Friday, January 18, 2013

New Year's Resolution - Enjoy the Process. This works even for dishwashing!


There Is No Lasting Satisfaction From "Getting There" The Process Of Doing It Is The Key Item
If You Are Not Enjoying The Process, You've Had It


"Life is composed of a large number of minutes glued together. In the first one you are born, and in the last you die. For all the ones in between when you are in the middle of one of them you cannot reach forward even one minute and pull up a new minute until it is due. Also you cannot reach backward as little as one minute and re-live it. Therefore in all your life you only have one minute at a time. The quality of your life depends on what you are doing with each of these precious minutes. If you spend many of them wishing you were somewhere else, that minute will slip by unused. Add these up, and that portion of your life will have disappeared.
If Sir Edmund Hillary (the first man to climb Everest) didn't enjoy the planning of the trip and the actual climbing of the mountain, the exhilaration of the 15 minutes on top couldn't have been worth the effort. The journey's the thing. Getting there is secondary.

This insight shows up for me in so many of my efforts. If I hated every moment of writing this book (which I don't), seeing the final product in print will be an inadequate reward for all the effort that has gone into the project. If a person works out every evening because they want to look good, and the process is negative for them, they need to throw some mental switches. Once you concentrate on the process while you are doing it, a new level of enjoyment often opens up. "


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