The 2% We Remember: How to Enjoy the Journey Instead of Just Chasing the Destination

Why do we spend so much time chasing moments we'll only experience briefly? After reflecting on a World Series appearance and lessons from astronaut Chris Hadfield, I found myself wrestling with a simple question: What happens when we become so focused on the reward that we overlook everything required to reach it? In this episode, we explore why our minds tend to fixate on peaks, endings, and achievements and how to find more meaning and fulfillment in the journey itself.

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Transcript

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Have you ever thought about how much time you spend chasing and pursuing moments that really only represent a tiny fraction of your life? We spend years working toward future milestones. We daydream about them and we imagine what they'll feel like once we reach their summit. And we tell ourselves that when we finally get there, everything might be different. But here's what's interesting. A championship celebration might only last a night, or maybe until the victory parade. A wedding only lasts a day, graduation only lasts a few hours, and a promotion is announced in a moment. Yet we spend months, years, and sometimes decades pursuing them. Now don't get me wrong, those moments matter and they can be incredibly meaningful, and they deserve to be celebrated. Many will become some of our favorite memories in life. But what happens if we become so focused on those moments that we overlook everything surrounding them? So today what I want to talk about on the podcast is sharing a lesson from a Canadian astronaut by the name of Chris Hadfield, and it's a lesson that invites all of us to expand our perspective on the pursuit of our own goals and reconsider where some of life's most meaningful moments are actually found. Hey coaches and leaders, I got a quick question for you. You spend a lot of time building game plans for those you lead, but when was the last time you built one for yourself? If you're looking to sharpen your leadership skills, strengthen your team culture, or find better ways to support and challenge your athletes in the mental game, I'd love to help. I'm offering a free coaching call where we can talk through your current challenges and create a simple game plan for what might move the needle most for you, your players, and your program. Most coaches I know obsess over developing their team, but they neglect the person in the mirror. This call is a chance to invest in you because a better you is going to produce a better them. And if that sounds helpful, you can grab a time at Callanly.com slash Zach Brandon. That's Callanly.com slash Zach Brandon, or just check the link in the show notes. I'd love to connect and explore how I can best support you. Now I think I've mentioned this on a previous episode, but I one of my all-time favorite books is An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield. There's so many lessons and insights in it where I found myself thinking how relevant they were to elite athletes and performers in other spaces. I've actually gifted the book to a few different athletes over the last several years. And for those that are unfamiliar with Hadfield, he had an extraordinary career. He flew three space missions, he completed multiple spacewalks, and he commanded the International Space Station, and he spent nearly 166 days in space. Now, unless you've read his book, the majority of people get drawn to his 166 days in space. He's got some incredible stories from his space missions, including when he got legitimately blinded during one of his spacewalks, which he discusses in his famous TED Talk back in 2014. But one of the things that I've always appreciated about Hatfield is that he never seemed to define his career solely by those moments. In fact, he's been quick to acknowledge and extend appreciation to the full experience as an astronaut, which includes a significant amount of time not actually in space at all. The vast majority of his career has been in training. Astronauts spend countless hours in preparation and they're constantly learning and refining their skills, not only for future space missions for themselves, but also to help researchers publish critical findings that can be used to assist other astronauts and future missions. His book gives a wonderful overview of the preparation demands for astronauts and the years spent becoming capable long before he was ever given an opportunity to launch in the first place. But in an interview on the Green Room podcast, Hatfield highlighted how important it was for him to appreciate the entire experience because 166 days in space was such a small fraction of his time as an astronaut. So I decided to uh do some math and I wanted to kind of gauge just how small of a fraction was this. If we estimate his career was over 21 years as an astronaut, that's going to come out roughly to 7,600 plus days. The 166 days that Hadfield spent in space represents just over 2% of his entire journey. Just 2%. The moments that everyone remembers represent such a small tiny fraction of his career. These are the moments that also everybody wants to ask him about. Again, they just only represent just such a small fraction. And what oftentimes gets missed though is that there are thousands, thousands of ordinary days that make it possible. But this isn't just true for astronauts. It's common for most of us. Think about a coach who wins a national championship. The game will only last a few hours, the celebration might last a few days, and the banner might hang forever. But the journey consisted of years of recruiting, phone calls, planning, teaching, leading, failing, adjusting, and just showing up every single day. Think about a marriage. The wedding might be one of the most memorable days of your entire life, but the marriage itself is built through thousands of ordinary conversations, dinners, challenges and fights, laughs, sacrifices, and moments that will never make a photo album. Or think about becoming a parent. There are milestone moments that you're always going to remember, like the birth or graduation. But most of parenting happens in the everyday moments in between, the car rides, the bedtime stories, and the ordinary Tuesday evenings. And yet if we're not careful, we can spend years building a life, a career, a relationship, or a season only to evaluate the entire experience through just a handful of moments, which I think raises an interesting question. Why do those moments seem to occupy such a disproportionate amount of space in our memories? So here's where we can look at psychology, and there's a few well-known principles that I think can help kind of offer some explanation here. The first is something that psychologist Daniel Kahneman called duration neglect. Duration neglect suggests that when we evaluate an experience, we often fail to appropriately account for how much time we actually spent having that experience. Think about everything that gets poured into an eight-month season. Then the season ends with maybe, let's say, a disappointing loss. Suddenly the entire year can feel disappointing. Our minds often allow one moment to outweigh everything that came before it. That's an example of duration neglect. The second principle is called the peak end rule. This is also where we can go back to Kahneman's research that found when people reflect on their experiences, their memories tend to be disproportionately shaped by two things the emotional peak and the ending. In other words, our minds don't necessarily create like a documentary of our lives, they create highlight reels. We compress years of experiences into just a handful of moments that stand out most vividly to us, the celebrations and the devastating losses, the breakthroughs and the sudden collapses that feel like they come out of nowhere. And while those moments absolutely matter, they can begin to overshadow everything else that happened throughout the middle. And then finally, the third principle is what psychologists call the arrival fallacy. This is the belief that lasting fulfillment exists somewhere ahead of us. It oftentimes sounds something like I'll feel successful once I achieve this goal, or I can finally relax once the season's over, or I'm going to enjoy life a little bit more once I finally get this promotion. Now, most of us have probably said or thought of some version of this in our own life and in our own experiences. The challenge is that when we finally arrive though, our minds often move the goalposts. What was once the dream now just becomes a new baseline, and the achievement becomes your new expectation. I remember listening to Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVeigh discuss this very thing on the Game Changers podcast with Molly Fletcher. He talked about winning the Super Bowl and discovering that the feeling didn't last nearly as long as he expected. Life eventually just returns to normal. The reality is that there simply aren't enough championship moments, promotions, or milestones to provide all of our fulfillment in life. And within all of this, I'm not here to say or argue against ambition. And this isn't an argument against caring deeply about what you're working toward, but it is a reminder that fulfillment can't come exclusively from the peaks in our lives. Because if the goal is the only thing that you enjoy, you're asking a very small percentage of your life to provide all of your joy, meaning, and fulfillment. And I think that's a lot to ask from a moment that may only last for a very small fraction of time. So this week, I'd like to offer a simple invitation. Take inventory before it's over, not after the season, not after this current chapter of your life ends. Just do it while you're still in it. Pause and notice the people around you. Notice the opportunities that are currently in front of you. Notice what you're learning. Notice how you've grown. Notice the routines and experiences that can feel very ordinary right now. Because many of those moments are going to someday be ones that you miss because even though they don't look very remarkable while they're happening. And I'm also going to invite you to ask yourself or reflect on one question here. What part of my current season am I going to miss someday? And again, because the peaks matter, the milestones matter, and the accomplishments matter. But again, they only represent a small percentage of our lives. The other 98%, that matters a lot too. And if we're paying attention, we may discover that the journey itself wasn't simply the path to the destination, it was part of the destination all along. Thanks for listening.