Enjoy the Journey

You’re focused on the destination. The goal, the achievement, the finish line. That’s what drives you, what gets you out of bed, what keeps you pushing forward. But here’s what you’re missing while you’re fixated on where you’re going. The journey itself is changing you in ways the destination never will.

I learned this the hard way. I have a GPS watch that tracked my runs for years. It showed me distance, pace, all the metrics I thought mattered. After my last marathon, I stopped using it. The watch sat in a drawer gathering dust for three years while I kept running the same routes, thinking I was just maintaining fitness.

Then I found the watch. Charged it up. Took ages to boot, took even longer to find the satellites. When it finally flickered to life, it still had my personal best times from three years before. So I used the training function that let me race against my younger self. A person three years younger who’d just run the London Marathon in just over three hours.

I didn’t just beat my younger self. I demolished the old personal best for that route, crossing the line with my three-years-younger self still a full kilometre behind me on the watch’s virtual pacer. Same roads, same hills, completely different runner.

Sitting there afterwards, drinking coffee and trying to make sense of what just happened, I realised why. For the last three years, I’d come a long way. Not because I was chasing faster times, but because I’d changed how I approached running itself. The transformation happened when I stopped focusing on the numbers and started paying attention to the process.

After a spate of injuries, I switched to chi running. More balance, minimal heel strike, far more fluid movement with a mid-foot landing pattern. I’d introduced regular HIIT workouts, added speed work. Started stretching and yoga on some mornings. Practised mindfulness meditation and incorporated breathing patterns into my running to create rhythm, relaxation, and balance, and I’d improved my diet.

I got rid of the carbohydrate roller coaster, avoiding sugars and processed carbohydrate-dense foods in favour of quality protein, leafy greens, salads, and pulses. Lost over a stone in weight, got significantly leaner. My body seemed to metabolise fat more efficiently. My energy levels increased dramatically. These weren’t dramatic overnight changes. They were small adjustments that accumulated over time. This is just what worked for me, not medical advice — everyone’s nutritional needs are different, and it’s always worth talking it through with your own GP or a dietitian before making major changes yourself.

No surprise I beat that time from three years ago. I’m not the same person. Despite the pain of pre-marathon training my younger self endured to set that old record, I set a new one simply because I got back to basics. Learned how to breathe, eat, relax, and run more efficiently. The paradox is that by focusing less on speed, I got faster.

Research on deliberate practice by Ericsson (2008) shows that improvement comes not from mindless repetition but from focused attention on technique and continuous refinement. I wasn’t just logging miles. I was learning to run better with every step. Each run became an opportunity to refine something, to notice something, to improve something. That’s the difference between practice and deliberate practice.

Over a decade ago I started writing and posting articles on the Juvenate website. For a year, my posts were like signposts in the desert. Barely anyone read them. Now I’ve peaked at over 10,000 visitors a month, and I realise what consistency can achieve. And thankfully, how my writing has improved. Not because I was obsessing about visitor numbers, but because I was writing, publishing, learning from what worked and what didn’t.

Arthur Ashe said it perfectly. “Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important than the outcome.” You hear that and think it’s motivational fluff. It’s not. It’s mathematical precision disguised as inspiration. The outcome is a data point. The journey is the process that creates the capability. One is finite, the other compounds.

The journey changes you. The destination doesn’t. When you cross the finish line, you’re the same person who took the last step. But you’re completely different from the person who took the first one. The transformation happens in the middle, in the countless small improvements you make while nobody’s watching. Those improvements don’t show up until they suddenly do.

Maybe the old Juvenate website slogan “be the best you can” has rubbed off in facets of my life I haven’t fully recognised yet. Like my run that day. I wasn’t racing for a time. I was concentrating on the harmony of how I run, the journey itself, rather than obsessing about the destination. That shift in focus paradoxically made the destination better than it would have been if I’d obsessed about it.

Here’s what coaching is really about. Getting you from where you are to where you want to be. There’s a point in that journey, somewhere past the beginning, where it makes more sense to keep going than to turn back. You’ve invested too much to quit. You’re not at the finish line yet, but you’re past the point of no return. That’s when the journey gets interesting.

I had a patient who decided to retrain as a therapist in her forties. Two years into a three-year program, she was exhausted. Doubting herself. Wondering if she’d made a terrible mistake. She came to me ready to quit. Everything felt too hard, too overwhelming, too much.

I asked her what she’d learned in those two years. Not about therapy, but about herself. She paused. Then she started listing things. Resilience she didn’t know she had. Capacity to learn she thought had died decades ago. Connections with people she never would have met. Confidence in her ability to handle difficult conversations. Patience with herself when things didn’t come easily.

“So even if you quit tomorrow,” I said, “was the journey wasted?” She looked at me like I’d slapped her. “Of course not,” she said. “I’m not the same person I was two years ago.” Exactly. She finished the program, but the real transformation had already happened during those two years of struggle. The qualification just validated what the journey had already created.

Research on identity development by Ibarra (1999) demonstrates that professional transitions succeed not because people have a clear destination, but because they experiment with new behaviours and gradually become someone different. You don’t reach your goal and then change. You change along the way, and that’s what makes reaching the goal possible. The goal is evidence of change, not the cause of it.

Think about my example of the GPS watch, but imagine if you too had a smart watch that was tracking your life. Maybe the real issue isn’t knowing exactly where you’re going. It’s focusing on your direction while enjoying the journey itself. Direction matters more than destination because direction is something you can control today, who knows where you’ll end up if you keep going.

You’ll surprise yourself. Not at the finish line, but somewhere in the middle when you realise you’re doing things you couldn’t do before. When you notice you’re thinking differently, responding to challenges with capabilities you didn’t have at the start. That’s where the real transformation happens. In the unremarkable Tuesday morning when something that used to be impossible is now routine.

The journey teaches you things the destination can’t. Patience when progress is slow. Resilience when things go wrong. Creativity when the planned route doesn’t work. Confidence that comes from solving problems you didn’t know you could solve. None of that happens at the finish line. It all happens in the messy middle where nobody’s watching and nothing feels remarkable.

Csikszentmihalyi’s research on flow states (1990) shows that peak experiences happen during the process, not at the completion. You’re happiest when you’re fully engaged in challenging activities, not when you’re celebrating achievements. The journey is where you actually live. The destination is just a brief moment of arrival before you pick the next goal. If you’re not enjoying the journey, you’re not enjoying your life.

So stop treating the journey as something to endure on the way to what you really want. The journey is what you really want. The growth, the learning, the person you’re becoming. That’s the point. The destination is just evidence that you made the journey. It’s not the reward. The journey itself is the reward. Every day you show up, every small improvement you make, every challenge you face. That’s where the real value is.

Enjoy it. Not in some forced, toxic positivity way where you pretend everything’s wonderful. But in an honest recognition that this process, right now, is changing you in ways you’ll appreciate later. You’re becoming someone more capable. More resilient. More yourself. Those changes are happening whether you acknowledge them or not, but acknowledging them makes them more powerful.

That’s worth enjoying. Even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard. Because the hard parts are doing the most to change you. Research on stress-related growth by Park and Helgeson (2006) points to challenges you overcome contributing more to your development than easy successes ever do. The difficult journey creates capabilities the easy path never could.

Look back at your own life. The moments you’re most proud of probably aren’t the easy victories. They’re the hard-won battles where you weren’t sure you’d make it but you did anyway. The journey that tested you and proved you were stronger than you thought. That’s what creates lasting satisfaction. Not the trophy, but the person you became to earn it.

So embrace the journey. All of it. The setbacks that teach you resilience. The slow progress that builds patience. The unexpected detours that create opportunities you never would have found on the direct path. The person you’re becoming through this process is more valuable than the goal you’re chasing.

Further reading

• Ibarra, H. (1999) — ‘Provisional selves: Experimenting with image and identity in professional adaptation’
• Ericsson, K. A. (2008) — ‘Deliberate practice and acquisition of expert performance’
• Csikszentmihalyi, M. — Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
• Park, C. L. & Helgeson, V. S. (2006) — ‘Introduction to the special section: Growth following highly stressful life events’
• Duckworth, A. — Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance