When you learn to love the process of living, control over your life becomes personal. – Chad Howse

Work is something that everyone should respect and love. It’s the process of the work, of doing work around your house or on a project you’re passionate about that will bring you happiness. (Read This: If You Half-Ass Your Work You Will Live A Half-Assed Life)

If you’ve ever set a goal and attained it, you’ll see that goals don’t bring happiness, they are merely something to work toward. To put all of your hopes and dreams into a goal that can only exist in the future is to give the power over your happiness and purpose in life to something beyond the present.

If, however, you love what you do and try to get better at it every day, the power returns to the person.

Our society is set up to force us to seek things.

We seek to possess objects and homes. We aspire to have happiness and love. We want sex and money. There is a finality in what we seek. The problem is that anyone who’s reached this finality, this end, understands that the desire for more never ceases.

It isn’t merely contentment that you should aspire to create. It isn’t even happiness that you should aspire to create. Every day should see you involved in creation, period. In work. (Read This: How to Get Shit Done)

Think about when you’re at your happiest, when time and space and all of your worries dissolve away.

You may be playing basketball with friends or even alone. You may be training in the gym. You may be training for a fight. Heck, you may be writing a book and before you know it 4 hours has gone by and 5,000 words have been written.

The key to happiness, then, isn’t the attainment of goals, but the creation of something you love or deem valuable, but also the simple art of practicing.

Work In Society

Work in our society is done to buy something. Be it freedom, safety, or a distorted view of happiness.

What work should actually be done for is simply that, work. Work because we’re born to work. We’re born to hunt and gather and make things. It’s when you work that you feel alive and present. So don’t let your mind wander. Don’t think about what you’re working toward, nor the vacation that looms.

Work because you love to work and to do anything else is useless.

Read This Next: Forget Finding Your Passion. Just Work.