Enjoy the Journey: Why Loving the Process is Key to Success

Good morning, Believe Nation. It's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe in people more than they believe in themselves. And my sincere hope is that if you see in yourself what I see in you, you'll be able to change the planet. So to help you on your journey, today's message is enjoy the journey. Over to you, Eckhart Tolle.

I wake up every morning, espresso keep me going.

I wake up every morning, Talking about past and future and excessive emphasis on past and future in your life, yes, of course you need to have— there's nothing wrong with having a certain intention of what you want to achieve, take steps towards it, it's part of living here in this dimension, you can't just say, "I'm never going to plan anything anymore," just take life as it comes. Well, some people try to do that, but they're not that happy either after a while. So then your life will get very diffused, and so to have an intention, to make a plan, perfectly fine. Either a short-term plan, like I'm going to meet you tomorrow at 4 o'clock. How would you ever meet anybody if we didn't have time? And future on a practical level, of course it's needed. The question is whether future takes over your mind. Being able to use it for practical purposes is of course great, but I call that clock time, is fine, but psychological time is when the future takes over your mind and your entire thought patterns are geared only towards future, and you treat the present moment as either just a means to an end because it enables you to get to the next one, You're always reaching out, so to speak, internally to the next, yet never quite here, always looking for some fulfillment there, so you can never embrace the fullness of now, or you make the now into even an enemy. Some people are always unhappy. Perhaps we all know one or two people like that.

Three.

Who are, wherever they are, they're complaining, it's never quite right. Wherever they are or whoever they are with, after a little while, they're very uncomfortable again. They should be somewhere else. You know the bumper sticker that you see on some cars, in various versions of it, says, "I'd rather be golfing." And then another one says, "I'd rather be fishing." I'd rather be this, I'd rather be there. When I visited the spiritual teacher Ram Dass, who lives in Hawaii, he has a bumper sticker on— Ram Dass was the person who in the '70s wrote the book "Be Here Now." Anyway, he has a bumper sticker on his car that says, "I'd rather be here now." So, and then you realize you can actually, you can still pursue whatever an intention, where you want to get to, a plan. I call it, it's a bit like a journey. Your life is a journey. You're going, you know you want to go from here to there. Whether you're going to get there, we don't know. Maybe on the way you'll branch off out to somewhere else, but at least you have a certain direction. It's good to have some direction in your life, but while you are traveling, if your destination takes up most of your attention and you're continuously focusing on there, you miss all the journey really. You can't enjoy the journey anymore, and most of your life is the journey. The arriving is relatively rare— the wedding, Ahh. And a few more graduations.

Ahh.

But so those moments are not that far and few between. So the rest is the journey. And if you can't enjoy the journey, which means the step you're taking at this moment is really the most important thing. Yes, of course, you know you're going that way, but this step is still to be enjoyed. Because that's where ultimately your whole life consists of the step you're taking at this moment. There is never anything else.

Most entrepreneurs fail, I believe, because they don't enjoy the journey. Because they set some big goal for themselves, they want to have a million dollars or they want to build this company or whatever it is that they want to go out and do and they're so attached to the goal without the process, without the how, without the execution on a daily basis. I believe most entrepreneurs fail because all they do is have a goal and they say, "I'm gonna do whatever it takes to go and hit that goal," but they don't enjoy the whatever it takes. And if all you're doing is jumping from one goal to another goal to another goal and never enjoying the process or the journey along the way, you're never gonna be fulfilled, you're never gonna be happy, you're never gonna actually hit most of those big goals that you set for yourself. It comes up consistently over and over and over and over again in all the people that I profile from all walks of life, from entrepreneurs to singers to actors, musicians, politicians, business people, athletes, everyone. You have to enjoy the grind. And a lot of people see the grind as a negative thing. They see it as this just constant hustle and work. And if you're working on the wrong thing, then it is a negative thing. If you threw me into your job, into whatever your business was, I would probably suffocate. In most businesses, in most jobs, in most roles, and I had, you know, part-time jobs and other jobs before starting this, I would— I suffocated. I hated it. I could only force myself to do something for so long. You can only force yourself to do something that you don't enjoy for so long before you quit, because it sucks. Where you have to enjoy the daily process of the work that you're doing. Now that becomes especially hard for entrepreneurs because there's a lot of crap that we have to deal with to build a business. There's a lot of crap we have to deal with, and there's very minimal results at the beginning as you're just getting started, as you're building up momentum. There's very small results that you're actually getting back for your company, so it's hard to stay motivated. It's hard to keep going. So not every day is going to be amazing as an entrepreneur. In fact, you're going to have a lot of crappy days. You're going to have a lot of days that just don't work out, a lot of days that you feel like quitting, a lot of days where you are really hard on yourself, really negative towards yourself, saying that you're never going to make it. You're going to have a lot of those days as an entrepreneur. The thing that gets you through is that you still enjoy the work. You may not enjoy everything else around building a business, but you enjoy the work. You enjoy creating whatever you're creating. You enjoy dealing with your customers. Whatever it is that, that you need to take more responsibility of, more ownership of, to do more consistently. I love making videos. I love helping entrepreneurs. Not every day is amazing in my life, on my YouTube channel. You know, we had the whole past month of not having great audio on the videos, and you guys gave me A ton of flak for that, and you know, well deserved. I have standards too, and we all want to make amazing videos for you guys on my team. So not every day is gonna be special, not every day is gonna be the best day ever, but net-net, I love making videos for you guys. I love the work that I do. I wouldn't want to be doing something else. I don't sit in my office, or sit at home, or sit here at TDS and start thinking, "Huh, I wish I could do this." As soon as I get that idea, I wish I could do something else, I have to go out and do it. It means what I'm doing is wrong. Means I have to cut something that I'm doing right now and start doing the other thing that I'm daydreaming about. You have to enjoy the work, you have to enjoy the process. And so if you pick the business where you don't, that's when you quit. When people ask me, should I quit on my business? Depends. Do you still enjoy it? Do you love it? Do you have the passion for it? That's the only thing that matters. If you don't enjoy it and you're just chasing the goal, quit right now. And move on to something else. But if you do enjoy it and you want to keep going and you have this vision of yourself in the future having this big impact, then you have to keep going. And you're going to get hit with a lot of bricks along the way, but you have to keep going because you enjoy the work. So the question today, today is I want to spread a little bit of positivity. I'm curious, what do you enjoy the most about the process in your business? What's your most favorite task? Leave it down in the comments below, really curious to find out. And if you leave a comment within the first few hours of this video going live, you get a chance to win one of our two daily prizes. I also wanna give a quick shout out to Steph Reveron. Steph, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word, and taking that picture and sharing it with me. It really, really means a lot to me, and I'm so glad that you enjoyed the book. Thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love, and I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of Enespresso. I wake up every morning.

Enespresso keep me going.

This is where trainers mess people up. I've had trainers who totally just want to prove that you could never do what they do. And they have you paying.

I know what you mean.

Just to say like, oh, this is what I—

You're not as good as me. Right.

And they go to blast you like they want you— Unless you're in pain and you feel like you're sick and you're throwing up, they're like, "Yeah, that's a workout now. Yeah, yeah, look at you. Yeah, you hurt, you hurt, you can't walk? Great." And the whole point is, what I tell people is treat the gym like a spa. The first time you ever go, just go in there and walk around. Touch the weights, get a drink of water, walk around, and then leave. And I mean, literally do that for like a week, 2 weeks, until you just get to the habit of getting in that door. 'Cause what's gonna happen is eventually you're gonna start lifting because you're there. And you're gonna do something. And then you stop. Don't ever get to the point where you're like, "I can't feel my arms, ah!" It doesn't work. I've been working, people want, they say they want my body and all this stuff, but I've been working out consistently since I was 14 years old. And I'm 44. 30 years of hardcore 2-hour workouts.

30 years!

So it doesn't happen overnight. You just have to enjoy the process. Learn to enjoy it. 'Cause I'm sure there was a point where you started to enjoy losing 113 pounds. And that's the only way you're gonna keep going.

Enjoy the journey, not the destination. A lot of us delay our happiness. When I get to this level, when I get my degree, when I get the kids, when I get married, I'm gonna be happy. Enjoy the journey, enjoy the whole step, the whole process. Every day that you get up to strive for whatever it is you're after. You know I'm a goal-oriented guy. Yeah, absolutely. But you don't celebrate when you get to the finish line. Celebrate all along the way. Celebrate all along the way. Along the way.

Yeah, man.

A lot of time I'll bring a friend of mine to the gym, and, uh, let's say it's a girl I'll bring out to the gym, and she already feels really hot about herself, but as she goes to the gym, she begins to see her weak spots. Uh, she begins to actually realize how far she has to go, and paradoxically, the very act of actually improving herself makes her feel even more insecure. Um, you'll see the same thing when guys actually try to get a little bit of money going, or let's say that they try to learn to be good with girls, right? Let's say you actually thought your money was okay and then you start improving your cash situation, all of a sudden you realize, damn, if I want to get a good business going, I want to get my career going with some good momentum, I have a lot further to go than I realized. Likewise, as far as girls go, most guys actually walk around thinking like, you know, they could win any fight, they could pick up any girl. When you actually go and try to do it, you realize how much you suck. It winds up making you feel even more insecure. So just remember that the fact that you are trying to improve yourself, it's a paradox between self-improvement and self-acceptance. Because the very act of improving yourself sometimes can make you feel a little bit bad. Uh, what's the frame that I come from then? How do I do all the self-improvement stuff and not feel terrible? Um, well, what I do is I come from a basic frame, and the basic frame is I'm already awesome and I'm just enjoying my journey of becoming even more awesome. So I remember back when I was first teaching boot camps, uh, one of the first ones I ever taught was here in New York City. I didn't really have a lot of students. We didn't charge a lot of money and probably wasn't the best teacher, so you might not want to have been at that boot camp. But the point being was I was teaching boot camp in a Starbucks. You know, I'd sneak into like, you know, an HIV clinic and say that I had HIV, or we break into a school building and do it on milk crates. I'd be doing seminars in those environments. And if you would have asked me if I thought what I was doing was cool, I'd say, yeah, it's cool. Right now I might teach like, you know, a 400 or 500 person seminar at a hotel. You ask me if I think it's cool, I say I think it's fucking cool. Someday I could be teaching a 5,000-person audience in a big auditorium somewhere, like some kind of, you know, convention center. And if you ask me if I think it's cool, I think that's cool. And if I was around the whole damn planet, I think that's cool too. Wherever I am on my journey, I'm loving it, okay? I love the journey because as far as I'm concerned, the golden era is now. The golden era is is the present moment. And, um, wherever I am, right, like if you're asking me now, like, oh, did it suck when you taught the programs back at Starbucks? Fuck no, it was awesome. I was already awesome and enjoying my journey to become even more awesome, right? Someday if I'm teaching 5,000 people, you say, oh, teaching 500 people, oh, was that too small of a crowd for you? I'd say no, I was just enjoying my journey. I was awesome and just enjoying being on the path to becoming even more awesome.