Results are a side effect of doing the work with love

For most of my life, I’ve been what job descriptions on LinkedIn breathlessly call a results-oriented person. That is to say, it’s been in my nature to focus primarily on the outcomes of my actions and not on the means by which I get there.

To be more precise, I’ve had a tendency to set clear, specific goals for whatever activity I’ve been engaged in, and then find the best, most efficient, most well-trodden path in the direction of those goals.

For example, when I wanted to learn to play the piano—nearly ten years ago now—I scoured the internet for the most effective piano courses available, purchased a set of exercise books that were most recommended by music teachers and other pianists, and set about working through them for ninety minutes every day.

It didn’t matter to me that the workbooks focused on Western classical music, a tradition I knew nothing about and was indifferent to. It didn’t matter that the lessons were tedious to the point that I felt a sense of relief rather than accomplishment after mastering any one of them. It didn’t matter that I had to psych myself up every morning in front of the mirror so I could muster up the motivation to sit at the piano and plink out a child’s playground song from nineteenth century England. All that mattered was my goal of becoming a pianist.

It was a miserable way to go about learning a musical instrument. Why did I stick to it for nine grueling months? Because the internet promised me that I’d be a pianist if I managed to get through those workbooks from beginning to end. I’d be able to sight read and play any piece of music I wanted. I never questioned the fact that following the advice I’d received from the internet would have me feeling miserable for years before I developed the skills I wanted. I believed that was just how things worked: first you didn’t know how to play an instrument, then you were miserable for five to seven years, then you were able play your instrument and finally be allowed to enjoy yourself.

This singular focus on producing results has served me well in my career as a software developer. When I’m working with a client, I’m very good at going from knowing nothing about their codebase to making a meaningful contribution to their software within the span of one or two weeks.

However, my focus on output over process has been disastrous when it comes to my creative life. I burned out so badly while learning the piano that the mere idea of learning a musical instrument today fills me with dread. And music is not the only creative endeavor I’ve burned out on.

And so, when I started taking my writing practice more seriously last year, I decided to approach it differently. Instead of focusing on the output from my writing sessions, I decided to focus on the process of writing and make it as enjoyable for myself as possible. I figured if I could turn writing into a fun activity, I’d be eager to spend more time noodling around with it. And if I spent more time noodling around with it, I’d automatically end up producing something interesting.

When I take a results-focused approach to my writing practice, I concentrate exclusively on the artifact that I’m producing at the end of a writing session, not on the experience of doing the work. If the artifact turns out well, I’m happy. If it sucks, I get mad at myself. On days I can’t write anything at all, I get frustrated. It doesn’t matter whether I have fun, learn something new, or write a beautiful sentence that just doesn’t have a home yet. All that matters is the artifact, the final Markdown file that needs to be sent out into the world for other people to read.

When I work with this mindset, I deprive myself of the joys of treating my work as an opportunity to allow new and unexpected ideas to emerge, to surprise myself with new insights that have been lurking at the periphery of my consciousness, to mold the half-formed notions in my mind into different shapes and see what works.

When I focus on the artifact, I treat myself like a machine, a widget generator, a mere thing. This is somewhat acceptable to me in the workplace. The contract is clear when I’m working for somebody else: I produce working software, I get paid money in exchange. For better or worse, this is how employment works in the year 2025. You might be a complex, multifaceted person to your colleagues, but to your employer you are an instrument for performing economically fruitful tasks. But that’s not how I want to treat myself when it comes to blogging or storytelling.

When I’m working on a blog post or story, I want to give myself time to pause, reflect, and wonder. I want to daydream, to meander, to find the dangling thread of an idea I didn’t even know I had and pull at it until I find an unexplored new corner of my mind that I was previously unaware of.

I want my creative life to be inefficient. I want to spend five hours working on a single blog post, then throw it away because the voice feels wrong, or the argument falls apart, or the vibes are off. I want to present the same argument in seven different ways, making the same points every single time, just to see which way feels most like myself. I want to let the writing run away from me, morphing into something I never intended for it to be (something that happened with this post).

And while I’m doing all of this messy, slow, inefficient work, I want to discover my tastes. What do I like in my favorite writers’ works? What do I dislike? What are the themes I keep returning to over and over again in my own work? I want to discover who I am, what I sound like on the page, what I want to sound like on the page. I want to write and publish blog posts riddled with spelling and grammar mistakes, arguments with so many holes in them you could use them to strain pasta, stories in which nothing happens. In the process of writing and publishing all this drivel, I want to discover what it is that I actually have to say to the world.

And most importantly, I want to have fun. I’m probably never going to make money from my writing, but I can sure as hell enjoy myself while I’m doing it. The more I focus on getting to the end of my creative journey—if such an end even exists—the less I focus on the delights hidden along the way, the little side-paths filled with secret pleasures.

And so I have been weaning myself off the habit of focusing so much on results, at least when it comes to the work I do for myself rather than my employers. I’ve been successful at this to some degree, but I imagine it will take me years to undo the habits that have been ingrained in me since young adulthood.

This blog post is proof that I’m at least making some progress. It says nothing new that people smarter than myself haven’t said more eloquently before. It doesn’t even say anything I myself have never said before in my previous posts. But I’ve enjoyed writing it, and by sharing it with the world I might learn a thing or two about a thing or two. It’s all part of the process.

And results? Results are just one of the many side effects of doing the work with love and pleasure. I don’t need to go looking for them. If I keep doing the work, the results will follow.