Why It Pays To Nurture Your Process, Instead of Prioritising Results
You’ve seen this image of the iceberg illusion before, I’m sure.
Either way, let’s take a closer look at it:
Success is the result.
Everything else; unseen superficially, is the process.
To put results over process is to set one’s self up for disappointment.
And yet …
We tend to prioritise results over process:
I’ve seen this play out over and over again, with the nearly 2000 MBAs and Executives I’ve worked with in my work with business education.
These are professionals who return to business education in pursuit of new direction in their careers and lives. I help them make sense of their past professional lives, so they may direct themselves toward meaningful future career success; rooted in greater awareness of who they are, what they offer and what they want.
Like most of us, these professionals tend to focus on the results they’ve achieved in their careers thus far, as opposed to their internal process — skills, talents, and knowledge — that created these results in the first place.
I can’t even blame them for it!
We live in a world where algorithms decide if these professionals can fulfil their desired career moves, and these algorithms seem to love results over process. Obviously a bias for results that is programmed by a work culture that also overvalues results.
The algorithm apple doesn’t fall far from the culture tree, after all.
If you think briefly about your own career or life, like their 2000 careers, you’ll see why prioritising results is a stupid idea.
Very likely; almost certain, that several “results” — or even the lack thereof! — in your own career, in theirs, and certainly in mine, happened as a coming together of many factors, not all of which are under our control as individuals.
Maybe you were really good at your job and made all the right decisions to make some fantastic results happen, and then; due to some external circumstance, your capacities couldn’t be realised into noteworthy results.
Murphy’s Law started as a scientific law for a reason, before it became a colloquial thing.
<If only there was a way of dropping the Second Law of Thermodynamics into colloquial conversation. Anyway, I digress. Must be entropy writing through me.
Stop that, Entropy! I have a point to make here.>
In much the same sense that a farmer; no matter how disciplined he might be with his ploughing, sowing, and nurturing, might have nothing to show for his work if perhaps a storm came upon his fields. Or his fields became the site for some interstellar crop circle emoji. Murphy’s law at work!
Considering he has no results to show for his work, does that make him a bad farmer?
No. Just an unlucky one.
You can do everything right, and still have nothing to show for it. In other words, you can have a great process, but have no results to show.
On the other hand: you can do average; and still, with all the right external circumstances, and a fair amount of luck, have great results to show for it.
And that seems to be because:
Results are Not Replicable — But Process is!
If we think back to the professionals I mentioned earlier; who focus more on the results they’ve achieved in their careers thus far, rather than on the process — we can notice something else at work which is true for all of us.
Your internal process — skills, talents, attitudes — by which you make results happen in the first place, is actually replicable from one employer to the next; and even from one career to the next. We may call it a “transferable” property.
That’s because you are “carrying” that process inside you wherever you go. The results may or may not have come with the right environment, luck; or the lack thereof.
Ergo results are not a reliable guide of what you; or anyone else, is capable of. Only the transferable process is a reliable guide of what a person is capable of.
This is also why a good recruiter or coach tries to get to the bottom of what’s transferable, so that they better understand what the person brings, or how they might direct themselves. As opposed to superficially understanding what was achieved by what’s transferable.
While results depend on context, process is context agnostic!
So, what? Ditch Results, Nurture Processes!
If you’re in the process of building a business, or realising some other creative goal in your life, you’d have both as well: The process, and the results of whatever it is you are working on.
As you hustle your hustles, make your music, write your plays or whatever it is that you do — or sculpt that marble, my preferred metaphor of the creative deed — you’ll see output upon output come through, as your practice goes on.
The outputs are results, the practice is the process.
Some of these outputs, might be deemed “successes”, while others might be deemed “failures”. They’re merely results, or lack thereof. They come and go.
If the circumstances are wrong; despite you doing everything well, you may have failures. That doesn’t make you bad at what you pursue.
Similarly, you could do whatever it is you do averagely, and due to circumstances; or luck, still have successes — doesn’t make you good at what you pursue.
Either way, the results are fleeting inflection points in the underlying thing that is present in your life as a hustler / musician / writer / creative soul: the process.
Results are fickle creatures who show up only when the scene is right. Yes, it’s great when they show up, and everyone is happy and excited they’re on the scene, but the air might feel … stranger. Like how the mood changes when someone seemingly “important” walks in. Everyone talks and laughs differently all of a sudden.
Process is that friend of yours who’s there for you no matter what. They don’t wait for things to be perfect to show up. You show up, and they’re there! The air isn’t strange. It’s comfortable, and reliable. A good time is guaranteed.
The process loves you, simply for showing up.
That’s why processes trump results every single time, which is why it’s best you return to it and nurture it.
Nurturing the process invariably breeds positive results!
The funny thing about nurturing the process is that; if you do it often enough, a result that is invariably something that can be deemed a “success” is bound to show up.
Even if that were, by accident.
That’s the paradox of the quantity of creative pursuit, v/s chasing singular perfection which I wrote about previously with the pottery teacher anecdote. In short: the pottery students who made the most (quantity) pots; by extension perfected their process, and consequently made the best (quality) pot.
Returning to the process is the best practice there is!
Just like the farmer who has to still plough, sow, and nurture his fields all through the year. He continues doing that anyway, irrespective of whether the last crop was a winning harvest, or the canvas to some teenage alien crop circle vandal.
The farmer gets up in the morning, hits the fields, does his duty anyway.
The process is completely internal.
Which is why it’s labeled “What people don’t see” in the iceberg illustration.
It’s all you. So, it’s on you to get to it.
Leave the results to everyone else. It’s literally an “externality”. You can’t even see it! It’s above the surface. Superficial.
You’re in deep. Below the surface. Labouring at the process.
Outcomes irrelevant.
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Background music: Allah Hoo - Hitesh Sonik feat. Jyoti Nooran & Sultana Nooran