Trust the Process:

Trust the process. Trust the grind. Funny how it took Sam Hinkie, Joel Embiid and a losing Sixers team to instil in me the motto ‘Trust the process.’ Life is about the process, not the outcomes. It’s about the grind and the journey, not about the ending where you accomplished your goal. The process of accomplishing your goal is so much more rewarding and fulfilling than the goal itself.

Think about it. If someone handed a million dollars to you today and that’s been your goal in life for a long time, how happy would you be? Probably really happy for a moment, but then it fades. Then you have to decide what you want to do and who you want to be. Do you go back to your old life? Do you travel around the world and buy really expensive stuff to virtue signal to people in your life that you’re finally rich? Great. Do that. Tell me how it feels after a little while because that will never make you happy.

The outcome itself is less important than the process. If you love the process, the outcomes will come. They’ll manifest themselves in more ways you can imagine. But you have to love the work. The writing when you don’t feel like it. The working out when you’re tired. The reading when you’re about to sleep. Once you love that process, nothing can break you. You’re no longer tied to outcomes.

Everyone has desires in their life. These desires manifest themselves in different ways and come from different experiences. If you’re born to piano loving parents in Western Europe, you may aspire to be able to afford a piano that Mozart played at. If you grew up a Knicks fan with generations of Knicks fans who talk about the good old days with Ewing, you may want to buy a game worn authentic Ewing jersey. But once you get this desire, that’s it. Your happiness is capped. The material things that you get once you’re rich or have accomplished your monetary goal, they don’t fulfill you.

Subconsciously I don’t think a lot of people ask themselves this. Why do you like the things you do? Why do you act the way you do? Why are you the way you are? It’s a combination of a lot of things like genetics, environment, social class, friends, school system, language, culture, etc. We think we are the way we are because of what’s happened to us in the past, and although that does shape you immensely, it doesn’t have to define you.

In the age of the Internet where we have access to all of the world’s information for free, the desire to learn is scarce. Why? Combination of things but my sense is people want to solve their problems now. We’re in the now economy where everything we want has to come immediately. Uber Eats, Amazon packages, social media likes, etc. We all want them now.

And this is just human psychology. Humans are lazy at heart. If you give people exactly what they want in the shortest amount of time possible, they will love you for it. That’s great when we’re trying to get packages or food delivered to our house, but not so great when we’re trying to figure out our life.

Life takes time. It takes patience. It takes working on an idea or concept or yourself for years and years and years when no one is watching to eventually become something people look to.

Why did I start writing? I started honestly on a whim because I kept hearing Tim Ferris talk about journaling. Then I saw tweets and articles from other people about how writing was so cathartic, so I started it and told myself I would do it for a year and see what happens.

Over that year, I switched from a job in medicine to a job in venture capital, moved halfway around the world to Amsterdam to go do an internship, saw Liverpool beat Chelsea at Anfield, watched the Raptors win a title while I was home, then move to Montreal to work at one of the biggest healthcare venture funds in Canada. All of that happened in a year of me starting to write. If I never wrote, I would have no recollection of what happened during that time. I would have no written acknowledgement of what I did. Sure I would have specific memories like when Kawhi hit the shot, or singing happy birthday to Sadio Mane while watching Tiger win the Masters, but I wouldn’t know how I felt.

But what journaling did was let me capture a moment in time. It let me track my progress. It let me see how I was evolving into the person I am today. It showed me the trials and tribulations and all of the things I was thinking about in my head. I could see some days how I just wanted a written memory of what happened, like ‘today I watched this movie, saw this person and got drunk.’ Other days it was really meaningful and profound things that I didn’t even know I could come up with.

It’s also been a massive motivating factor. Everyone doubts themselves. Society constantly tries to put us down, particularly in a capitalist society, where there are winners and losers.

No.

In certain things, like zero sum games, there are winners and losers. Social climbing, politics, sports, etc. But in positive sum games, everyone can be a winner. Relationships, wealth creation, free trade agreements, etc.

For a long time, I thought I needed to be winning the zero sum games. I thought I had to be successful so I could be validated by my parents and family for having accomplished something in my life. But after becoming a doctor, I realized that the life I had envisioned for myself in a hospital was not the life I wanted.

Sure I have big aspirations to become someone people can look up to, but that’s more just to play the game of life. It’s more to show myself that I can do whatever I want. It’s to prove to me that anything you want to do in life, any person you want to meet, if you work hard enough, dream, visualize, and be patient, great things can happen.

The world is your oyster, largely because the Internet has democratized everything. The information arbitrage doesn’t exist anymore and the distribution channels to get your content out there are easily available to you. For example, you want to meet Gary Vee and Yes Theory? Go create a post about them, send it to everyone that’s connected with them and see what happens. The worst thing that happens is you wrote a great piece that you’re happy about, and the best thing is you get to speak to them. That never existed before in history.

Everyone is one DM or email away from being reached at. People will hide their emails but if you’re smart enough and use the Internet, you can definitely get to them. As Alex Bananyan would say, walk through the Third Door. Figure it out. The most successful people are the ones who believe in themselves and their ideas more than anyone else, who take immense risks when everyone doesn’t understand what they’re doing, and who bet on themselves over and over again. But they’re also the ones who do unconventional things and walk unique paths.

I strive to be like those people and maybe I will be considered one of them some day. I know though that the goal is not that. I don’t want to just be successful in society’s eyes. I want to be happy. I want to have fun. I want to be around family and friends doing things that I enjoy. The success part of it and the money part of it is one thing, but it’s the thing that gives me access to freedom. That’s what you want.

Just know this. You’re at the beginning of your journey. You just started. You haven’t done anything yet. The gun just went off on the marathon. You got to this starting line with hard work, persistence and a lot of luck, but you’re still at the start. You got lucky to be born into the circumstances you did but your experience is only yours. Own your story. Work hard. Create. Write. Do it for yourself.

Through it all - Trust the Process.