Make the Work the Reward - Elaborations on Living
To live life by intention instead of by default, you need to want it. I'm claiming that living by intention is desirable and superior to living by default—a claim that sits at the foundation of this entire essay. Without a deep understanding of what you want and intrinsic motivation (stemming from within/internal energy) to fuel your desire, you can't embark on the journey because you wouldn't even see it. But you don't need to want a specific thing. You just need to want transformation, exploration, or evolution—call it whatever you wish. You adopt the overarching mindset that drives how you live.
PS. Don't take this too seriously—ease up. There's a tendency (reminder for myself) to approach these concepts with the kind of effort that makes your eyebrows squinch. No need for that. Sincerity is required, seriousness isn't. The eyebrows get tired of squinting eventually, and there's no other way but to loosen up.
You aspire to become something—to be a certain kind of person, to develop traits that are unique and desirable to you. You'll draw inspiration from others because this is part of our social nature. You envision your upgraded self, and this clears the path for the journey ahead.
Aspiration is the destination you hold for your adventure—the hero's journey, your quest. The destination is necessary but not sufficient. It serves as a placeholder for a clear endpoint, but it doesn't matter much. The journey to the destination is all there is and all there ever will be. This isn't merely a proposition—it's a truth about human beings. Hedonic adaptation—the phenomenon of adapting to circumstances and seeking the next thing—is real and well-established across multiple domains of research (more on this later).
Like Marcus Flaminius Rufus in his search for the City of the Immortals, you fully commit to the process of discovery. The journey itself is the reward—each step naturally produces positive emotions, without the need for external rewards. This embodies a core principle of Flow State: the reward is the experience itself, not just the outcome. Dopamine is released throughout the process, not only at the end.
In Borges' story, Rufus is on a quest for the river of immortality and the City on its far shore.
Along the treacherous path, most abandon the mission. Exhausted and thirsty, Rufus spots a river, drinks from it, and loses consciousness. Days later, he wakes bound in a cave among mute troglodytes, who seem indifferent to whether he lives or dies.
When he finally reaches the City of the Immortals, he finds labyrinths, mazes, and stairways that lead nowhere—architecture “without purpose.” Awe turns to disillusionment and then to the sane desire to be mortal again.
The destination served only to reveal the deeper truth: upon arrival, a new direction appears, and the journey continues.
Aspirations and destinations are useful guideposts for setting the direction of the journey. They immediately become useless upon reaching the destination, as they are discarded for something new, a new destination, and a new adventure.
So, how do you define your destination? Here are two practical exercises for this: authoring your future by writing it down in detail (e.g., via the Future Authoring program), and monitoring your journey regularly to re-determine the path or adjust according to the current situation (e.g., yearly reviews, quarterly quests, weekly reviews).
Writing your future is a practice in crystallizing it, because writing requires thinking, and thinking requires some degree of effort, involvement, and engagement. This is desirable because visualizing with clarity what your future can look like, including multiple possible paths you may follow, makes the future real, tangible, and reachable. If you can visualize something and see yourself in that position, the chances that you reach that position increase drastically because your choices will align with it.
Consider how we constantly look to others for inspiration on what to do, what not to do, and what to become. We do this especially at a young age, when our experience is limited and we look to our parents, family members, and others around us for guidance on how to behave in the world. This is a natural part of evolution. Currently, the pool of people we can “look up to” is far expanded than it used to be before the Internet existed. We can peek into the lives of people from many parts of the world through YouTube videos, for example, and get a sense—though often flashy or distorted—of the possible ways of living available to us.
This is a powerful realization, because we are no longer constrained to the few people in our tribe as sources of inspiration, but can draw from virtually anyone in the world. One disadvantage of this phenomenon is that evolutionarily, this creates confusion and possible heightened indecisiveness about life choices, because there are so many options that it can feel overwhelming to make practical choices on how to behave, what to believe, where to live, what profession to pick, how to select a partner, and other common human decisions that would naturally flow without much distraction for the majority of people throughout history.
So, no wonder there is increasing isolation and a creeping disruption in how we behave and live, with many people moving out of their original town, not having children, not having a stable profession, and more. On the one hand, all of this fosters disconnection, lack of trust, and isolation. On the other hand, it represents a transformation, the birth of new possibilities that span far outside of the small world we used to live in, sometimes getting stuck in it.
These are some reasons why determining what we want is one of the most important things in our lives, and writing about it in detail is a stepping stone toward becoming who we wish to become, living how we want to live. There is a balance between exploration (research, observation) and exploitation (commitment, action). We can explore all the possible options, and then narrow them down and define how we wish to live. This is not a permanent decision. Everything always changes, and so do our aspirations. But it is a commitment to the process of figuring it out, even though there is nothing to figure out*, and living from the natural state of Being rather than from a place of overwhelm, fear, anxiety, and scarcity.
“Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.”
Practical tools
Future Authoring Program — If you could live the life you most deeply wanted, what would it look like? This is a question worth writing about in detail, because it turns out that you can live the life you most deeply want. It is possible that the current situations you find yourself in were once distant visions or dreams. Yet they feel mundane and unsatisfactory in the moment.
First, mindset effects are real, as research by Dr. Crum at Stanford and others has been demonstrating with increasing clarity over the past few years. What you believe shapes your decisions and your actions, which directly impact your present and future. Believing in this truth is a mindset in itself.
Second, hedonic adaptation is also a well-established phenomenon within humans. We seek a certain situation or possessions, and soon after we reach it, it becomes mundane; we adapt to the new reality very quickly, dissatisfaction and desire re-arise, and we continue the "hedonic cycle."
Lastly, humans are a highly story-driven species. We think in stories. We create narratives about our past, present, and future. We define our identities based on certain stories we tell ourselves, true or only existing in imagination they be. Your stories are influenced by your individual personality traits, learned principles, beliefs, behaviors, and the societal influences all around you.
Importantly, if you believe in the evidence of mindset effects, you know you have the agency to craft your own narratives and directly impact your present and future.
An exciting and practical tool for writing about your stories and defining your vision is the Future Authoring program (no affiliation).
This is one of the most practical and comprehensive writing exercises I know to crystallize your vision. I have done it multiple times since I was 21, and I have found it incredibly valuable. It is an in-depth writing exercise with thought-provoking questions about your present and future. If you also wish to analyze your past (which can help clear out anything left lingering in the (un)conscious mind), you may do the full authoring suite.
If unsure, I would start with the future authoring program. It will take a few hours, possibly split across multiple days depending on your preference and available energy.
Yearly Reviews — These are reviews of the past year to identify what gave you energy and ensure you double down on those things (why wouldn’t you do more of what energizes you and produces positive emotions and a predominant sensation of forward motion?). The link points to Tim Ferriss’ article on yearly reviews with practical steps and mental models for doing them. I have conducted annual reviews every year for the past 6 years. While I haven’t found them as valuable as the future authoring program, they have been a key stepping stone, shedding light on the direction of my life and allowing me to make decisions about the present and future.
Weekly reviews — Shorter-term and more tactical rather than strategic (see difference here). Weekly reviews allow us to learn and iterate across a short time horizon. What happened in the past week, and what will happen in the upcoming week? Short and simple, yet high leverage over time if you do it consistently every week, as it goes for anything done consistently (even “negative” habits you wish you didn’t do). Click the link above to access a practical template and get ideas on what to include in a weekly review.
- Mindset effects: What you believe about your efforts shapes your physiology and outcomes. Studies show that framing and belief can alter stress responses, satiety, and performance. Choosing a useful frame changes behavior, which changes results.
- Hedonic adaptation: Wins fade fast. We normalize new circumstances and start seeking the next thing, which is why treating “destination” as the point leaves you restless. Process focus counters the treadmill by making the work itself intrinsically rewarding.
- Narrative mind: Humans are story-driven. Identity, goals, and meaning travel in narrative form, so writing and reviewing your future serve as the mechanism that organizes perception and action.
- Plasticity and momentum: The brain remodels with repeated experience. Consistent execution lays neural pathways that make the next action easier, turning effort into momentum and momentum into identity.
- Cognitive alignment: When stated values and actual behavior diverge, you feel friction and lose energy for action. Aligning stories, beliefs, and daily actions reduces dissonance and releases effort for forward motion.
Practice
If destinations are wayfinding, what carries you day to day is practice.
The all-encompassing concept behind all of this is Practice. Practice is the container of all containers, as Ido Portal often defines it. It is the overarching framework that makes everything possible. Practice is a state of being in constant exploration, experimentation, action, analysis, and iteration. It is an infinite game, embodied, as real as you.
Practical tools
All of the tools above are part of the Practice.
Whenever possible (i.e., almost always), get your hands dirty — experience the thing firsthand by doing it yourself. A deeper understanding happens through body and mind, not just mind.
Embody — practice using the body, not just the mind. Move, train, embody everything you do with conviction and lightness.
Play and be ok with looking stupid — learning happens through play, and you are a beginner anyway.
Re-learn how to breathe at a natural pace that activates a parasympathetic state (relaxed, connected). This requires practice (for most modern humans) and involves longer breaths. I found an exercise by Ido Portal helpful for re-learning how to breathe. First, study how the human respiratory system works so you can understand and visualize it. Next, practice deep, relaxed, easy inhales and exhales through the nose, visualizing* the air passing through each section of the respiratory system: in through the nostrils, nasal cavity, pharynx, larynx, trachea, chest, ribs, mid-belly, diaphragm. Exhale by reversing the path, from the diaphragm all the way out through the nostrils. When the mind wanders, gently return to following the breathing pathway.
*This is a psychological tool for interoception enhancement.
Innovation
In practice, openness shows up as structured experiments. Practice becomes real through experiments.
Almost everything is always changing, and yet the natural tendency for many of us is to shy away from change, suffer through it, avoid it, or retreat from it when it happens, placing barriers and creating stories stacked on top of each other ad nauseam. We tend to like and attach our idea of self to what used to be or what currently is, scared of what could or will be. We are restless and wish our situation were different, yet we also want it to stay the same, afraid of what “different” might imply. A constant battle of opposites that’s present in many people, particularly in Western societies (though the well-defined distinction between Western and Eastern cultures is, in my observation, increasingly blurred - I’ve lived in many Eastern Countries in recent years).
A practical and natural approach to change is to fully welcome it, all the time, whatever its nature. We can experience sadness, joy, fear, excitement, and whatever else stems from each change we confront. But we don’t resist change and all the sensations that may arise through it. We open up, accept, allow, welcome, and own whatever is there at any time. It’s a micro shift that generates macro shifts. Micro somatic/behavioral shifts that naturally foster a systemic change and integration of truth throughout our lives, no matter the situation.
I never ask if “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” I think “this is what it is” or “this is what it isn’t.”
— Richard Feynman
Living in a state of nimbleness, acceptance, innovation, and experimentation is desirable for us humans precisely because everything can and is always changing. Small changes, big changes. Something that was there is no longer there. Resisting leads to the magnification of what you resist in most cases. Acceptance leads to natural dissolution and integration. We allow whatever is there to be there without fleeing from it; instead, we welcome it.
And whatever is there gets integrated into ourselves, loses strength, slowly dissolves, and dissipates in the background, while we continue living naturally free from additional knots and blockages. Because the foundations (the seeds of human beingness, so to speak) are stable, not significantly changing, and they are always there in the background of our lives, in the way we live, think, act, and be. Spaciousness, stillness, and connection are always here. The process to access them is the opposite of effort through the mind, despite what most Western people seem to believe. It is a release, a state of living that’s naturally effortless. Counterintuitively, this doesn’t seem to be available by default for most people, but hidden beneath many layers of effort, trying to be someone or something, tension, constriction.
Practical tools
Awake awareness (source: Shift Into Freedom, Loch Kelly): practice this glimpse as a taste. Let your attention move down from the head to the body, below the neck.
Connect with the sensations in the body.
Notice how everything around and within you is fundamentally still and spacious.
Maintain the observer view and then ask: What is here now when there is no problem to solve?
Notice and stay with whatever comes up.
Experimentation mindset (sources: Joe Hudson, Anne-Laure Le Cunff): consider running experiments akin to a scientist. Sometimes a new revelation or insight manifests itself in your consciousness. Welcome it with wonder and consider running an experiment for a set period to determine whether you wish to incorporate it into your life in the long term.
A practical experiment follows a streamlined version of the scientific method: start with a clear hypothesis (what you predict will happen), define a timeframe (e.g., 1 week, 1 month, 3 months), specify a methodology (how you’ll run it), and determine concrete measurements (how you’ll evaluate your prediction)
For example, say you have been waking up with an alarm your whole life so far. One day, you wonder what it’d be like to wake up without an alarm consistently. So you devise an experiment.
Hypothesis: if I wake up naturally without an alarm every day, I will feel more energy and generative drive (motivation) throughout the day.
Timeframe: 1 month
Method: wake up without an alarm every morning for 1 month. Go to sleep around the same time every night.
Measurement: journal about what you notice, energy levels, and other interoceptive sensations at the end of each day. Once the time frame of the experiment has elapsed, decide on whether to continue, stop, revise, or whatever else.
Momentum
Repeat experiments and execution generate momentum. Momentum compounds when you pause to steer.
Implementing an experimentation mindset and living by design rather than by default generates a sense of momentum. Every action fuels the next, reinforcing this way of living in a feedback loop. Everything can generate momentum with repetition. Brain plasticity occurs throughout our lives. Each repeated and salient experience gets incorporated into our brain structure. For example, it is often claimed that consistent meditation rewires your brain. That is true, but no more true than claiming that learning a second language rewires your brain. Some types of changes are more desirable than others; otherwise, we wouldn’t have any preferences, tastes, and make the choices we make.
Momentum makes taking action easier over time as you repeat similar actions. When paired with a clear feedback mechanism and positive adjustments, momentum leads to compound success and growth. Compound growth is exponential rather than linear growth. Like financial compounding turns your investments into exponentially more money over many years, thanks to the compounding return rate, life compounding turns you into the best possible version of yourself, unleashing the most amount of potential available at any given time.
I define the best possible version of yourself as one that is the most useful, productive, valuable to yourself, the people close to you, your town, your Country, and the World. All these levels of resolution, spanning from the individual to society, are aligned and benefit from your actions, which create the most good possible at any given time.
For this, you get to have “high standards” for your behaviors, so to speak. You get to hold yourself accountable for what you do, and always strive for the ideal, no matter how far it seems in any given context. At the same time, you can’t expect the same highest standards from other people, because they are not you, and by definition, they hold different ideals. You can be “strict” with yourself (striving for doing the best you can in any occasion, given the circumstances) and “loose” with others. If you do not accept the shortcomings of others (and your own, too) compared to expectations and values, you set yourself up for misery and a constant, dreadful overarching sensation of frustration, resentment, and anger.
Similarly, the “most amount of potential” is the state in which you are aligned throughout the levels above, and your actions, beliefs, and emotions do not hold traces of cognitive dissonance (the gap between what you say you believe and your actions). You do what you believe, you believe what you do and say. You live from the highest level of truth, honesty, integrity (wholeness) available to you at any given time. You do not sabotage yourself into living a life that is limited by your mental and emotional barriers. You are capable of living from Being.
While this seems natural and inherent to each human, it is not; it requires a lifetime of practice to approach it. It is an ideal, and one could argue that ideals are there to set the highest possible standard imaginable, which is very hard—if even possible—to achieve and maintain. Still, it is the guidepost that influences everything like a mathematical asymptote.
That’s the upside of momentum, which occurs naturally as long as there is consistent execution on the things you must do to increase the chances of becoming the kind of person you wish to be. Consistent execution is not something to take for granted. In fact, it tends to be a rare ability that comes more naturally to some people, and can be honed anyway.
It comes more naturally to some people because consistent execution is generally driven by a high degree of conscientiousness (particularly its industriousness subtrait), which is a personality trait (see Big Five) thought to be rather stable across people’s lifespans. This just means that execution comes more naturally to some people than others. It doesn’t mean it is fixed and you’re doomed because you find it challenging to do something consistently. You can — and do — change if you truly want it—remember, a growth mindset is a fundamental cornerstone of the whole game of life.
For example, you make writing a daily practice and do it for at least 30 minutes daily. You decide this because of a strong reason, the purpose behind writing every day, which, say, allows you to become a clear thinker, establish yourself as a reputable source of insights for others, become better at clearly expressing exactly your truth, all of which ultimately open up opportunities in your professional and personal life, which allows you to connect better with others, gain respect and wealth, feel like you contribute something of value to society.
The downside of momentum is that you can tie your identity to certain habits and behaviors that don’t serve you any longer, just because change is scary and costly. You fear change because you egoically identify with the current version of yourself, and you fear leaving the known for the next stage of adventures. This creates a self-made trap, and you get stuck in it like a rat in a cage.
Your life circumstances and vision shift over time, at least for most people, because the context around you evolves, and you naturally adapt to it. When you egoically identify with your past and current habits, you don’t allow for the natural changes to occur. You hold the manual brake tight, shoulders raised to your ears in tension.
Such an attitude creates friction and blocks evolution, which must and does happen no matter how much you resist it. That is why you need to allow renewal to take place by getting out of the way, noticing when something is no longer in service of your current self, and dropping it for something new, or removing it. This is different from quickly dropping balls and stopping habits just because you feel like it. Read above about the necessity of momentum. It is an effortless observation and recalibration of your energy. This observation doesn’t happen at the same time as the act of doing.
As it is common advice in writing, production and editing are two distinct processes. Only do one at a time. Never collide the two. They require completely different states of being. Production requires scrappy creation. Editing requires detailed analysis, removal, and improvement. Colliding the two leads to nothing. Do not edit when you write, and vice versa. Similarly, do not review your systems while you execute, and vice versa. Do the work. Once that is done, analyze and adjust. Analysis may occur in specific cycles (e.g., weekly, monthly, yearly) for practicality.
For example, you notice that while writing has enabled you to achieve a certain state you desired some years ago, you are now seeking a way to connect with other people at a deeper level and directly transfer your wisdom to someone else in person. Writing doesn’t provide that opportunity, and it is time for you to shift focus into speaking in public, conducting workshops, transmitting knowledge to a small or large group of people so that you get real-life connection and feedback, and the benefits stemming from real-life interactions that you can’t get hiding behind the written words. If that is the next experiment to run, so be it. Allow it to unfold, test the hypothesis, and experience what it is like. Then evaluate and adjust your aim.
Understanding
To renew, step out of doing and reflect. Reflect, adjust, and set the next experiment. Repeat.
Momentum generates movement, motion, all of which are required to take action. Action can be interwoven with analysis and understanding. As in the example above, you run experiments to explore something new, then analyze and course correct.
Importantly, don’t mix action and analysis, as stated above. There is a tendency to want to analyze while taking action, especially when you do something new, because all the inputs can feel overwhelming to process without thinking. Yet thinking stymies action and momentum at that stage. Action must be embodied, present, detached from the thinking mind.
Analysis and understanding are primarily an internal state of curiosity, reflection, openness, and noticing. You don’t want to force yourself to course-correct your actions solely based on external feedback from others. You need to inquire within first and incorporate both internal and external input into your course corrections and decisions.
There is a billboard I often see when passing by a street near my house: “If you want to make the wrong decision, ask everyone.”
If you overrely on external feedback, you get easily swayed in many directions without a unifying purpose or real understanding. You follow others’ interests instead of your own calling, which easily makes you resentful and bitter in the medium to long term, because you repress “you” with “them”, in search of fame, money, pleasure, safety, or a feeling of being accepted and in harmony with others.
These states can coexist with living a life that’s aligned with your true wishes. Even more easily so, contrary to popular belief (judging from the most common human behaviors). When you are aligned with your interests and calling at any given time, you are in a position of leverage and generative drive that benefits you, the people around you, and the whole society.
Practical tools
Conduct a Weekly Review. This can be an effective ritual for auditing your life and making adjustments. A Weekly Review can include a reflection part (looking back at the week), and a prospective section (looking at the week and years ahead, incorporating the reflections). Check out a starter template here.
Journaling can help unlock stuckness. You can journal freely in a stream-of-consciousness style sometimes, and journal by answering specific prompts other times. Journaling too frequently leads to excessive self-consciousness. Once a week, as part of the weekly reflection, can be an effective cadence.
Resources
Borges, J. L. (1949). The Immortal. In El Aleph [Short story]. Emecé Editores. (English translation available at: https://lecturia.org/en/short-stories/jorge-luis-borges-the-immortal/9052/)
Crum, A. J. (2023, March). Understand the power of intrinsic motivation. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2023/03/understand-the-power-of-intrinsic-motivation
Hambrick, D. Z., Macnamara, B. N., & Oswald, F. L. (2020). Is the deliberate practice view defensible? A review of evidence and discussion of issues. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 1134. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01134
Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P. I., Prestwich, A., Conner, M., Kellar, I., Benn, Y., & Sheeran, P. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 198–229. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000025
Macnamara, B. N., & Burgoyne, A. P. (2023). Do growth mindset interventions impact students’ academic achievement? A systematic review and meta-analysis with recommendations for best practices. Psychological Bulletin, 149(3-4), 133–173. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000352
Roberts, B. W., Chernyshenko, O. S., Stark, S., & Goldberg, L. R. (2005). The structure of conscientiousness: An empirical investigation based on seven major personality questionnaires. Personnel Psychology, 58, 103–139. https://projects.ori.org/lrg/PDFs_papers/Struc_Conscientiousness_Roberts_et_al_05.pdf
Saha, R. (2025). The exciting frontier of neuroplasticity: Innovations in brain health and recovery. Journal of Behavioral and Brain Science, 15(3). https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=141637
van der Linden, D., Tops, M., & Bakker, A. B. (2021). The neuroscience of the flow state: Involvement of the locus coeruleus norepinephrine system. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 645498. https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8079660/
Verywell Mind. (n.d.). What is brain plasticity? https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-brain-plasticity-2794886
