I’ve struggled with consistency my entire life. Ask me to accomplish something, it’ll probably get done in a few intense bursts as opposed to sustained, dedicated effort. In high school, I’d do all the work for the quarter during the week my teachers’ grades were due. Needless to say, they weren’t very fond of me when I dumped a stack of late assignments on their desk. In college, that doesn’t go well. Deadlines are strictly enforced, assignments aren’t simple enough to be finished in a couple hours, and I can’t sweet-talk professors into giving me extensions. A couple semesters in, I realized that something had to change.

It’s surprising, but the two things that have managed to change my personality to embrace the sustained effort that I previously avoided have been cooking and the Philadelphia 76ers.

While on co-op last year, I started slow cooking meals simply as a way to ensure that when I came home, something would be ready for me to eat. I always attributed how delicious everything was to the fact that I was hungry by the time I came home — as everyone knows, food tastes better when you’re hungry. Slow cookers are notorious for making meals burst with flavor, as the spices simmer while the heat steadily dissipates through the ingredients which permeating every mouthful with savory goodness.

Of course, my slow cooker didn’t give me an epiphany. But the more I cooked with it, the more this idea began to ferment in my head — about how taking my time with the meals I was making led to a better result. That thought finally bubbled to the top while I was teaching a friend’s family how to make chana masala, because chana masala needs to sit over a low flame for a while to really draw the flavor out. And surprisingly, what felt almost as good as eating the food was sharing it with people whose company I enjoyed. Sharing a meal together generates happiness, because there’s something inherent about the simple act of dining together that creates a bond between people.

Looking back, most of the best friendships I’ve made have involved food in some capacity. A close friend and I always meet at Panera. The aforementioned friends for whom I made chana masala are very dear to me. They say that families that eat dinner together tend to be more successful and I completely buy into that. A friend of mine told me how she felt sad that her family no longer ate dinner together, and simply hearing that made me feel sad. It’s actually because of her that I started making more of an effort to remain in touch with my friends — normally everyone ghosts each other during the semester.

But after eating, there’s always dishes to do. And this is where basketball comes in, because I would listen to The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, a podcast about the Philadelphia 76ers — they’re the people who popularized “Trust The Process” with regard to the Sixers. If you’re not familiar with what the Sixers did over the last few years, they essentially lost on purpose to maximize their chances at drafting superstar talent, because the worst teams draft before the best teams. They traded away all their good players for future draft picks, because the current players just weren’t good enough.

The architect of this mad strategy? An “analytics” guy named Sam Hinkie. I put analytics in quotes, because while he did lean heavily on statistics, he also relied on the traditional basketball evaluation techniques. It wasn’t a strategy of blindly trusting anything — it kept what currently worked but replaced what didn’t with something that worked better. The Sixers were so bad, they set the record for most consecutive losses by a major sports team in America. Many fans were fed up, national sports media slammed the team, but all the while The Rights to Ricky Sanchez was telling people to “Trust The Process”, because it would all be worth it in the long run.

Sam understood that team was really bad, but he wasn’t interested in the short term losses — he had “the longest view in the room”, and prioritized winning championships in a few years over avoiding a couple losing seasons. The Sixers “zigged when everyone else zagged”, because when the organization tried to do what every other franchise did, which was to try to compete with the teams comprised of great players cough LeBron James cough with simply good players, they got beat. Sure, they could try to buy a superstar’s loyalty with a fat contract, but how many teams let superstars get away? The statistically best option was to draft a superstar, and while it is still far too early, Joel Embiid looks to be a superstar if he can remain healthy.

Hinkie’s weakness was his refusal to talk to the media on the record. He ended up resigning on April 6th, 2016 after essentially being forced out by the disapproving NBA. His 13 page resignation letter received a lot of NBA media coverage. People who hated him sneered at his pretentiousness and rejoiced at his ouster, while those who liked him praised it as a manifesto of his vision and justification of his choices. Clearly, I fall into the latter camp. But there’s a lesson I learned here, and this goes back to sharing a meal. Sometimes, you have to share with others, because otherwise, the people you leave out may not appreciate being left out.

Sam may not have popularized “Trust The Process”, but his methodology and vision to attain success is something that I found admirable, and have adopted it as my own. Sure, what you do may fail in the short term. But if the logic is sound and you’re confident in what you are doing, eventually you will succeed. I’m sharing all of this because “Trust The Process” has had such a impact on my life. It’s motivated me to go to the gym regularly, eat right, take notes in class, to turn everything in on time, keep in touch with people that matter to me, be nicer to my family, and just do the little things right. Yes, putting effort into classes is mentally taxing, but it’ll put food on the table for the rest of my life. Yes, working out is hard and painful, but the long term benefits with regard to my health and body image far outweigh those costs. By keeping in contact with the people who are a positive influence on me, I can become a better person.

I turn 21 soon, and over the past year I’ve been doing a lot of self reflection. I certainly have many strengths, but there was one glaring weakness that I wanted to improve, and that was consistency. Something as mundane as making a meal or following a basketball team has had such a profound impact on the way I live my life. It seems crazy that of all the things in the world to make me get my act together, those two were the catalysts, but it’s true.

Trust The Process.