you and your goals.
There is a process to lose weight, clean a house, or play the ukulele.
The question to ask is what's the desired outcome? The outcome defines the process required.
The more times we run the process, the easier it becomes.
There's a process to washing dishes and mine may differ than yours.
There'a process to putting dishes away, and while my process my differ from yours, the outcome is the same.
I have a process to take a book from idea to bestseller.
Worthwhile goals demand effort, risk, and sacrifice. You have to persist through fear and doubt. You have to draw on inner resources and become more than you were before. Challenges make us more than who we're were before. Every new challenge serves as an initiation - you meet discouragement, you over come discomfort, boredom, and frustration, and in the end you find out what you’re made of.
What pulls you through is the vision that inspired you to begin the quest. It can draw you like a magnet through the muck and mire. The first step in any process is to creating a direction by choosing a goal that lights a spark in you. Lean towards what excites you, what makes your heart smile. The question to ask is “Is it worth the effort and sacrifices that are inherent in the commitment to it?”
You won’t discover it (the goal) by waiting for divine revelation or absolute certainty. Often times the path won’t appear until you take the first step.
Lofty dreams in the distant future can be a heavy burden to carry. Instead, the best goals to focus on are often near term - what you can do this week, today, or even in the next hour. It’s in creating a process that yields many small successes that grand successes are built on.
Any great success is built on years of effort. Overnight quick successes don’t last long (ie. lucky breaks). They eventually crumble. Only the hard earned results stick.
OMG - this is exactly what happened with my ‘luck’ of getting on Amazon’s referral list. It took 3 years, but eventually that luck ran out.
The road to happiness is always under construction. As time passes, every process includes repairs. Focus on taking life one step at a time until you get it right (recall the process of stepping away from the tree and throwing the rock. Sometimes, you’ll have to step back closer until you hit the tree, then you can step back again). When discipline and patience join forces, they become the persistence that endures the peaks and valleys that carry you intention to completion.
Enthusiasm sets the pace, but persistence reaches the goal. Process, patience, and persistence (3Ps) are the keys to unlock the door to any destination. The treasure isn’t only at the journeys end, the process itself is it’s own reward.
Reach one goal and you’ll only create another - the journey never ends. Hidden in the obstacles are the seeds to our next goal.
True fulfillment comes from engaging deeply with your work and relationships—not from chasing external rewards or status symbols that leave you perpetually hungry for the next achievement.
Comparison is the thief of joy.
We're living through a cultural moment that measures everything by its payoff: followers, salaries, titles, exits. But this wealth ethic has quietly eroded something essential—the capacity to find meaning in the work itself. When you optimize only for outcomes, you become a stranger to your own days, always living in some imagined future where success finally arrives.
The shift back to process over payoff isn't romantic nostalgia. It's a recognition that the quality of your attention shapes the quality of your life. When you focus on substance—on doing things well, on learning deeply, on building genuine relationships—you develop capabilities that transcend any single goal. You become someone who can navigate uncertainty, who creates value wherever you go, who doesn't crumble when circumstances change.
This matters because the payoff-obsessed approach is inherently fragile. Markets shift, industries evolve, status fades. But skills, character, and the ability to engage meaningfully with challenges? Those compound. They make you antifragile.
More importantly, process-driven living solves the happiness paradox. People who chase outcomes rarely feel satisfied when they achieve them—they just reset the goalpost. But those who find intrinsic reward in their daily work access a renewable source of fulfillment. They're not waiting for permission to enjoy their lives. They're already living them.
This philosophy doesn't ask you to be less ambitious. It asks you to be more honest about what you actually want: not just the trophy, but the person you'd have to become to earn it. Not just the destination, but a journey worth taking.
Instead of asking "What did I accomplish today?" ask: - What did I learn today? - What did I create or improve? - Where was I fully present? - What challenge did I engage with honestly?
Keep a simple log where you note one genuine engagement each day—a moment where you were absorbed in process, not outcome.
Document the behind-the-scenes work that nobody sees: - Failed experiments and what they taught you - Skills you're building slowly, deliberately - Relationships you're nurturing without agenda - Problems you're working through without clear solutions
Review this quarterly to see growth that doesn't fit on a resume.
Add intentional difficulty that forces deeper engagement: - Take on projects slightly beyond your current skill level - Commit to doing things manually before automating them (to understand how they work) - Choose harder routes that build capability over convenient shortcuts - Practice explaining complex ideas until you truly understand them
Identify areas of life where you refuse to measure or optimize: - Conversations where you're not networking, just connecting - Hobbies practiced for pleasure, not performance - Learning pursued from curiosity, not career advancement - Creative work done without audience in mind
Protect these spaces fiercely—they teach you what intrinsic motivation feels like.
Find people who value how you work, not just what you achieve: - Join or create mastermind groups focused on craft, not outcomes - Share work-in-progress, not just finished products - Discuss challenges and learning, not just wins - Celebrate effort and growth, not just results
When starting projects: 1. Write down what you hope to learn or experience 2. Identify what would make the process itself worthwhile 3. List ways you'll grow regardless of the result 4. Define success in terms of effort quality, not external validation
Return to this when anxiety about outcomes creeps in.
Regularly examine your goals: - Which ambitions are truly yours vs. borrowed from culture? - What would you pursue if no one ever knew about it? - Are you building toward something or running from inadequacy? - Does achieving this goal require becoming someone you respect?
Be ruthlessly honest. Some goals deserve to be abandoned.
Every Sunday, assess: 1. Where did I prioritize process over payoff this week? 2. Where did I slip into outcome obsession? 3. What's one way I can engage more deeply next week? 4. Am I becoming someone I respect, regardless of achievements?
The goal isn't perfection—it's maintaining awareness of what you're optimizing for.
Somewhere along the way, we traded work ethic for wealth ethic—swapping the satisfaction of doing something well for the promise of what it might get us. We began measuring our days not by what we created or learned, but by what we accumulated: money, status, validation from others.
But what if the real prize isn't waiting at the finish line? If it's woven into every moment we spend fully engaged in our work, every connection we nurture with care, every problem we wrestle with until something clicks?
When you focus on the process—on the substance of what you're actually doing—something shifts. The setbacks stop feeling like failures and start feeling like teachers. Mistakes become part of the story, not detours from it. The uncertainty that once paralyzed you becomes the very thing that keeps you growing.
This isn't about abandoning ambition or settling for less. In fact, it demands a fiercer kind of ambition—one that refuses to cheapen your dreams by reducing them to their most marketable parts. It's the difference between wanting to be called a writer and needing to write, between craving the title of entrepreneur and being unable to stop building things that matter.
Process-driven ambition doesn't ask "What will this get me?" but rather "What will this make of me?" It's not content with shortcuts or the appearance of success. It wants mastery, depth, and the bone-deep satisfaction of knowing you didn't just arrive somewhere impressive—you earned every step, learned from every stumble, and became someone capable along the way.
This kind of ambition is actually harder to maintain. It doesn't offer the quick dopamine hit of checking boxes or the social proof of flashy milestones. It requires you to care about things that don't photograph well: the hundredth revision, the patient explanation to someone who doesn't understand yet, the integrity of doing something right when no one's watching.
But it's also the only kind of ambition that sustains itself. When your drive comes from genuine engagement with the work—from curiosity, craftsmanship, or service—you don't burn out chasing someone else's definition of arrival. You keep going because the work itself nourishes you.
So this philosophy doesn't ask you to think smaller. It asks you to want more: more presence, more growth, more substance. It's choosing to build skills not just to reach goals, but because the building itself transforms you. It's showing up each day not to cross something off a list, but to engage with life as it unfolds—messy, difficult, and infinitely richer than any outcome could capture.
When you live this way, guided by authentic purpose rather than society's scoreboard, you discover something unexpected: the opportunities multiply, the joy deepens, and fulfillment stops being something you chase. It becomes something you inhabit, right here in the work itself.
Emphasizes valuing the journey, personal growth, and intrinsic fulfillment over mere outcomes or external rewards. A critique of the societal shift away from relishing the work itself, aka “work ethic”—toward a “wealth ethic” focused primarily on financial or status-based payoffs.
Real satisfaction comes from embracing substance—the quality of your work, meaningful connections, and honest effort—rather than constantly chasing material accumulation or accolades.
This outlook encourages:
When people prioritize the substance of their life’s journey—by fostering creativity, learning, and service—they access more opportunity, deeper joy, and greater potential for fulfillment, regardless of the final “payoff”. This philosophy asks us to question whether our actions and aspirations are guided by authentic purpose, rather than solely by what society measures as success.