I like winning. I love competing.
There’s a difference between the two, even though I think we sometimes treat them as if they’re the same thing. Winning is a result. Competing is everything that goes into pursuing that result, including what happens long before anyone turns on a scoreboard.
I’ve always been a “process over outcome” person.
Outcomes matter… of course they do. If I’m coaching a basketball game, I want to win. If someone is interviewing for a job, I assume they want the job. A business needs to make money. An athlete wants to make the team. There’s no reason to pretend otherwise.
But there’s a question I find more interesting: What gives us the best chance of producing the outcome we want?
That’s where the process comes in.
One of the things I’ve said to players over the years is, “Good players play to win. Great players prepare to win.”
There’s nothing particularly complicated about it. Simply wanting to win doesn’t guarantee winning. So, what’s preparing to win? It’s deliberate practice. It’s mindful skill work. It can be film study, visualization, conditioning, recovery, or developing a better understanding of yourself and the challenge in front of you. Then, when it’s time to compete, preparation becomes awareness, effort, decision-making, resilience, and the ability to stay present enough to respond to what is actually happening.
There’s some interesting research behind this. A systematic review and meta-analysis of goal setting in sport looked at 27 studies and compared different types of goals. Process goals, which are goals directed toward the actions involved in performing, showed a larger effect on performance than performance goals or outcome goals. They also showed a large positive effect on self-efficacy – a belief in your ability to accomplish a task.¹
I don’t read that research as evidence that we should stop setting outcome goals at all. I read it as evidence for something I’ve come to believe more strongly: the outcome can give us direction, but the process deserves our attention.
Imagine walking through a desert toward a light on the horizon. You need the light. Without it, you might not know where you’re going; to use a metaphor, it’s your guide. But imagine becoming so focused on that distant light that you stop looking at the ground in front of you.
You might miss the all-important water when one is in a desert. You might walk past a tree offering shade when you need to rest. You might not see an obstacle until you run directly into it.
The destination matters, but you still have to travel the path.
I think we can do the same thing with outcomes. We become so focused on winning the game, making the team, getting the promotion, hitting the sales number, or receiving some other validation that we stop noticing the things immediately in front of us that might actually help us get there.
That’s what process over outcome means to me. It isn’t pretending the outcome doesn’t matter. It’s understanding where our attention is most useful.
There’s another side to this, though, and I think it’s important to note. You can prepare extremely well and still lose.
That might be uncomfortable for people who like sayings such as “hard work pays off,” but competition doesn’t make those kinds of promises. Research on deliberate practice illustrates some of that complexity. One meta-analysis found that deliberate practice explained about 18 percent of the variation in sports performance overall, with a considerably smaller percentage among elite performers.² Practice clearly matters, but it isn’t the only thing that matters. Ability, coaching, health, opportunity, environment, opponents, and plenty of other variables can influence what eventually happens.
That doesn’t make me believe in preparation any less. It makes me think about preparation differently.
Good players play to win. Great players prepare to win.
Prepare to win. Not prepare and you will win. I feel like I need to say it again, so I will. Prepare to win… not prepare and you will win.
We’re trying to put ourselves in the best possible position to compete at a high level. We’re not entering into a contract with the universe that guarantees us the result we want because we worked hard. So what happens when we don’t get it? When we don’t win in this case? I keep coming back to a simple question:
What do I know?
Maybe I lost because my preparation wasn’t good enough. Maybe my strategy was wrong. Maybe I made poor decisions when the pressure increased. Maybe I prepared well and performed well, but the person across from me was simply better that day.
Winning deserves the same examination. We can play poorly and win. We can make bad decisions that happen to work. A business can have a profitable quarter despite problems underneath the surface. Getting the outcome we wanted doesn’t automatically validate everything that produced it any more than losing automatically invalidates everything we did.
The result tells us what happened. It doesn’t always tell us why. That’s where curiosity becomes useful.
What happened? What worked? What didn’t? What was within my control? What did I miss? What do I understand now that I didn’t understand before?
What do I know?
And then comes another question: What do I do with what I know?
Sometimes we need to change or need to get uncomfortable and struggle with something longer before deciding it isn’t working. There’s danger in both directions. We can stubbornly stick with a bad process because we’ve been told to “trust the process,” or we can constantly change what we’re doing because one result didn’t go our way.
Neither seems particularly thoughtful.
Maybe this is where Bruce Lee’s famous idea to “be like water” becomes useful. Adaptability isn’t the absence of a process. It’s part of having a good one. The information changes, the environment changes, the opponent changes, and sometimes we have to change with it. The more I think about it, the competitive process starts to look something like this:
Prepare → Compete → Reflect → Adapt → Repeat
I’m hesitant to call that a framework because I don’t want to manufacture one simply for the sake of having one, especially since I’m more interested in whether it continues to hold up. But for now, it captures something important for me: competition doesn’t end when the time on the scoreboard reaches zero or the final out has been made or the finish line has been crossed. The result becomes information that we can carry into whatever comes next.
It also makes me think differently about what competition actually is. Does competition require an opponent? I don’t think it does.
It requires a challenge.
Sometimes that challenge is another person or team, maybe it’s a time on a stopwatch, a sales number, a weight on a bar, a problem we haven’t solved, or a standard we haven’t reached. Or, very simply, it’s whether we can do something better than we did it before.
That means competition, at least as I’m beginning to define it, is engaging fully with a challenge in pursuit of a meaningful standard or outcome.
The words engaging fully matter to me. Competing isn’t simply showing up. There’s effort and energy involved. There’s attitude. There’s preparation and awareness – first of ourselves, then of the opponent or challenge, and then of the environment around us. There’s resilience when things inevitably don’t go according to plan. And there’s a willingness to adapt instead of becoming rigid when the situation asks something different of us.
Ideally, there’s also some FUN in all of this.
That word can feel out of place when we start talking seriously about competition, but I’m not sure why it should.
Think about how most of us discover the things we eventually become competitive about. A kid sees a basketball and thinks it looks fun. Someone watches people run a race and decides to give it a go. We pick up a golf club, write something, build something, or try to solve a problem because something about it interests us.
Then, if we’re lucky, we discover that we enjoy it enough to keep coming back. Again. And again.
There’s research worth paying attention to here, too. A systematic review of youth sport participation found that enjoyment had a strong relationship with young athletes’ intentions to continue participating.³ That doesn’t mean everything should always be easy or entertaining. Some of the experiences I enjoy most involve struggle. There’s satisfaction in figuring something out, improving at something difficult, and finding out whether you can meet a challenge you weren’t sure you could meet.
Research into how people experience demanding situations adds another interesting piece. A 2025 analysis covering 62 studies and more than 7,400 participants found a small performance advantage when people experienced demanding situations as challenges rather than threats.⁴ I’m careful about making too much of that finding because the effect was small, but I find the idea fascinating. The challenge itself may be part of what draws us into competition rather than something we need to eliminate from it.
Maybe that’s why this distinction feels important to me: I like winning. I love competing.
Winning feels good. Losing doesn’t. I don’t think we need to pretend otherwise in order to believe in process over outcome. But winning is a moment.
Competition is an ongoing relationship with challenge.
We prepare. We test ourselves. We become uncomfortable. We make decisions. Sometimes we get them right. Sometimes we don’t. We learn something, or at least give ourselves the opportunity to learn something, and decide what to do next.
Then we get another opportunity to compete! Let’s go!
So yes, keep an eye on the destination. Know where you want to go. Set ambitious goals. Keep score. Try to win. But pay attention to the path.
Because staring harder at the destination won’t get us there any faster. What we do next might. That is what process over outcome means to me.
The outcome gives us direction. The process deserves our attention.
And when the outcome finally arrives, whatever it happens to be, there’s a question waiting for us:
What do I know now?
Then we get back to work.
The Standard Never Changes.
Notes & Further Reading
1. Williamson, O., Swann, C., Bennett, K. J. M., et al. “The performance and psychological effects of goal setting in sport: A systematic review and meta-analysis.” International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology (2022). The review included 27 studies and found that process goals showed larger effects on performance than performance or outcome goals, while also showing a large effect on self-efficacy.
Read the study
2. Macnamara, B. N., Moreau, D., & Hambrick, D. Z. “The Relationship Between Deliberate Practice and Performance in Sports: A Meta-Analysis.” Perspectives on Psychological Science (2016). The researchers found deliberate practice accounted for about 18% of variance in sports performance overall, while finding a much smaller association among elite performers. This is useful context for understanding preparation as important without treating it as a guarantee of success.
Read the PubMed record
3. “Predictors of Persistent Participation in Youth Sport: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Frontiers in Psychology (2022). The review found sport enjoyment was strongly associated with young athletes’ intentions to continue participating, alongside factors including basic psychological needs, coach support, parental support, peer support, and perceived sport competence.
Read the open-access study
4. Hase, A., Nietschke, M., Kloskowski, M., et al. “The effects of challenge and threat states on performance outcomes: An updated review and meta-analysis of recent findings.” EXCLI Journal (2025). Across 62 studies involving 7,418 participants, challenge states were associated with better performance than threat states across domains including sport, although the overall effects were small.
Read the open-access study