I have been thinking about dopamine wrong for most of my life, and I suspect you have too.
It started with an episode of the Huberman Lab podcast that I listened to on a Tuesday morning drive to one of our Golden Pines homes, the kind of drive where the roads are still dark and the coffee hasn't kicked in yet, and Dr. Andrew Huberman was explaining something that stopped me mid-sip. The core finding, drawn from decades of neuroscience research, is that dopamine — the molecule most of us associate with pleasure, with reward, with the finish line — is actually released in greatest quantities not when we GET the thing we want, but when we are in PURSUIT of it. The wanting, the working, the grinding forward in the dark.. that is where the neurochemistry of motivation lives. Not after. During.
I had to sit in the parking lot for a few minutes after that one. Because, what Dr. Huberman was describing was not some abstract lab finding about rats pressing levers. He was describing my life.
Let me back up. I studied chemical engineering in college at the University of San Carlos in the Philippines, and one thing that training gives you is a deep respect for mechanisms — for understanding not just that something works but HOW it works, what drives the reaction, what the inputs and outputs actually are. So when Andrew Huberman laid out the dopamine system in mechanistic terms, explaining that the brain's reward circuitry is fundamentally designed to reinforce effort and not just outcome, something clicked for me in a way that all the motivational quotes and Instagram posts about "trusting the process" never quite managed. This was not philosophy. This was biochemistry. The process is not something you white-knuckle through on your way to a reward. The process IS the reward, chemically, measurably, by design.
And so I started looking at my own days differently. I run memory care homes in Southeast Michigan, and anyone who has built something in senior care knows that the work is not glamorous. It is early mornings and licensing paperwork and supply chain calls and caregiver scheduling and family meetings that require every ounce of patience and empathy you have, and then you wake up the next day and do it all again. For years I told myself what most entrepreneurs tell themselves — that the grind was the price of admission, the toll you pay on the way to something better. Endure this part. Get through this part. The good stuff is on the other side.
But Huberman's research flipped that framing entirely. The science says that my brain was already giving me the good stuff, right there in the middle of the hard work, in the problem-solving and the learning and the forward motion. I just wasn't paying attention to it. I was so focused on some imagined future state of "making it" that I was ignoring the fact that the doing was already generating exactly what I was chasing.
Granted, this runs against almost everything hustle culture teaches. The dominant narrative is suffer now, celebrate later — defer all gratification, stack up the wins, and someday you will arrive at a place where you can finally enjoy yourself. But the neuroscience suggests something almost the opposite. The dopamine system rewards pursuit, and if you train yourself to only associate reward with completion, you actually diminish your capacity for sustained motivation. You burn out. You crash after every milestone. You feel empty at the top of the mountain because you spent the whole climb telling yourself the climb was the bad part.
I read about 40 books a year, and people sometimes ask me how I maintain that, as if reading is a chore that requires discipline. But I do not read to finish books. I read because the reading itself — the encounter with a new idea, the feeling of my understanding shifting paragraph by paragraph — that is the thing. I do not track my book count to hit a number. The count is just evidence that I keep showing up to something that feeds me. It sounds corny, I know, to say that reading a book about neuroscience on a dark Tuesday morning is its own reward, but I mean it, and I think the science backs me up on this one.
There is something I did not fully understand when I was building Golden Pines from nothing. I remember the early days — the renovations, the regulatory hurdles, the nights where I questioned everything, the financial risk that sat on my chest like a weight. I thought I was enduring something. I thought the struggle was the cost and the finished product would be the payoff. But when I look back now, with a few years of distance and a much better understanding of how my own brain works, I realize that the struggle was when I was most alive. Not happy, necessarily. Not comfortable. But ALIVE — engaged, growing, becoming someone I had not been before. The building was not preparation for some future version of me that would finally be enough. The building was the entire point.
In any case, I am not the master of this. I still catch myself postponing satisfaction, still catch myself treating the present work as a means to some future end. But I am learning to notice when the dopamine is already flowing, to recognize that the early morning and the hard conversation and the tenth revision of a business plan are not obstacles between me and the reward. They are the reward. And every time I forget that, I come back to what Dr. Huberman said — that the brain does not wait for the finish line to celebrate. It celebrates the running.
I want to protect that. Not the outcomes, not the milestones, not the someday-I'll-have-made-it fantasy that most of us carry around like a promissory note we never cash.. but the work itself. The reading, the building, the caring for people who need caring for, the becoming. Mama gave everything she had so that I could become someone worth becoming, and I used to think the tribute was in arriving — in being successful, in being finished. But I do not think the tribute is in the arriving anymore. I think the tribute is in the continuing. In waking up tomorrow and doing the work again, not because I have to, but because the doing is how I honor every person who believed I was worth believing in. The process is not something I endure on the way to becoming who I am supposed to be. The process is who I am supposed to be.
