Focus on the process.
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Notes
The story: Seth and his friends took fly-fishing lessons. Seth requested that he be given a fly without a hook, which allowed him to focus on the process (rhythm, posture, “the magic of the physics of casting”) while everyone else was focused on the fish.
The point: while the “professional” does want results, those results come as a side effect of the practice.
Elizabeth King: “Process saves us from the poverty of our intentions.” Process suffers if we allow the desired outcome to distract us, whether through shortcuts, or hustles, etc.
“Set aside judging yourself until after you’ve committed to the practice and done the work.”
Thoughts
The fly-fishing lesson is similar to the juggling lesson: focus on the process, and the results will take care of themselves. That last part of the sentence—”will take care of themselves”—doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ll have the results we seek; there are no guarantees. But a practice—which seems, here, to refer to a deliberate, focused process (perhaps even a ritual)—is the best way to increase the likelihood of the desired outcome.
One way it does that is to protect us from the “poverty of our intentions,” as Elizabeth King put it. Seth seems to interpret this as a willingness to take shortcuts, or run a hustle, or “somehow cajole that fish onto the hook.” But that distracts us from the best path forward—again, a practice that trusts in process rather than results.
(An aside: The quote from sculptor Elizabeth King first appeared in the introduction to this section [“Trust Your Self”]. I didn’t mention it before, which is a bit weird, since Seth told Tim Ferris that there would be no book without that quote. But it didn’t fit the overall focus that I saw at that early stage in the book: the conversation with Steven Pressfield’s notions from The War of Art.)
This series is meant to capture my thoughts as I work through Seth Godin’s The Practice. It’s a book with over 200 (very short) chapters, which I hope to work through and, I further hope, to implement over time.
If you’re interested in more of Godin’s ideas, or my thoughts about them, you can check out this collection of posts. Note that if you’re more interested in the former, you should probably get Godin’s book and read it yourself; my notes will be both incomplete and idiosyncratic, and my thoughts will relate to my own experience.
But if my thoughts resonate with you, or if you think I’m just silly, I welcome your comments.