It feels good to have written a book.

It’s similar, I suspect, to the feeling of running a marathon or hosting a successful dinner party: it’s an achievement, and it’s satisfying to know you’ve done something difficult and aspirational (even better if there’s some kind of implied social status attached to said achievement).

It also feels good to write a book.

The act of jotting, editing, sculpting something over a long period of time is meditative and frustrating. It’s growth-inducing; it’s productively frictional.

It’s a joyous sort of exertion, if you’re the type of person who enjoy writing and books and stories and sharing things with others.

The process is tedious and the path can be long and uncertain, but there’s something invigorating about the entire exercise, which is probably why some people stick with it all the way till the end, despite the ponderousness of the process and its many difficulties and downsides.

For every accomplishment, there’s the thing at the end and there’s the stuff you do to get there.

If you’re solely aiming for that end-point, you’ll be a lot less consistently motivated and thus a lot less likely to actually achieve that goal.

Counterintuitively, then, it can be more productive to focus on finding some kind of satisfaction in the process rather than prodding yourself forward by imagining how good it will feel to have written a book or run a marathon.

Learn to love the daily grind, the minor victories, the mysterious and meandering paths between milestones. If you can find a way to enjoy (or latently love) the stuff you do to get to that eventual destination, you’ll be far more likely to stick around until the end.

And even if you never quite make it there, the experience won’t have been wasted because the endeavor itself was valuable.

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