Success as a side effect

[00:00:00] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Well, hello. This is The Daily Five with Aurooba, that's me, where we reflect on creating our best lives a little bit every day. Here we go.

[00:00:15] I've mentioned the phrase journey before destination a bunch of times this season. I think it a lot. But so far, we've only really talked about how enjoying the journey is a better way to ensure success, which means even though it is Journey Before Destination, it's still about the destination. And, you know, that makes sense if you're trying to get somewhere.

[00:00:40] But what about when you're trying to achieve something, which is what I really am trying to allude to? Well, I have another perspective for you to noodle along on with me. That's an awkward phrase.

[00:00:55] What if success was a side effect of what you were actually trying to do? What if the destination wasn't that end goal, but instead the destination was doing the process so well that the final end goal is inevitable? A predictable consequence of having focused on other things.

[00:01:14] I want to use an example here that is probably one we all relate to. A lot of us know how to touch type, the art of typing, without looking at the keys and always having your fingers connected to the keyboard in some way. When you first start to learn how to touch type, there are a number of exercises dedicated to training you to keep your fingers on the home row and to return to the home row after having pressed a key.

[00:01:41] I bet if you've been touch typing for a long time, you can probably position your fingers in the right place most days without even looking at the keyboard. That's your years of practice and familiarity with a particular style of keyboard coming together to create this effortless efficiency.

[00:01:59] Don't get me wrong, I'm not the fastest typer in the world, nor the most accurate, but when I'm thinking really deeply and writing a lot, I type very fast, very accurately, and my entire attention is focused on the thoughts I'm trying to get down. I'm almost never paying attention to the actual typing or the keyboard. I have the fundamentals of touch typing mastered so well that I can replicate the result again and again and again without breaking a sweat. It's effortless, but it wasn't always like this.

[00:02:32] I remember struggling to touch type as a kid. Now, granted, I actually had a lot of fun practicing it, because there were a bunch of really fun typing games out there that we had installed on our school computers, but I also remember it sucking sometimes, too. I remember it feeling so basic and so repetitive. Why am I practicing hitting the Y key and then returning my finger back to the J key on home row again and again and again? This is so boring. Wouldn't my time be better spent practicing typing actual words?

[00:03:06] I don't know. Well, no, actually, no. The art of training my muscle memory to know how to type each letter came first. The muscle memory of typing certain words is also really handy. You know, most of us can type our own names extraordinarily fast. But the muscle memories of the fundamentals of touch typing matter more if your primary concern is not just skill acquisition, but skill mastery.

[00:03:34] Getting great at pressing the individual keys and returning my fingers to home row made it easier to type words, and not just words I'm familiar with, but the words I'm unfamiliar with, or ones I don't have to type too often.

[00:03:48] Not that I'm saying I'm a perfect typer or a master at it. More than half my messages in the Slack app have to be edited after the fact to fix at least one or two typos. Because, unfortunately, I think even faster than I type. But you get the point.

[00:04:04] Success can be a side effect of nailing the fundamentals so well that when you put them together, the result you are looking for is inevitable. A side effect. Something bound to happen.

[00:04:18] Not that I'm saying we're all computers and these steps and fundamentals are like programs, which we can perfectly replicate every single time, all the time. But still, it's perhaps a more compelling argument for paying attention to the process and making that your goal than saying that enjoying the journey means you're more likely to stick with it, even though that is true too.

[00:04:44] What if success was a side effect, a consequence of something that is your goal?

[00:04:54] Thanks for listening. Same time tomorrow?