Still Trusting the Process

 

When it comes to American sports, winning is everything. Front offices will open up their checkbooks, teams will tank, and athletes will endure unbearable hardship all in service of that ring. Win the last game of the season and you become immortal, to be remembered and feted by a hungry fan base.

There is nothing like winning to elevate the locker room mood and brighten the spirits of an entire city. We live for those moments, so are willing to do whatever it takes to get there. And if we've been to the mountaintop, we'll do whatever it takes to get back. 

With such a single-minded determination, life lessons abound. Eagles QB Jalen Hurts swallowed the pain of losing Super Bowl 57 by saying "you win or you learn." What an extraordinary statement of resolve, to transform the bitter pill of defeat into another step towards victory. And completely on-brand for a young man who continues to impress me with his maturity and humility.

Yet transferring this determination to our lives can be somewhat fraught. We are not megastars upon whose shoulders rest the anxious wishes of a whole region. We are going about the normalcy of our day as workers and parents and friends and citizens, far from the spotlight that shines so brightly on Hurts and others. How do we also "win or learn"?

Let me borrow from another Philly sports team the phrase "trust the process." It is simultaneously an assurance by 76ers management to fans that lean seasons and tough decision will beget future success, and the nickname of Joel Embiid, the centerpiece of that team's hope for championship glory. As such, it has been beaten into the ground around here to be rendered almost meaningless from having been uttered so often.

Yet contained in the phrase is great wisdom. Which helps shore up some of the shortcomings of the first statement about "you win or you learn."

What do I mean? Well, for starters, in life it's important that when you win you are still learning. Winning can cover over a multitude of problems in a bad way, thus allowing those problems to remain unaddressed amid the euphoria of victory. "You win or you learn" thus provides a false dichotomy, as if you should learn when you don't win but don't have to when you do. "Trust the process" means you work on doing the right things the right way independent of the immediate result, even if the temptation is to gloss over things you need to change so long as you keep winning. For the long run, failing forward is better than winning the wrong way.

Furthermore, who said winning is everything? Blasphemy in this country, maybe. But in life, there are competitions where winning matters, and then there are other circumstances that should not be competitions but we can be tempted to make them such. Competition by definition means I win and you lose, but most of what's good in life isn't, or shouldn't be, about one of us winning and one of us losing. I say this as a relatively competitive person, but it saddens me that we've injected too much gamesmanship into things like politics and parenting and community and spirituality. The goal isn't always to win, and to make it so runs the risk of doing damage.

"You win or you learn" is a wonderful thing for Jalen Hurts to say as the QB for the Philadelphia Eagles. I applaud him, I applaud it, and I take the statement to heart. But I also trust the process.