What Does ‘Loving The Process’ Actually Mean?
It’s something you hear all the time. Love the process. Love the grind. Don’t be in it for rewards. Follow that, and you’ll be successful.
Sounds simple, but what does it mean?
It’s pretty clear that if you jump into anything and expect rewards immediately, you won’t have a good time. Especially businesses. Sure you may get the money, but your business will suffer quickly and fizzle out and you’ll be back to square one.
Long term success is a different game with different rules. Rules that you must play by or everything will turn around on you. Those rules are the process. The system is the process. The small things you do every day that guarantees inevitable success are the process.
Let’s look at an example. If you want to be a successful writer getting paid from Medium, having book deals on the table, and really enjoy what you do, you don’t write click-bait about popular stuff you don’t care about once in a while when you feel like writing.
Successful writers write as close to every single day as they can manage. They write about things that interest them, things they are deeply about. They say the words that can’t be held inside anymore. Every day. They build their life around writing because that is what they enjoy. They don’t try to fit it in throughout their day, they schedule it in its own special time, generally early in the morning when most people are still asleep. They care about it that much. They may care about the rewards too. It’s always nice to get paid for what you love. It’s every writer’s dream to have a book published. They just aren’t taking shortcuts.
Sure, you could write 15 click-bait articles a day and make a lot of money. Lots of people do that. I would love to ask them if they love their work. If they can see themselves doing it for the rest of their life. I want to know if they have a following of people who enjoy their writing style, or if they have a following around a specific topic.
Following the process brings inevitable success. No matter what as long as you write every day and push yourself to be better, something good will come your way. This means that you get to truly enjoy what you do because there is no pressure to perform. You be yourself. You do what you love. And you get the success over time. If you can really stick to the process things start happening a lot faster than you expect too.
My Story
Over a year ago now I started writing on Medium daily. I did almost every day for 60 days. Then it was every other day for another 45. Then maybe once a week. I enjoyed it the whole way through, I just couldn’t figure out how to keep up the daily routine and burnt myself out.
In those first 100 or so days I went from absolutely zero views to anywhere from 100–2000. To this day, despite having barely published anything for 8 months I get 100+ views a week. The old me who had just started writing was thrilled by 5 views. By the time I stopped writing I simply wasn’t happy with getting less than 50. I stopped focusing on the process and started chasing results. That’s when I wrote “5 Ways I’ve Used to Grow my Follower Count” (another reward I was chasing) and got 2000 views in a week. After that nothing was satisfying. I wanted to reach that level of ‘success’ again and couldn’t.
Really taking a look at it though…For 100 days of writing, doing something I enjoyed and loved, I’m still getting 100+ views a week. Those stories are still circulating out there. Hopefully, they are impacting people in positive ways.
