It was a bright and sunny morning in the town of Farragudo, Portugal and I was sitting at a café as the waitress approached me. In my broken Portuguese I placed my order, “eu quero um café americano, por favor.”
I look at the waitress hoping my order was comprehendible enough. She looks back at me and promptly proceeds to correct me, “in Portugal an Americano coffee is called ‘abatanado.’”
Another blow to my ego.
I am humbled by my complete lack of understanding of the language once again. But the truth is that these kinds of interactions is what makes traveling interesting for me. It gives me an opportunity to interact with people in a meaningful way as they educate me about the peculiarities of their culture.
When I first started learning the language, I had ambitious goals of becoming fluent very quickly. I simply wanted to bypass the actual learning process and skip right to the outcome of being able to converse with ease.
I have too many memories of trying to learn Spanish growing up and feeling like it was just too difficult, and would take too much work, which is why throughout my entire adult life, I never seriously desired to take on the challenge of learning a new language.
With Struggle Comes Satisfaction
In recent years my attitude toward many things in life has changed, one of them being how I view struggle and challenges that take a lot of focused effort to overcome. As I’ve mentioned in my Savage Manifesto article, I now realize that the process of taking on challenges and overcoming them is where true fulfillment and life satisfaction comes from.
If the process of overcoming challenges is what brings fulfillment, then I must learn to enjoy the actual process rather than obsessively focusing on the end goal. In the case of learning Portuguese, the process of learning entails interactions like the one I had with the waitress at the café and the dozens of other organic moments of connecting with people as I struggle to put somewhat coherent sentences together. Sometimes I’m laughed at (in the friendliest way possible), other times people are pleasantly surprised, and more often than not people look at me with a blank expression before asking me to repeat myself.
Being Present in the Process
But nonetheless, it is this learning process that is making life interesting, and if I had somehow taken a magic pill to quickly pick up the language without any effort, then I would be missing out on all of the moments of joy and connection opportunities that I have been afforded by fumbling my way through the language with native speakers.
This brings me the point of why it is essentially important that I, and you, and everyone else needs to stop being so fixated on the end result, and instead need to focus on the day-to-day process of slowly and methodically getting better.
The vast majority of life happens in the space between the moments in time that we like to celebrate. This space that we traverse through every day is where the process resides. In other words, the vast majority of our lives is the day-to-day activities that we carry out in the hopes of eventually reaching a destination. These day-to-day activities is life itself.
Focusing too much on the destination, and not being present enough to focus on the day-to-day is a certain recipe to letting life, and all of the joys the come with it pass you by.
The Process of Life
This philosophy translates to so much more than learning a new language. In my experience working with people who embark on fitness journeys, people REALLY want to skip the diet and exercise part and get right to the 20 lbs of weight loss. When it comes to making money, people REALLY want to skip the work part and get right to the dollars in the bank.
I get it. It’s human nature to want results with minimal effort, but that is simply not the way the world works. With the exception of extreme luck, all things worth having require challenge, struggle, consistency, time, etc… and with all of these things brings the true richness of life. They make life, and the journey towards a goal so much more interesting.
For people who really learn to be fully immersed in enjoying the journey, they become somewhat detached or indifferent towards the outcomes because the process itself is what brings the joy. Ironically, it is when we stop trying so hard to attain something that it is most likely to enter into our lives.
The end goal or destination becomes a sort of byproduct that just happens when we focus on the present.