The journey v the destination:

The other day, during a yoga class I was taking, the instructor, said to the class that “It is important to find joy in the journey so that the destination becomes unimportant.” So much is written about this and said so often that it could be a meaningless platitude similar to when people say you should “live in the moment”. Yet, it is neither meaningless nor a platitude. To some extent this is the secret of success. Just a few week’s I wrote that one of the most significant lessons from people’s failure to keep their new year’s resolutions is that the resolutions are invariably never specifically about finding pleasure or meaning in the journey.  But on this, I have a few reflections.

The first of my thoughts on this is that over the past few years I have read and listened to many self-help gurus, business leaders, and others like Arnold Schwarzenegger exhorting people to find pleasure in hard work, the task at hand, etc., and for almost all of these successful people the centrality of their message is that it is the completion of the micro-tasks on a daily basis that leads to achievement. The outcome, whatever one is aiming to do, comes not from setting one’s sights on it but rather on the completion of the countless hours of work that is required to reach the goal. However, the magic happens not when the goal is reached, we are told, but when the activity becomes the goal, when the actions required take over from the outcome. It is in this moment, that the real transformation happens and growth, success, whatever one wants to call it, occurs.

Now, I want to take what I’ve just said and reflect on the modern world and especially the contemporary university. The university should be a place where people are transformed. Once, not that long ago, universities prided themselves on the transformative power of education. Today, all universities seem to care about is that students get the skills to get jobs when they finish. Students become fixated on how to get the best possible marks by doing the least amount required. Many only care about what they need to do for the assessments. And sadly, universities feed this instrumentalism in so many ways without realising there is an inherent contradiction in promising to prepare students for the world ahead while they create an environment that is designed to only meet their needs. Students that go to university today are not given the life lesson of finding pleasure and meaning in work that so many leaders believe is the key to success. This is only going to get worse as universities abandon attendance and participation requirements. For students of today, university is not about the journey it is about the destination and because of this they and the world we are in are poorer as a result.

Anyway, back to the importance of finding meaning and pleasure in what we do. It is this which enriches our lives and the lives of others. This was made very clear to me many years ago when I was a PhD student. At one point, I started to look at job advertisements and my focus wandered to how I’d get a job and the PhD itself became secondary. I switched my attention to the destination and the PhD became a distraction, something I had to complete if I wanted an academic job. One of the wisest people I have ever known turned to me one day as I was asking his advice about one job or another that was out there and said to me, “focus on the PhD and the rest will work itself out”. This was a light-bulb moment for me and a life changer. I did exactly what he said, and he was right. I found joy in the research, in the work I was doing and at the conclusion of the PhD, I loved doing what I did so much, that I made myself very employable. I still had challenging moments including being rejected for academic jobs, but because it was the work I loved not the job, in time I found my way.

In this contemporary world where everything seems immediate, where you can have it delivered next day or in a few hours, it is imperative to remind people, young and old, of the message that the long hard slog is not just the key to success but the source of happiness. It's not the mesage people want to hear. Tell them anyway.

Until next time, focus on the effort not the destination as part of your journey to being Herculean.