Many people feel that success happens in an instant. They assume that great inventions, artistic creations, and profitable business ideas come in a flash of genius. They believe sports victories and brilliant philosophical concepts are sudden.

This makes sense. The triumphant win overshadows all the failure and hard work that come first. The final win becomes attention-grabbing. The celebrations and accolades are notable and admired.

Championships in Football versus Basketball

I love watching sports, especially football and basketball. I find it fascinating how different of a process there is for determining a champion in each sport.

Football teams play once in a playoff structure to determine the best team each year. There isn’t a best-of-seven series to determine a champion. There is one game. This means that it is very easy to fall into the “event” mindset.

But in basketball the series determines the champion. This means that there are many games, rather than one single super game. This helps to show that a team can have a bad game or a good game. But over time the better team can usually overtake a weaker opponent.

Play once and this game means everything. Play seven times and each individual game means less.

Events versus Patterns

In football, this naturally leads to an event-focused mindset. The event (game) means everything to most fans. In basketball the event means less than the pattern of events. But even basketball fans tend to be too event-focused. They ignore the patterns.

Since the series is spread out over several days it is funny to listen to the sports media between these games. Team A wins the first game and they all claim Team B is horrible and won’t win another game. Then Team B wins a game and suddenly they “figured it out” and guarantee they will win the next 3. But then they lose the next game and the media perspective shifts again.

How can there be so many shifts in perspective? It is because we are all told throughout our lives that the outcome is what is important. We ignore the process. We ignore the patterns. Instead, we focus on the event.

Lightning Bolt of Creative Genius

In The Road to Reinvention, author and successful businessman Josh Linkner talks about this perspective.

He says, “Unfortunately, most of us have a delusional view of how ideas are formed and come to life. We believe that a lightning bolt of creative genius strikes a select few, who then launch perfectly developed ideas. That’s not the case. When you study innovative breakthroughs in just about any area, you find that some of the biggest advances are the result of someone toying with the seed of an idea, then developing it through a series of stumbles, missteps, and failed experiments that eventually bear fruit.”

It is easy to misunderstand success in this way. It is far too easy to overemphasize the outcome and downplay the journey that led to that outcome.

Focus More on the Process and Less on the Event

There is benefit to shifting our perspective on success. We can start to get better by focusing more on the full process rather than the single outcome or event.

A great example given by Linkner is in the development of the common household product, WD-40. “WD-40, the leading cure for all things squeaky, earned its name through a series of failed trials. The name actually stands for: ‘Water Displacement, Fortieth Experiment.’ It could have just as easily been named WD-31. What the makers of WD-40 know, and what we all need to embrace, is that mistakes are not fatal; they’re part of the process of discovery.”

But if we were given a look into WD-40 in any of the early attempts we would see failure after failure. It would be easy to make the case that this was total failure on the part of those working on this project.

In fact, if sports media personalities were analyzing WD-39, they would say it is a colossal failure. They would argue that it was a waste of time. They would say the inventors were stupid and couldn't see what the rest of us see. But it isn't just them.

We would say that this project failed over and over again and the logical thing is to stop failing. In other words, the logical thing would be to quit and do something more beneficial.

Don't Get Too Caught Up in Event Thinking

How many things in our own lives do we approach like this? How many times do we take a failure or series of failures and let that weigh us down? But we don’t know the final outcome of our lives.

I heard someone once say that life only makes sense when we look at it in reverse. When I look at my life it seems like all the right pieces were in place to take me where I currently am. But those failures and stumbles, those obstacles and adversity, the struggles and mistakes didn't make sense at the time. They are usually painful, and the lesson only comes after we get past them.

So, whatever it is that you are doing, make sure you look at the overall process and observe the patterns. Make sure you are making progress and improving. You may jump around from thing to thing but make sure you are moving forward. And realize that, just like WD-40, you may be on your 39th experiment, and haven’t reached the success event. But when you reach that event, all your hard work will pay off. That will make it all make sense. But that doesn’t mean you are not a success as you struggle through each preceding step.