Joe frames enjoyment not as a nice-to-have but as the gravitational center of the entire transformative journey — “the golden meme of the journey.” It’s more effective to enjoy the process than to push through it, and the specific reframe matters: “The question isn’t how do I do the things that I enjoy. The question is how do I enjoy the things that I’m doing.”
This applies to everything, including the uncomfortable parts. If you notice you’re criticizing yourself, how do you enjoy criticizing yourself? If you’re on a meditation retreat, how do you enjoy being bored? This creates a virtuous feedback loop: enjoyment makes you want to approach transformation, which accelerates learning, which generates more enjoyment.
Joe illustrates this with the story of driving by a house that once triggered a knot in his stomach — eventually he would drive by hoping the feeling would return so he could attend to it and love it. He learned to enjoy the thing he thought was uncomfortable. “That’s critical. And that’s what it is.”
“How do you enjoy the things that I’m doing? That’s like the golden meme of the journey — that’s where you guide your footsteps by, and then everything else is kind of a technicality that revolves around that sun.”
Related Concepts
- Enjoyment as the only metric
- Enjoyment dissolves procrastination
- How you do it determines if you do it
- Enjoyment is the compass for surrender to your deeper call