Last week we hosted Spark 2026, our free annual workshop where me and some guest speakers walked participants through reflecting on 2025, figuring out where there life’s going, and setting goals for 2026. Big thank you to everyone who attended: I had a great time running it, and I hope you got some value out of it 🙂
The event was very focused around Goals. So this week’s email is going to be about Goals. But before we get started, I’d like to talk about a video game.
You see, the other day I was reclining on the couch playing God of War (2018) on the PS5. I’m a few hours into the game, and I found myself at a crossroads (literally and metaphorically). I could choose to row my boat LEFT, and progress the main storyline. Or I could choose to row my boat RIGHT, and do a side quest that seemed interesting but that wouldn’t progress the main story.
I noticed my default thought process was: “well, we’ve gotta go LEFT, because that’ll get us moving through the storyline faster”. But then I stopped and noticed that thought. I was like: “hmm that’s interesting… I’m playing a video game here… why do I feel the need to play it efficiently? Why did my first thought go to: what’s the fastest way to progress through the game?”
After some thinking, I landed on the question: “What’s actually the point of playing this video game?” And the answer came pretty quickly: “The point is simply to enjoy the journey of playing it”. There’s no cosmic significance to my playing God of War. It isn’t an exercise in “self improvement”. The “points” or “levels” I earn in the game have less than zero impact on my life. It’s simply an arbitrary video game, I’m playing at an arbitrary difficulty level (hard, but not ultra-hard), purely for the purposes of passing the time doing something enjoyable.
So I decided to turn right, and take the more scenic route, doing the side quest that had no bearing on the main storyline, but enjoying myself, and playing in a relaxed fashion with the attitude of “leaning back, relaxing and enjoying the challenge of this arbitrary video game”.
The following morning, I was in the office with the team, and working on some designs for our new productivity app. I found myself feeling a tad on-edge with how little time I had available to work on it: just a few hours of deep work before the next meeting, and then it’s lunchtime, and then my afternoon’s packed with gym followed by a couple more meetings with the dev team. I found myself approaching the designs with an air of franticness, an air of feeling like I was running out of time, and therefore had to make progress on this quickly.
But then I remembered the feeling when playing God of War. The feeling of trying to do things “efficiently”. So I asked myself that question again: “What’s actually the point of us building this productivity app?”
Sure, if the app does well, it’ll mean more money for the business. And sure, it would be cool to be building an app that lots of people around the world use and enjoy that helps them manage their time and achieve their goals. But in the grand scheme of things… a few decades from now (if not way sooner), the app will be forgotten. A few more decades from now (hopefully a lot longer), me and the dev team will be dead, and no one will particularly care about this app that we spent a few years building in the 2020s on planet Earth. This app has zero cosmic significance.
So what’s the point? I realised that much like a video game, the point is primarily to “enjoy the experience of building this thing”. If we build it well, it’ll hopefully have a little more impact on our lives than literally spending those hours playing more video games. But not that much more, on a cosmic scale. In many ways, the journey of building an app is much like the journey of playing a video game: it’s an arbitrary goal, with an arbitrary level of difficulty (how complex and full-featured do we want to make it?), played for the primary purpose of “building something cool” and “enjoying the journey of building it”.
So I thought, “huh, if the point of building this app is actually primarily to enjoy the journey of building this app, what if I approached it like I approached playing God of War… what if instead of approaching it with an attitude of franticness or stress, I instead leaned back, relaxed, and enjoyed the challenge?”
So I tried it. I took a breath, I leaned back, I relaxed, and I remembered that building the app is an arbitrary video game, where the primary goal is to simply enjoy the challenge. And you know what… I had a great time. For the next few hours, I had my Study with Me Spotify playlist playing through my headphones. I took breaks every now and then to get a coffee and use the loo. I chatted to the team a bit while waiting for Lovable to mock up designs. And while approaching it in this “relaxed” fashion, I made a load of progress, came up with a bunch of cool new ideas, and felt great.
The very first chapter of Feel-Good Productivity is titled Play. The whole thesis of the entire book is that when we approach our work in the spirit of play, treating it with a little more lightness than we’re used to, we actually become more productive, more creative, and less stressed. AND on top of that, the work ends up generating rather than draining our energy.
But even though I’ve written that chapter, and I’ve seen first-hand the benefits of taking a more “playful” approach to work, I still find myself defaulting to the mode of “this is a Serious Thing that Needs To Be Done Quickly and Productively and Efficiently”. Over time, I’ve gotten better at catching myself when I do this, and deliberately switching over to “play mode”. But it still isn’t my default. I’d love for it to be, so that my approach to practically every goal or project, in work and in life, is to treat it with an attitude of lightness, ease and sincerity, rather than Heaviness and Seriousness.
Zooming out even more, I’ve found myself wondering this: What if every goal we’re working towards, in our work, our health, our relationships, our home life… What if all those goals are “merely” arbitrary video games, played on an arbitrary level of difficulty, where the primary purpose is to enjoy the journey of playing them?
What if… the journey is in fact, the destination?
Dammit, after all that, we’ve landed on a cliche.
Have a great week!
Ali xx
