The Journey

Life is indeed about the journey. The funny thing — the ultimate cosmic joke — is that we won’t truly understand that until we’ve taken the journey. 

Sometime back I listened to a Howard Stern interview with Jonah Hill. They were discussing topics such as taking notes on a film and why Jonah wanted to host SNL for a fifth time — which prompted Hill to say this:

“The only reward is the process… The reward of filmmaking for me, of this film, would be to get to make another film because it’s what I love to do. And [that’s] something that actually is the truth, but it’s just hard to stick to because as human beings you’re like, ‘Oh but I want this validation or I want that validation’… The process is the reward. That’s it.”

Hill also talked about having a young, validation-driven headspace when he had been nominated for two Oscars. So Howard asked, “Do you fear you’d never be nominated again? Like now you’d really be in the moment, you’d be present…” And Jonah smartly replied, “No because the point is by the time you get something like that, by the time you’re ready for it, that’s not the thing that makes you happy…”

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

Albert Camus

The pursuit of success is, in and of itself, success. If anyone aspires to “be successful” they’re missing the point. Lots of people want to be the noun without doing the verb. They want the job title without the work. Let go of the thing that you’re trying to be (the noun), and focus on the actual work you need to be doing (the verb).

The point: DO. Or, more to the language of this article: Take the journey. The point is not about being successful or being an artist; it’s to put in the work, to play, to discover.

We all set goals. But goals are not destinations. Goals are guideposts along the journey. Then again, we need to take the journey just to realize that the journey in and of itself was the “destination” we were seeking in the first place.

I’m still on the journey. And I can say I’ve committed myself to identifying and defining the meaning contained within the phrase, “life is about the journey, not the destination.”