Thinking

Alyssa Liu and Loving the Process

There's a concept in the Bhagavad Gita (nishkama karma) that translates roughly to "action without attachment to outcome." You do the work because the work is worth doing, not because you're chasing a specific result. Stanford researchers Huang and Aaker found the same thing empirically: people who frame their goals as journeys rather than destinations show significantly more growth and sustained effort after reaching them. The metaphor changes the relationship to the work itself. Alyssa Liu puts it better than any paper could. After falling at the Olympics, she told NBC: "A bad story is still a story, and I think that's beautiful. There's no way to lose." And later: "I love struggling, actually. It makes me feel alive. I really did learn detachment." That's not naive optimism; it's a framework. If the goal is expression rather than perfection, every attempt adds to the body of work. The stumbles become part of the narrative rather than disqualifying moments. Detach from the scoreboard and the score tends to take care of itself.