The Process

I read this interesting article the other day, real eye-opener. 

The idea is that if you just start focusing on the process, rather than the outcome, you'll start feeling much more free, much more effective. And this is true on multiple levels and for multiple reasons. 

There's so many other concepts that link with this one: 

• Focus units -- by removing extraneous considerations, you free up focus units
• These focus units can be used to form a global perspective, for instance. Perhaps "go meta", form a general theory, a model to understand your internal data. A model helps you interpret internal feedback in the model context and gives you hints on which points to test and explore to gain maximal information under the model assumptions. It could even help you build your own learning plan. 
• Control and optimization -- by paying attention to internal factors (factors that are directly under your control) and less so on external factors (factors not under your control), you can run a learning algorithm to find the correct control pattern to get the desired result. The classic example/model is a smooth map between two differentiable manifolds. Outcome-fixation is like trying to control the outcome from the range directly, but it's really the domain that controls the outcome. 
• A cute mathematical application of binary search for optimal control comes in bottle flipping. The mistake people usually make is not paying enough attention to how your kinetic chain feels when flipping the bottle, instead focusing heavily on the way the bottle flips. Once you start feeling, you can start adjusting and remembering and get pretty consistent. In the end, the most complex of movements is controlled by just a series of muscle contractions. It doesn't come from you "imagining the movement really hard in your mind and trying to do it" -- this typically results in your mind resorting to known habits, which is often the opposite of what you're trying to do when you're learning something new
• Mindfulness -- outcome-fixation is often accompanied by looping noise and negative thoughts which ruin focus and consume mental resources. 
• Scarcity mindset -- outcome-fixation is often accompanied by scarcity mindset. This is a well-known cause of tunnel visioning, which is almost always contrary to our complex, modern day goals.