Without the "convenient excuse", the journey starts looking like pure procrastination; how do you enjoy it without the guilt about not doing more important work that leads to more important results?

What if it's a bit of both? Something dawned on me today when mulling on another related idea "systems vs goals", popularized by Scott Adams in "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big"[0]. It was a widely popular book at the time, even here on HN, but the core idea never worked for me. Nor even resonated.

Quoting from the book[1]:

"A goal is a specific objective that you either achieve or don't sometime in the future. A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run. If you do something every day, its a system. If you're waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it's a goal."

Boring, ain't it?

For me, the problem with project, systems, and enjoying journey over destination is that:

1) Projects don't motivate me for long; past initial excitement, I'm rarely able to muster enough motivation from the dream of finishing something (and enjoying the spoil) to move me past static friction.

2) "Journey over destination" - I mean, if I'm doing a project, I care about benefits and (my imagined) experiences given by whatever it is that I've built or completed. Journey is just a distraction at best; typically, it's a source of stress and many yaks to be shaved, most of them stinky and ugly. If anything, I get motivation from ways to shorten the journey.

3) Systems are even worse. If journey is just distracting me from the goal, systems are about putting the goal out of mind entirely, automating it away through habits, changes to environment, etc. While probably[2] effective, systems give me zero motivation - they're too arbitrary, generic.

It's a problem that, even in this formulation, I've been trying to solve for almost a decade now. Recently, I've started thinking about what actually motivates me about a project in an ongoing fashion; the insight I had today is that it's a combination of the "project" and "journey" factors:

- The base / fallback motivation is the goal - the benefit I'll get when I reach it. Often, the major one is that someone will be satisfied or impressed. Even more often, it's the relief of getting the consequences of not completing it of my mental threat board, and/or shutting up people who pester me about it. However, that alone is only able to keep the project on my mind; it's not enough to motivate sustained work.

- The immediate-term, ongoing motivation is the journey, or specifically the experience of proficiency, and all the interesting tangents I find along the way. It's a necessary condition for me to stay on the task, but I can't treat it as the main motivation itself - when I try, my mind evaluates the value of the activity as zero and pulls emergency brakes; after all, there are much easier ways to get immediate gratification, and there are more important things to do, so if I don't care about reaching the goal, what's the point of going for it in the first place?

Systems don't even enter the motivational equation here[3].

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that, in terms of motivation, the completion of a project and the journey to it are two different things entirely; treating them as alternatives is a category error.

Also my rambling here is saying that, at this moment, nothing for me has the right combination of "project" and "journey" factors - otherwise I'd be doing something else than writing HN comments.

(And yes, finishing projects completely is hard, because that last 20% of work contains the 80% of chores and annoying tangents that completely ruin the experience of the journey.)

--

- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Fail_at_Almost_Everythi...

- [1] - Via https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/973029-a-goal-is-a-specific...

- [2] - Hard to tell, I'm clinically unable to hold a simplest habit to save my life. Forget "it takes 30 days to ingrain a habit" - even after months or years of doing something "habitually", a smallest disturbance to the daily life is enough to undo all that work and get me back to square one.

- [4] - Exception: when I can reframe setting up a system as a kind of a project. Even then, it just makes it easier to build a system; it doesn't help maintaining it over time, which is the whole point of systems in the first place.