Are You Enjoying Your Journey?

Note: This is a guest post from Kyle Durand from The Entrepreneurial Advocate
Most mornings I wake up and start my day with an adventure. This adventure usually has something to do with darting through the woods, cycling over the mountains or swimming in the lake near my home. I am often asked during the course of the day about my morning workout, and a recurring question is, “How far did you go?” This is a question I often can’t answer with objective data, because I generally don’t keep track of distance, time or any specific numbers during my morning adventures. Instead of data, I focus on enjoying the journey and improving the quality and richness of my experiences. The principles of enjoying the process of whatever I am doing and keeping an open mind to new possibilities and experiences are the fundamental guides for the other parts of my life, as well.

It wasn’t always this way for me, though.

For most of my adult life, my central focus was on measuring productivity and climbing ladders. I tracked every minute, mile and repetition during my morning workouts. I went to the gym at the same time every day, climbed onto a treadmill, bicycle trainer or into the pool and had a specific time or distance to reach. This laser focus on numbers was not limited to athletics, though. After my morning workouts, I entered my exercise data into a log and headed to work where I put in the designated amount of time in the office, billed the appropriate number of hours, saw the approved number of clients and generated the required number of documents before heading home to net more time or mileage running, cycling or lifting weights. My days were myopically focused on metrics – time, distance, weight lifted, hours billed, documents created, etc. One day bled into another and weeks, months and years passed.

I amassed volumes of data but severely neglected the truly important things in my life. While overly captivated by the numbers, I inflicted serious damage on my body and my relationships. When my back hurt, I refused to stop, because I wouldn’t meet my self-imposed distance quotas. When a doctor told me that I had a stress fracture in my pelvis from overuse, I kept running, cycling and lifting weights. When my friends wanted to socialize, I passed, because I “didn’t have the time”.

From an outside perspective, and according to my production numbers, I was successful in athletics and my career. Among dozens of other athletic events, I completed 18 marathons, 3 Ironman triathlons and qualified for the US national championships and the world championships in triathlon. Professionally, I obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in physics, a Juris Doctorate in law, a post-doctorate degree in tax law and was certified to practice in three states and before the US Federal courts. I scrambled up one ladder rung after another and rose through the ranks in my profession, engaging in dozens of legal cases around the country, including two that went before the US Supreme Court.

Internally, though, my life was full of pain and loneliness. My health deteriorated as I sacrificed my physical, mental and emotional well-being at the alter of production. It wasn’t until the culmination of a series of events that resulted in my body, many of my relationships and my career falling apart that I realized there was more to life than metrics. All of the myopic focus on hitting specific numbers left me with a pile of rubble where my life used to stand and a series of hard lessons.

Specifically, I was shown that our lives are meant to be experienced and enjoyed – not just measured. I was mired in focusing solely on a goal or a specific result and completely missed out on the joys and opportunities that my journeys could have provided. My pre-occupation with measuring and achieving caused me to be disassociated from all of the wonderful experiences that I was surrounded by along the way.

To make matters worse, when I achieved a particular goal, I simply moved on to the next target without savoring the satisfaction of that achievement. This vicious cycle resulted in a theme of dissatisfaction that permeated my life. Virtually nothing was ever good enough – no race time, no work result and no relationship. I had inadvertently created a no-win situation for myself in which my ladder-climbing goals drained all of the joy out actually reaching the destination.

Leaving the ladder behind

When I finally made a decision to get off the ladder, I started seeing all of the richness in life that was right in front of me the entire time. My world was changed immediately. Instead of depending on the future to make me happy, I am happy in the present. Rather than putting my head down and grinding through a workout or a project on my way to a specific outcome, I keep my head up and eyes open for new experiences and new opportunities for adventure. I shifted from focusing on things I can measure and count – the tangible resources, to focusing on the stuff that is harder to measure and count – the intangible resources. As a result, my life is significantly richer.

Don’t get me wrong – I am not suggesting that once you slow down to “smell the flowers” that everything will be hunky dory and you will glide through life. You will face obstacles, you will struggle at times and the journey will not always be as smooth as you might want. But, I believe that it is vitally important to remember during those tough periods that there are valuable lessons to be learned from facing adversity and to embrace those lessons as sacred insights into who you are and what you are capable of.

We spend much more of our time on the way to a goal rather than at the goal. Passing up the joys that the trip provides causes us to spend most of our time unhappy and relying on an anticipated result to fulfill us. No achievement will make up for the lost time, lost happiness and lost relationships.

When all is said and done, you probably won’t remember how far you went, how much time you invested or the amount of money you made or lost along the way. Instead, what you will recall are the experiences and the people that you encountered during your voyage. So, enjoy the journey and the abundant richness that it brings to your life.

Kyle is an entrepreneur, adventurer and business attorney who’s mission is to encourage entrepreneurship and to provide resources and tools to make business dreams become realities. Swing by and visit him at The Entrepreneurial Advocate or @kpdurand on Twitter.