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Process not product

Thursday, October 28th, 2010 by Adrian Segar

process not product: photograph of a wall of yellow sticky notes, each filled with a few words and an occasional diagram. Image attribution: Flickr user sixmilliondollardan

Process not product.

“We shape our buildings, then our buildings shape us.”
—Winston Churchill

I spent the first twenty-five years of my life obtaining a Ph.D. What was more important, the achievement or the work and learning involved?

More recently, for about ten years I had a piece of paper thumbtacked at eye level on my office wall. It said:

Process not product.

I needed that piece of paper in plain view to remind me as I worked on projects that, ultimately, the process I use to achieve my goals is more important than the end result.

No, I’m not saying that the products of my work aren’t important; far from it. Rather, if I concentrate on my end goals to the extent that my awareness of the process I am using to obtain them suffers, then:

  1. My end results will be inferior to what I could have achieved; and
  2. I’ll be living a miserable life.

It took me ten years before I removed that piece of paper. Ten years to reliably remember not to plunge into achievement at the expense of mindful action.

Sometimes, old habits take a long time to change.

There’s a silver lining, though. By implementing change in small ways in our daily lives, we can better facilitate the change we seek.

Which is more important for you? Process or product?

Image attribution: Flickr user sixmilliondollardan

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 28th, 2010 at 3:24 pm and is filed under Soapbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

3 thoughts on “Process not product”

  1. The process needs to serve the entity not the opposite.The process needs to consider the reality that needs to change as soon as reality changes (dynamic steering)If you could reach those 2 things, the product you have at the end will be consider very ok and if not, you will be able to correct the course very fast.

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