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Episode 39: The Joy Comes from the Effort

Jan 12

7 min read


I watched a video on YouTube the other day, on Andrew Huberman's [00:00:30] channel, that suggested that if you can convince yourself that what you like about doing a thing is not the reward, but the actual effort. that gets you to the reward, then you can excel at anything. Getting good at something is hard, and sometimes I think we watch these people that are experts, and get inspired, and soon realize how far behind we are from them, and give up.


Accomplishing a thing is always going to feel fantastic, but if the prize is the only [00:01:00] reason you're doing it, it's going to be a slog the entire time. And your bad attitude is going to keep you from success that you so badly desire. I can't remember where I read this, but there was a book I read that said Olympic swimmers actually loved practicing.


It might have been a Malcolm Gladwell book. Can't remember. But to them, the practice itself Was extremely satisfying where in contrast, the [00:01:30] same book said that when these people reached the highest levels of achievement, like in the case of these Olympic swimmers, a gold medal, they often would get a kind of low after the fact.


There's a kind of emptiness to having dedicated your life to a goal that gets accomplished without having another goal to replace it. The prize put meaning behind the effort. If they could have just enjoyed the effort without the prize, then [00:02:00] maybe they wouldn't have been left with such a gap. The reward is really not good enough to sustain us.


I learned a while back that I could not do something well if I did not enjoy it. Falling in love with the process, not the product, has made many of my endeavors become easy and even fun. Things you're good at, don't do. That are and will almost always be the things that you're interested in. Because what you're interested in, is what you will spend time [00:02:30] doing.


In the same video that I mentioned earlier, it talked about how little children like to draw and color. But when you start giving them a reward for doing it, and suddenly take that reward away, they'll stop coloring for fun. I think we're kind of wired to work. Nobody really sits and does nothing. And if they do seem to be doing nothing, then they're probably thinking or imagining something.


But even the most thoughtful of us will find [00:03:00] something to do. Even the laziest of us don't typically sit idle for very long. We're more likely to find some kind of entertainment, which I think I'd also refer to as Enjoyable work. For most of us today, our phones are the main provider of that work slash entertainment.


We're provided unlimited content to analyze and comprehend. It takes focus and effort to scroll through social posts. It takes effort to get through a game. It also takes effort to go boating, [00:03:30] or to play a board game, or to go to the beach, or to play catch. We can't help ourselves, because in truth, as much as we love moments of triumph and success, it is the work itself that we appreciate.


The best part about this is that if we can stop thinking so hard about the reward, it often becomes much easier to actually do the work. Another thing I learned about myself not too long ago was that I can more or less enjoy just about any activity, [00:04:00] especially if it involves doing it with other people.


I figure, If I can enjoy just about anything, then why can't I enjoy the things I typically associate with negativity, like housework or my job? Which I don't really hate my job, my job's kind of fun, but Even still, it's so easy to get caught up in these negative attitudes about certain kinds of work that we really make life harder on ourselves.


I know several women [00:04:30] that are married to men that are more than capable. of providing for these women's every need. They don't need to work, but they still do. I think they do it simply because they like the work and getting paid for it is more of like a happy side effect for them. Those people are happy simply because they have learned to find joy in the work and not the results.


I didn't start making much progress myself going to the gym until I realized that I actually liked going to the gym, [00:05:00] regardless of whether or not I ended up with bigger muscles. I love that I'm stronger, and that I look better than I did, but that's just a side effect of the fact that I've grown to enjoy the gym.


Sometimes we get lost in the quest to do something that we love when, more often than we think, we can find a way to love what we are already doing. Uh, there's an old movie that I like called Pollyanna, if you're familiar with it. I hated it as a child because my mom would make us watch it [00:05:30] and the protagonist, Pollyanna is a persistent optimist, and that was annoying to me, and it was kind of dorky, I thought.


But I've grown to appreciate that attitude as I've gotten older. There's a line that I particularly love in that movie, where Pollyanna says to a woman that seems to be determined to stay unhappy. She says, When you look for the bad, expecting it, you will get it. [00:06:00] When you know you will find good. We spend so much time reinforcing our internal beliefs about how bad work is that it can become all but unbearable.


I remember working in an hourly job in high school and feeling so much anticipation for the moment my shift was done. Because I had convinced myself that the work was miserable and that that's why they have to pay you to do it. It certainly wasn't anything to get excited [00:06:30] about but I robbed myself of some amount of contentment and happiness by telling myself that I could not be happy doing that work.


Sometimes life really is just terrible. And what can you do? Then again, there's quite a lot we can do. I can remember times when I let myself sit in boredom that I could have easily turned around. Sometimes we fight so hard against the concept of work, but then we'll go and do [00:07:00] some other kind of work that we choose to call entertainment or activity.


Watching a TV show is a kind of work. Scrolling on your phone is a kind of work. Sitting alone in thought is a kind of work. Sitting alone in meditation, trying to not think, is a whole ton of work. Going out to eat is work. Talking to friends is a kind of work. Absolutely everything we do in life is work.


[00:07:30] We may like some work more than others, but most work is not ultimately that different. All work involves your mind trying to accomplish something, even if it is as simple as trying to understand what your friend is saying to you. I think I put this line in another episode recently, but I can't recall, so forgive me if I've repeated myself here.


But in the movie Mary Poppins, Mary Poppins is trying to get two young children to clean their room. As she's helping them along, she [00:08:00] says, In every job, there must be done. There is an element of fun. We don't actually have to pretend that the joy comes from the effort, because the joy really does come from the effort.


Contentment comes from learning to be happy as you go. Misery comes from learning to only find happiness in those brief moments of validation. And a reward is nothing more than societal recognition of your efforts. If you're only happy with a reward, then you are [00:08:30] only really happy when others are validating you.


I think the last 15 to 20 years of social media has taught us that no one wins when we become dependent on that social validation. I became somewhat close with an older couple several years back that, had a severely disabled grandson that they had taken into their care. One of the most remarkable things about their grandson was his love of small, tiny objects.


[00:09:00] He took absolute pleasure in finding something like the back of an earring or a tiny piece of glass. If we could find a way to appreciate the small things, our happiness could be almost limitless. Writing this has got me thinking about my own children. I take them to the beach most weekends that I have them, and they love picking up shells and collecting them, and they might as well be picking up 100 bills for how excited they get over it.


They'll sometimes come and ask me how much the shells are [00:09:30] worth, and I'll usually tell them they're not terribly valuable in the real world, but that it doesn't matter. But, they still look crestfallen when they hear that, and I think it's sad that from one moment to the next, we can be as happy as we would have been picking up gold bars.


But the moment we find the world doesn't value those things the same, we refuse to take the same amount of pleasure that we once did. I wonder sometimes if we've robbed ourselves of [00:10:00] happiness and contentment in life by refusing to be happy with anything less than external validation. Who cares if you win a gold medal if you hated the process all along?


Who cares if you're good or bad at a thing if you enjoy doing it, regardless of your skill? Instead of waiting forever, Hoping for happiness to find you, maybe you can find a way to appreciate some of the small things in your life that you take for granted. We have a long road to walk in life, and [00:10:30] rushing to get to the next stop on our path is kind of like hitting the fast forward button.


If you were going to watch a movie just to skip to the major plot points, you would have been better just reading a summary of the movie. Joy comes from the daily effort and not in the reward or the next success or the next milestone. In most cases, I think I would say that if you're not happy now, I don't think you'll be happy tomorrow.

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Skipping Stones podcast with Seth Roberts explores diverse topics to uncover principles and stories that aim to help you improve your life with perspective and purpose. If you find any perspectives helpful, you can thank the countless individuals who have passed on ideas that matter for generations. Influences include Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Jesus, Robinson Crusoe, Thomas Jefferson, and countless other books, historical figures, and thinkers.

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