How to Enjoy the Journey When You're Not There Yet

When I was young, I had a job I didn't much like. I worked on the River Cam in Cambridge, and my task was to stand on the street and persuade tourists to come on a punt tour, one of those long flat boats you pole down the river past the old colleges. I was paid by how many people I got onto the boat, and I was bad at it. I'm an introvert. I didn't enjoy approaching strangers, I felt awkward doing it, and the money showed.

Then one day I gave up, not on the job, on trying. I decided I'd stop attempting to get anyone onto the boat at all, and instead just stand there and quietly wish every person who walked past well. Coffee in hand, I'd send a bit of warmth their way and silently bless them, genuinely not minding whether they stopped. And the strangest thing happened. I beat the company's sales record. Then I beat it again. The thing I'd been straining for arrived the moment I stopped straining and started enjoying where I actually was.

I've thought about that summer many times since, because it holds the answer to one of the most common quiet frustrations there is: how do you enjoy your life now, when now isn't where you want to be yet?

There is no "there" to arrive at

Start with the hard truth, because it's also the liberating one. The "there" you're waiting to reach doesn't exist. You get to the goal and the mind, within days, draws a new line further out. I've watched it in others and lived it myself. When I wrote my first book, I was so fixated on finishing it that I barely felt the writing of it. Only looking back did I realise that stretch was one of the most magical of my life, and I'd spent the whole of it somewhere else, in a finish line that kept receding.

So if you're postponing happiness until you arrive, see clearly what you're really doing. You're postponing it forever, because arrival isn't a real place. Life isn't the moment you finally get there. Life is the getting. It's always the journey, from the beginning through the middle to the end. Which means the question worth asking isn't how do I get there faster? It's how do I actually live the road I'm on?

You can find joy in the situation you're in, even one you'd rather leave

Here's where most advice falls apart, because it assumes you can simply go and live your dream today. Often you can't, not all at once. There's the draining job, the long stretch of building, the season that isn't the one you'd have chosen. The skill isn't to escape it. The skill is what a wise friend of mine once called the ability to synthesise happiness from any situation, which I think is one of the truest marks of a high-quality soul.

You do it two ways. The first is to deliberately bring more of what lights you up into your days, even in small doses, the creative thing, the walk, the music, the practice that nourishes you, rather than waiting for life to hand you permission. The second is quieter and more powerful: you ask what this exact situation is here to teach you. Not vaguely, but specifically. A draining call-centre job is also hundreds of hours of practising how to listen, how to stay warm under pressure, how to bring good energy to a difficult moment, every one of them a real skill, gathered while you're being paid. The circumstance doesn't have to be your destination for it to be quietly making you into who you're becoming.

This is close to what the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl meant when he wrote, out of the worst circumstance imaginable, that the one freedom which can never be taken from a person is the freedom to choose their attitude in any given set of conditions. You may not be able to change your situation today. You can always change what you bring to it. And what you bring to it is where the joy of the journey actually lives. It's why so much of the lifestyle work we teach is about designing a life you can enjoy now, in the ordinary middle of things, rather than filing happiness away under "someday."