Trust the Process
Potty training Chewey was less “fun adventure” and more “elusive quest”, and by quest I don’t mean the exciting kind such as the search for the Holy Grail.
Devotees of Fox’s animated series Bob’s Burgers might recall an unbeatable game, created by Linda’s sister Gayle, titled “Gayle Force Winds”, and the inability of any Belcher child to ascend beyond the “Cliffs of Huxtable” (a Cosby reference for those who don’t speak Gen X). Yeah, I would say that potty training Chewey was exactly like Gayle Force Winds: for every step taken forward in getting Chewey potty trained, I took four back.
Shih Tzus are notoriously stubborn, and why wouldn’t they be? As I have previously written, the Shih Tzu was bred for absolutely nothing but companionship, and were treated with fawning, almost deity-like, reverence. This was the puppy-rearing equivalent of Toddlers and Tiaras, so Chewey’s ancestors were essentially indolent fury Paris Hilton's.
One thing all breeders of Shih Tzus seem to universally agree upon, is that when it comes to potty training them, positive reinforcement is a far more effective approach than militant discipline. One thing my ex, Stevie, wasn’t, was a positive reinforcer, especially when it came to activities that might threaten the cleanliness of her house. As a result, the quest to potty train Chewey fell to me, and a quest just wouldn’t be a quest without the inclusion of obstacles, challenges, and general difficulties.
Enter Chewey’s ascending hairline. Seemingly evolving from the Sasquatch family, Chewey’s hair knows no bounds, which includes his little ass.
So, beyond getting him on a potty schedule, Chewey came with the added bonus of needing constant bathing and grooming. Without embellishment, I can report that I’ve used a blow dryer more times in the last year than I had in my prior 47 years of life…combined.
Thankfully for me, Chewey, like Paris Hilton, is a prima donna, and enjoys being treated to these poor man’s spa days, so he sits very patiently while I make him ruggedly handsome again.
Needless to say, the process by which to get Chewey potty trained took daily, and sometimes hourly patience, which, as it turned out, is exactly the lesson I needed to learn in my own life.
Sam Hinkie was General Manager of the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers for three unremarkable seasons between 2013 and 2016.
Hinkie was part of a new wave of front office hires in professional sports at a time shortly after the 2011 Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill movie, Moneyball, popularized a new analytical approach towards building baseball rosters.
In the mostly-true-story movie (based on the 2003 Michael Lewis book of the same name), Pitt and Hill star as real-life General Manager Billy Beane, and Assistant General Manager Peter Brand (whose actual name is Paul DePodesta, however DePodesta wouldn’t allow his name to be used for the movie) of Major League Baseball’s 2002 Oakland A’s.
Beane and DePodesta were largely credited with assembling a roster that would go on to win 20 consecutive games that year, which at the time was the longest winning streak by any Major League team in 67 years.
The very basic premise of Moneyball the analytical approach (not the movie), which is more accurately known as the Society for American Baseball Research metrics (or SABRmetrics), is a simple one: If my team scores more runs, we win. It’s likely my team will score more runs if my players get on base more than the other team. Therefore I need to find players who get on base more.
The way in which Beane, DePodesta (a Harvard graduate with an economics degree), and SABRmetrics calculated how their team could get on base more than other teams was far more complex, consisting of algorithms which took into account massive quantities of data, and eventually produced an efficiency score for each player in the league.
Why did Beane and DePodesta undertake such an extensive system at all? This too is pretty simple: the game, according to Beane, was effectively rigged against the A’s, a small market team which simply couldn’t afford the price tags of super star baseball players in the way big market teams, such as the New York Yankees, could. To compete with big-dollar franchises, the A’s needed to develop an advantage which didn’t require engaging in a spending war, and thus Moneyball was deployed.
After the success of the ‘02 Oakland A’s, and after Moneyball became a box office success in 2011, teams across all major professional sports leagues began jumping on the bandwagon of analytics, with an aim of helping construct more efficient rosters.
And this, along with his successful track record while working for the NBA’s Houston Rockets, was how the 76ers set their sights on obtaining the young Hinkie as their next General Manager in 2013.
Hinkie, for his part, enjoyed far less success than that of his analytical counterparts in other organizations, and is perhaps most remembered for a single locution: “Trust the Process”.
“Trust the process” became pop culture fodder in the 2010’s, used both genuinely and farcically, from everyone in social media to corporate board rooms.
But the term itself is actually quite profound. I prefer a variability of this term, however; one that was most famously advanced in a sport I wouldn’t watch if I were paid to do so: cycling.
I first heard the phrase “the aggregation of marginal gains” in a book authored by James Clear titled “Atomic Habits”.
The aggregation of marginal gains (or “MG”, for short) was the brainchild of Sir David Brailsford, a sport and exercise sciences expert. Brailsford, once a cyclist himself, took control as Director of the British national cycling team in 2003. After just one year under Brailsford’s leadership, the UK cycling team won two gold medals at the Athens 2004 summer Olympic games, which was the team’s best performance since the 1908 games!
UK cycling, however, was just getting started, as Great Britain topped the cycling medal table at both the 2008 (Beijing) and 2012 (London) Olympic Games, winning eight gold medals at each event. But Brit cycling dominance wasn’t limited to just the Olympics.
All told, from 2003 to 2013, the UK would secure 59 world championships in road, track, BMX, and mountain bike racing, including two Tour de France winners, one of whom was eventual four-time winner Christopher Froome.
So what is MG and how did it contribute to the miraculous turnaround of the perennial punchline of cycling?
Quite simply, the idea of MG is to strive for infinitesimal improvements over a defined period of time.
Just how small is infinitesimal? Brailsford looked at everything, everywhere, and changed anything he found that could add even a fraction of a competitive edge.
His teams began bringing their own bedding to every venue they traveled, with an eye on improving sleep cycles. Brailsford’s staff provided hand sanitizer and emphasized the use of knuckles vs. finger tips when pressing numbered buttons on an elevator to reduce the risk of illness. He redesigned the team’s touring bus, outfitting it with the most plush accommodations possible, so that his team could optimize relaxation and rest periods. He even changed the colors of the caps on water bottles so as not to have his athletes confuse water for protein drinks or vice versa, ensuring that the right liquid was ingested at critical stretches of a race.
Skeptics of this approach will most certainly, and accurately, note that Brailsford’s cycling team became embroiled in an anti-doping controversy beginning in 2016, but the concept of marginal gains is nevertheless an intriguing one, and one which is now associated with many other measures of success.
I happen to believe that the conflation of the two ideas (“Trust the Process” and “the Aggregation of Marginal Gains”), and the addition of one significant word, is where real transformation begins.
If you can “trust that the aggregation of marginal gains is an enjoyable process”, the peace of presence will take root, and the results will follow. Said differently, it all comes down to loving the doing more than the reason you started doing.
Before the mess of my accident, this was a concept I had totally bought into. After my latest breakup with Stevie (yes, there’s more of those than I can actually count), in the summer of 2020, I decided that maybe it would be better if I didn’t drink myself into the degenerate I had become all-too-familiar with seeing after our preceding breakups. And so, for the first time in my adulthood, and at age 44, I decided to start exercising.
At first, my body rejected the notion of physical fitness the way women reject the Butabi brothers.
But then, after actually sticking with this new fad of jogging (or is it yogging? It might be a soft j. I'm not sure but apparently you just run for an extended period of time), for the first time in my life, I began to no longer see exercise as a chore that I needed to accomplish. I threw the need to see any results out the window, and began enjoying the process of just doing the process. While no one was ever going to mistake this Chris for the Hemsworth one, I began to feel pretty damn good; not about what I was seeing in a mirror, but rather about the person I was becoming inside.
Interestingly, this new found love of the process began to positively infect everything within my life. Weird things, like eliminating lime deposits in my shower, or even removing the callouses on my feet through consistent application of lotion and pumice stone scrubs, became daily pleasures. I stopped drinking completely, and began to even eat healthy.
These positive routines maintained for over a year, and then suddenly the lights went out in September of ‘21.
People, and specifically my mother, would tell me that the hardest part of my post-accident recovery would be the mental one, but I can admit now that I summarily dismissed these concerns as overly sympathetic platitudes. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
As I fell deeper into both addiction and depression, I began to search for the fire inside of me that drove the positive behavioral changes I had seen so clearly in the year prior to my accident. That fire would never come. No matter how much I prayed, wished, and hoped for a magic moment to hit me like the bolt of lightning that I absorbed in June of ‘20, nothing was happening within.
Then I reread Clear’s Habits a couple of months ago. That’s when it hit me that I had never actually experienced a magic moment at all; I just started doing and the magic came later.
As my dear friend tells me, I write too many words in this blog. So it might come as a surprise to readers that I used to detest writing. I only write now because I know I must. Why?
It forces my brain to slow down.
It forces me to look within.
It holds me accountable by making my shortcomings public.
The alternative is a life I’ve already lived, and it came with an abundance of problems.
And, perhaps most importantly, it’s forcing me to embrace new habits.
So maybe my days in the gym are actually over, but if I can once again find a way to “trust that the aggregation of marginal gains is an enjoyable process”, perhaps my best days are still ahead.
