The first time I remember ever hearing the phrase “trust the process,” I was interviewing my friend Mick about the house he’d built. It had taken him eight years of evenings and weekends, and started, kind of ironically, with him spending an entire weekend peeling three 20-foot logs before he realized he’d had the draw knife backward the whole time.
He stuck with it, of course, and built a house so beautiful you’d never guess he had no idea what he was doing when he started. The house was wonderful to spend time in, but I really loved the story of him creating it with his own hands, without ever taking out a loan or putting anything on a credit card.
People still use the phrase “trust the process” nowadays, and it always makes me think of Mick, who died in 2012. If he were still around, I might press him to elaborate about his relationship with the process, since he was also a passionate photographer, business owner, writer, and runner. I wish I could ask him, “Mick, is ‘trust’ really the right word for what we do?”
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There’s a clip of a 2016 postgame interview that bubbles up during college basketball season every year, after senior Dennis Clifford’s last game with Boston College, a program that had had losing seasons every year of Clifford’s career. They had just lost in the ACC Tournament to Florida State, to go 0-18 in conference play. In the clip a reporter asks Clifford, “Cliff, what are you going to take away as your best memory from playing basketball at Boston College?”
Dennis Clifford: “Probably just …
[pauses for 19 seconds to try to compose himself]
… going out to eat.”
There are a number of ways people interpret this clip—including that when you’re playing on a losing team, the basketball isn’t the best part and you have to find something else to focus on. But a lot of other people have commented about the profundity of Clifford’s words and sentiment, saying that it’s not about winning, it’s about all the time you spent with your friends doing something together, and I think they get it.
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This past week, I chatted with my friend Mario Fraioli, who is a running coach, writer, and podcaster. As always, our conversation bounced back and forth between running and creativity, and big goals like “running X race” and “writing a book.” I was running my mouth about how long it takes to write a book, and how the writing is really the best part, and how much time runners spend training for races (versus actually racing), and I said something along the lines of “like 99 percent of my running is ‘training,’ so I better enjoy at least some of it, right?”
And then after we hung up, since I am a nerd, I went ahead and looked it up, a process that I must sheepishly admit involved downloading a spreadsheet, sorting that spreadsheet, and doing a not-small amount of mathematics. I looked at a year where I entered two races (pretty typical for me) and did a lot of running, and calculated that I spend 95.4 percent of my running time that year “training,” and 4.6 percent of my running time racing. This is pretty much in line with a lot of online marathon training programs: 16 weeks of training, a few hours of racing, 95ish percent of that time spent on “the process,” which you are trusting to deliver “the result.”
But the process also—hopefully—delivers some nice views, a few really red-letter-day runs, some human moments you witness while you’re out there getting your heart rate up, a boost in your overall well-being several days per week, some good conversations with a friend who runs with you, and maybe a few moments of blissful gratitude that you can run at all.
Writing a book—as much as writers complain about the actual act of writing—is, to me, the best part. Better than holding the first copy in my hands, better or the day it goes on sale, or seeing a copy on a shelf in a bookstore somewhere. When you’re doing the actual writing part, you’re still dreaming, experimenting, working things out, discovering the path it’s going to take, imagining it one day being an actual concrete thing that someone might hold in their hands, read, and maybe even dogear a page or two because you wrote something that feels true to them too.
And maybe it’s the same with making your own pesto, or growing a decent tomato, or building a bicycle, or raising a child, or hiking uphill for hours just to stand on top of something for a handful of minutes: You give a chunk of the precious few hours of your life to something, imagining a great moment someday when it will all come together, and then when it does, you turn around and realize how many other great moments made up what you thought was “the process.”
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