If things aren’t going right for you now in your journey, it’s hard to love it.

If things are going good, it’s obviously easy to love it.

But regardless of how your life is, if you are on A journey, LOVE IT.

Love it because without the journey, you begin to stagnate. You begin to wallow in apathy and boredom and that’s where the path to the dark side begins.

A journey implies you are beginning or in the middle of heading toward a certain destination. Some might know what that destination is. Some may not. For those who don’t know the destination, the journey in it of itself is to find out what that destination is.

It’s the journey that makes us feel alive, that forces us to grow, that forces us to focus outside ourselves, to realize that we cannot do it alone, to meet other people who will later prove to be our mentors, our friends, from whom we learn valuable information from and all those adventures we take along the way come together to help us reach the destination we are striving for. Without this journey of pressing forward, you inevitably move backwards. Nothing is still in life. You are either going forward or backwards. Love the journey because it helps keep you moving forward.

I remember reading this article way back about the founder of Paypal but I honestly can’t say for certain whether it was him but I remember it was a person who founded a major site – Paypal or eBay or some site like that. I don’t know what he did but he came into a large sum of money after Paypal (or whatever site he founded) took off, more than enough to retire and he was very young at that time too.

And what do you do when you come into all that money?

You do the “beach” thing.

You take your girlfriend/boyfriend and you relax at the beach, sip margaritas on your hammock in the shade of the palm tree, work on your tan, swim in the crystal clear blue ocean, and just relax the whole time.

All fun, no work.

Just surf, sand, and sun.

So that’s what he did.

He lived the beach fantasy all people have.

After a month, he couldn’t stand it.

There was no journey. There was nowhere for him to go. He had all the money he needed for the rest of his life. And he played out the fantasy that most people have their whole lives.

But what now?

This is it?

This is all there is for him?

Just going to the beach everyday?

He had that empty feeling. He knew he was going backwards because he was doing nothing.

So he decided to go back to work. This time he started to build a whole new site, a whole new journey and that proved to be just the cure he was looking for.

The point is, everybody believes that the beach fantasy is the end all be all. That’s the destination. You work your butt off to get there and that’s IT because after that, no more journey! You don’t have to work anymore to go anywhere. That’s it. You can finally relax.

But you get there and it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be. You find it’s not about the destination.

You find out it’s all about the journey.

Because that’s what makes us TRULY happy - when we’re working toward something, when we’re trying to reach a destination aligned with our core values.

Think about it and you’ll find it’s true. Look back at the times in which you were in the midst of a journey and you’ll find happy times there. You knew where you were going, you were making good consistent progress getting there, and you knew it was just a matter of time before you reached it.

And you took rest stops along the way to recharge and relax. Nothing wrong with doing that when you’re traveling.

But one may ask – what happens if you complete your journey?

What will probably happen is you reward yourself with this resting period. But the honeymoon for that period won’t last long. You’ll get that gnawing feeling in your gut, knowing that there’s no journey anymore. So you either try to find a new one and spend considerable time doing so, or you fall into the deep dark pits of boredom, apathy and despair, spiraling down to rock bottom until you snap out of it and then go on to find your next journey.

To prevent that, it’s important if you find yourself nearing the end of your journey, to think about what your next one will be.

If you have that in mind, you can take the relaxation period and enjoy more from it, knowing there’s another journey ahead of you that you can dive right into after you recharge.

I highly recommend doing that – finding out your next journey while you are nearing the end of your current one because for some reason, it’s much easier to determine what that next journey will be when you’re in the flow of a journey.

When things settle down, when there’s no movement, it’s hard to think of what your next journey should be. It takes a lot of time and in that time, you begin to second guess and doubt yourself on whether or not you can find this next journey of yours, which further hinders your ability to find it in the first place.

But with time, you inevitably do and you get back on your figurative horse.

Love the journey because the journey means life itself.

Without the journey, it’s easy to feel like you’re not living at all.

So if you’re having a bad time right now, but you find yourself on a definite journey, don’t worry about it. You might not recognize it now, but you’ll always find in hindsight it’s the best place to be.