I Spent Years Chasing Outcomes and Missing Everything in Between

I had built my professional identity in Aurangabad and then in Pune around achievement - the specific visible accomplishment that could be pointed to and measured. This is not unusual in itself and is, in moderation, a useful orientation.

In my case it had become so dominant that the relationship I had with any ongoing piece of work was primarily anticipatory: I was always in the future state of the project rather than in its present. The work in progress was barely perceptible to me as an experience.

It was a condition to be endured on the way to the state I was waiting for. At 27, a mentor I had been working with for a year asked me, at the end of a project I had been particularly focused on, what I had learned from the work itself - not from the outcome, which we had discussed, but from the doing of it during the eight weeks it had taken.

I realised, in the pause before I answered, that I had not been paying much attention to the doing. I had been paying attention to the countdown to completion. The mentor said, with a patience that suggested this was not the first time he had made the observation: the outcome is a day.

The work is eight weeks. You are spending eight weeks to get one day of satisfaction and missing everything that happens in between. This was accurate and I found it more useful than most advice I had received in that period.

The deliberate practice of attending to the work rather than the outcome - finding what was interesting or developing or satisfying about the process rather than only about the result - was something I had to develop consciously because the habit ran in the other direction.

What I found, when I started doing it, was that the work itself contained considerably more than I had been giving it credit for. The problem being solved had its own logic that was interesting. The collaboration had its own texture.

The daily progress had its own small satisfactions that I had been stepping over on my way to the larger one. The larger satisfaction arrived with the same frequency as before. I was now also getting everything it had previously been replacing.