Trusting the process

I wrote my first book, you know, that share house one, in five weeks, fuelled by four thousand dollars worth of hot chips, whisky and amphetamines. I had a goal. Get that sucker done before my 30th birthday. And one day before I fell backasswards out of my twenties I dropped the floppy disc with the finished manuscript on my publisher, Michael Duffy.

Job done.

I wouldn’t recommend it, though.

There is a romance to the writer’s life that lures, misleads and entraps. If you grew up, as I did, on the work of those mad writers who came of age in the 60s and 70s, the delusion was incredibly strong. It fooled a couple of generations of would-be novelists, poets and freelancers into believing that if you matched Hunter S Thompson’s monstrous appetite for liquor and hard drugs, you couldn’t fail to match the pyrotechnic majesty of his words upon the page.

Yeah, nah, not so much.

Thompson was the real deal, but he was also a furious rewriter and maniacal editor, smashing out field notes and first drafts like a drunken, drug-fucked Norse God taking Thor’s hammer to the blank rock face of an empty page, but crafting his final copy like a Renaissance sculptor doing needlepoint work on precious marble.

The more books I wrote, the further I drew away from the shitfaced frenzy of Felafel. I made a lot of mistakes along the way—some personal, some professional—but I think I’ve reached a place many years later where I’ve worked out the basics.

Goals, it turns out, don’t matter, or at least they don’t matter as much as process. And this isn’t just writing advice. It can apply to pretty much everything in life. Trust the process over the goal.

We have data and everything.

Two years ago a bunch of brainiacs wrote a paper for the International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology which mashed up twenty-seven other papers by even bigger pointy-heads, all of them noodling over how different goal-setting strategies affected athletic performance and psychological outcomes.

Long story short? Process goals (dialling in on actions like maintaining good form) kicked all sorts of arse in measurable performance and boosted the athletes’ confidence that they could nail that performance. Focusing on how they did whatever they were doing offered athletes way more control over their efforts and led directly to greater satisfaction and motivation.

Focusing on goals, like winning a race or a game—or writing a book, or losing weight, or fixing the sliding door to the guest room that the stupid dog knocked off the runners during a thunderstorm a couple of years ago and which has been hanging there mocking you and your lack of home handyman skills ever since—focusing on those end goals is only likely to remind you that you haven’t fixed the fucking door and you don’t even know how to start and you are a worthless excuse for a man so why even bother.

Focussing on process, though?

That’s the money shot.

For me, these days, that means two things. Writing stuff and staying well.

The writing stuff you know about. You’re here, after all. But I will talk about it in a minute.

The wellness thing?

Oh boy. Okay. Let’s do it.

I struggled with comfort eating for a long time. When shit felt like it was getting out of hand, I’d pick up a donut, or a burger or a glass of wine and cram it into my head hole and for the next few minutes—well, okay, seconds—I felt like I was in control. I wasn’t, of course. The fucking donut was in control. But I felt like I was getting what I wanted, at least until I couldn’t do my pants up. Then, all I wanted was to lose weight. So I’d restrict the donut binges and hit the treadmill, and grind out hours of cardio until I could see my feet again.

I did that over a dozen times.

I guess it was my take on circuit training, with my circuit running from the donut shop to the gym in an endless self-defeating loop.

I finally broke that loop a couple of years ago by forgetting about my goal weight and focusing on the process of getting well and getting strong.

I’m going to write about that process in a longer essay because I still think about it every day, and writing about stuff is the best way I know to organise my thoughts. But bottom line, until I stopped worrying about goals and started leaning into the process, nothing changed.

It was a lesson I blindly groped my way towards through thirty years of writing, finally finally reaching something that felt like enlightenment in the grim, fallow years of Covid.

When I wrote Felafel, my goal was to finish that sucker before I turned 30. Nothing else mattered, and nothing else really occurred to me. That’s probably why I needed thousands of dollars worth of carbs and stimulants to crank it out in five weeks.

These days, I don’t think about finishing books. I don’t give myself deadlines. I don’t even have a daily word count.

I have the process.

And the process is simple but hard.

I turn up at my desk every day at about the same time. I make a list of three things I have to work on, but I understand I may not get to the third, and that’s fine. I quickly check in with a writing buddy on the other side of the world, a guy who’s usually just sitting down to his evening writing session as I begin my day. We tell each other what we’re writing. Then, I meditate for ten minutes. When that is done, I turn on my timer, set it to fifty minutes, and start to write. When the timer goes off, I tick a box on my three-item to-do list. I set another timer. Ten minutes. I do some stretches. I might lift some weights or hit the punching bag. The timer goes off, and it’s back to the desk for another fifty.

This is how I roll through the day.

Never looking up to try and see the end of the book (or column). Never thinking about any goal other than the work in front of me for as long as that timer is running.

It’s not romantic.

It’s not goal-focused.

But it works for me. Like getting a mate in to help with that stupid door.