(#32) The Power of Process
“Eighty percent of success is showing up.”
How often do you wonder about all those pet projects that might've been more than a jaded memory?
What is 'busy'?
In 2017, I settled back in Glasgow after a rollercoaster few years moving around. From PhD to postdoc to international placements, 2015-17 was a nomadic period of trying to move up the career ladder in order too find something longer term.
My wife and I enjoyed being able to walk to work together for the first time since we met working in the gym a decade before. She worked (and still works) in a hospital, and I was diving into independent academic life. It remained that way until late 2018, when our first daughter came along just in time for the festive season. Delightful, ill-prepared chaos ensued. Fast forward to 2022, now with 2 young kids and a dog, it’s an unavoidably stark admission that I never really knew what ‘busy’ meant before now.
Parallel to all this evolving and beautiful madness, was my efforts to write daily (or at least often), to record the word count achieved when drafting You Are Not a Fraud, and then graph it. Had I not found this process, I wouldn’t have a book to talk about. Had I not found this process, I’d never have appreciated the stress-managing magic of journaling. Had I never found this process, I’d be unlikely to realize how much free time I wasted before starting a family.
There is a power in process that will stay with you beyond the success or failure or the particular project facilitated by that process. My book (now under final editorial review before release) might fail, but I will always have the process to lean into for a new project.
From Micro to Mega Trends
There's more to valuing process than my own selfish story. Using a Twitter scraping program developed during my book project, I looked at tweets containing #ProgressNotPerfection since 2017. The number of tweets tipping the hat to this affirmation peaked in 2019 and has been in decline ever since. Food for thought...
How might you leverage the power of process to build a project that you’d otherwise disregard as too ambitious? How can process help you overcome the temptation to say you’re ‘too busy’?
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