You’re backstage, moments away from giving the presentation that could define your career. You’ve done the preparation, you know your narrative and figures inside and out, and you’ve certainly given countless presentations before. Still, staring at a sea of a thousand faces and recognizing the stakes at hand, you tense up. When the weight of the outcome rests heavily on your shoulders, one of the most powerful approaches you can take is to shift your focus from the end-outcome to the process itself.
The core idea behind process-orientation is to narrow your focus intensely on the present moment and the task at hand. An ambitious final goal—winning the game, closing the deal, or capturing a market—can be clarifying, yet an inordinate obsession with this goal can be detrimental. It can arouse fear, sap our motivation, and distract us from what we must do to apply our skills effectively. By focusing on the process, you are simply focused on the activities that are within your span of control and influence, thereby allowing you to maintain a sense of control and calm your mind.
We see a masterful example of this in the world of sports with legendary football coach Nick Saban. In 1998, his struggling Michigan State team was slated to play the nation’s top-ranked Ohio State Buckeyes. Facing what seemed like certain defeat, Saban received a piece of advice from a colleague at his school’s psychiatry department that would define his career: “Tell the players to play one play at a time, like it has a life of its own. There’s no scoreboard, there’s no external factors, your whole focus for 60 minutes is just to play the next play to the best of your ability.” Saban took this advice, and coached his players accordingly. Initially they fell behind and were losing by fifteen points after halftime, but the team’s focus never wavered. They kept executing one play at a time, and ultimately staged a historic comeback in the fourth quarter. Saban carried this “Process,” as it came to be known, to the University of Alabama, teaching his players to ignore the championship trophy and concentrate entirely on the daily grind of practice, drills, and individual plays. By trusting the process, they made excellence a habit and winning a byproduct.
Tennis legend Roger Federer articulated a similar mindset in his 2024 commencement speech at Dartmouth College. He noted that while he won almost 80% of his 1,526 career matches, he won only 54% of the actual points. His lesson was that even the greatest players lose almost half the points they play. “When you lose every second point on average,” he explained, “you learn not to dwell on every shot.” A double-fault is “only a point,” and even a spectacular, highlight-reel winner is also “just a point.” This process-oriented mindset, he argued, is crucial because it frees you to “fully commit to the next point, and the next point after that, with intensity, clarity, and focus.”
This mindset is not just for athletes; it’s the fundamental logic of successful innovation and entrepreneurship. Every great startup begins with a dazzling vision — perhaps a “Big Hairy Audacious Goal,” as Jim Collins would suggest. But once that goal has been established and you’ve oriented the energies of your organization accordingly, it is critical for teams to shift gears. They must integrate the overarching goal into their core operating priorities and then meticulously execute on the process of achieving it. In short, it’s equally critical to clarify your true north objectives, as it is to simply focus on brass tacks of process orientation.
Ultimately, great accomplishments are not born from a singular obsession with the high-level outcomes, but from a complementary series of focused efforts on the constituent activities that ultimately yield the desired end result. When faced with an ambitious endeavor, it helps to narrow your aperture, cut out the noise, and focus on the single most important step you can take right now. It works in football, it works in tennis, it works in business, and it will work for you. So now you’re backstage. You’ve done the run of show. And yes, you understand the stakes. In a few moments, though, you’ll simply walk on stage, shake the hand of the emcee, make eye contact with an audience member, and give a spectacular presentation, as you have done countless times before. Shoot the arrow, and allow it to fly.
