As self-developers and future thinkers we’re all a little obsessed with understanding process: the process behind our minds, our lives, our work, our achievements, our successes and our failures. But perhaps this isn’t always the best way to be when in search of prolonged lifetime success.

A few years ago, before I even began building or writing for One Life Success, I was as new to self-development as many of you are today. At that time I created and built things, I achieved success at different levels but never appreciated the process behind it. Instead, I was solely focused on the content and the action, 100%.

But over the last few years’ things have changed and I’ve become a much bigger thinker, examiner and analyst. I now find myself analyzing the processes behind my life and trying to understand and manipulate them for the better more and more.

However, a big part of self-development is discovering even the things you do to develop and changing them for the better. In doing so and with the help of others, I’ve come to realize once again that it’s not the process that’s important but instead the content and the results that come from it.

Instead of analyzing exactly what’s happened, why it’s happened and how it’s happened before looking at how I can reproduce and manipulate the process again. I now realize it’s not important to fully analyze these things, but rather to simply be aware of them, understand them and focus instead on the next big thing. The next set of content and results.

Steve Jobs once spoke about the Process vs. Content debate in The Lost Interview from 1995. “People get confused, companies get confused.” He said, “When they start getting bigger they want to replicate their initial success and a lot of them think well, somehow there’s some magic in the process of how that success was created. So they start to institutionalize process across the company and before very long, people get very confused that the process is the content.”

“And in my career,” Steve Said, “I’ve found that the best people are the ones that really understand the content and they’re a pain in the butt to manage you know, but you put up with it because they’re so great at the content. And that’s what makes great products, it’s not process.”

Now through One Life Success, I like to bring up new topics and angles but not necessarily suggest that they are all correct. However, I do believe through experience that many people, including self-developers are often guilty of focusing too much on the process and should instead balance this out with content and action to for maximum results.

Too much of one or another can be lethal for an individual (or company) but with clear balance and consideration, I believe an optimum processes and keen focus on content can work together perfectly to create recurring results for your life, rather than just overanalyzing the last lot and only your process to get to the next.

I always remember Jim Rohn once speaking and he’d say something like, I used to wonder how this would happen and why people would do that, but now I just say I don’t know. And I think this is the way to look at process, we should all be aware of the process and we should all even try to understand it to some extent, but we should go no further. Instead, we should accept what we know and focus the rest of our time and energy into the content of our aims and the execution of them instead.

So to conclude, my message from this post is: focus less on the process and more on the content. Because personal process will not change the world, but excellent content and its results will. It’s about balance. Don’t get caught up in the detail, instead just execute on the results.

Wrote by Joe Brown