It's okay to cry

Carefully detangling process and outcome

This week, Victor Wembayama (Wemby) qualified for the NBA finals against a superior OKC team. He was overwhelmed with emotion:

Shabazz 💫@ShowCaseShabazz

LOOK AT WHAT IT MEANS

2:49 AM · May 31, 2026 · 2.53M Views

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54 Replies · 2.48K Reposts · 22K Likes

This obvious display of emotion drew a large amount of praise and some (ridiculous) criticism. But something caught my eye: several people pointing out that the prevalent attitude in the NBA and other sports of nonchalance after winning, especially when the win is not the final win that makes you lift the trophy. It’s like the “process” overtook everything: disregard the outcome, focus on what you can control, keep going.

I’ve written about the process and about handling outcomes. But we have a great opportunity to go over a fine point that’s very important: how much to care about the outcome vs the process? Is Wemby too outcome-focused?

Let’s use my performance coaching framework as a compass to navigate this discussion:

Focus on the process is the Pursuit of Excellence. It’s the grind, the set of rules.

It’s the part of you that brushes off a bad tournament and keeps analysing, and focuses on the next round after a great game. That’s a great mindset, and it’s powerful.

The emotions of outcomes are in the Persistence basket. It’s the emotional reservoir that breathes with wins and losses.

Presence, of course, underpins everything. Presence allows the process to be the expression of your inner excellence rather than a robotic set of rules. Presence is the skill behind the emotion that prevents you from being swallowed into a torrent of thoughts that lasts for days or weeks.

Is Outcome focus bad?

The focus on outcomes is not bad, provided we do not let our personal stories become entangled with them. Emotions, good and bad, must be felt. Life is not some research of the ‘good stuff’ and a ‘minimisation of the ‘bad stuff’. It’s a full display of emotions. The problem is when the emotion becomes a ‘personal story’. The story becomes a vehicle to constantly re-live the loss (or gain). The stories we tell ourselves are just … stories. Sometimes they’re helpful. Sometimes they’re not. Life is difficult enough without making the story into a personal reality that we carry around in an ever-growing emotional backpack. Don’t pride yourself in carrying this heavy backpack of emotions and stories. Realise that you can just drop it: these stories are not part of our beings, they’re a co-opted pattern of thoughts that we make into real things.

We’re always back to the eight worldly conditions: gain and loss, fame and disgrace, pleasure and pain, praise and blame. These are transient, just like every emotional state we’ve ever felt in our lives. Let’s look at practical ways to handle positive and negative emotions.

I have won. It’s amazing.

Great! Enjoy it now. But you know that it won’t last. Savour it, but don’t cling to it. It makes the moment even more beautiful.

If you eat a lemon sorbet on a hot summer day, it’s amazing. How much sorbet is enjoyable to eat? One scoop? Two scoops? Twenty scoops? Gallons?

Just because we can’t reach a state of ‘being perfectly satisfied by continuously eating the refreshing sorbet’ doesn’t mean we should give up on it.

I have lost. It’s awful.

Okay. Give it a good cry. Sulk! Call a friend and complain. Call your mom to talk about it if you’re lucky to have her in your life. It’s important, and you didn’t get what you wanted. We are not “process” robots but humans. This will fade UNLESS you make it into a personal story that you access over and over again. I guess we may have evolved to have these negative stories stay with us so we don’t repeat them. But this isn’t helpful in this modern world. The following approach works really well:

1. While the strong emotion is there, be present. don’t resist it. Be sad.

2. Once the emotion has faded, see what personal story you could make out of this episode. Then say: This story is not me, not mine. Not me, not mine. This will allow you to ‘file’ this away.

3. Fall back onto your training routine.

Wemby is amazing

This is going to be odd … Wemby is making reading cool. The thirty branches of the San Antonio public library have compiled lists of books that he’s been reading (he always carries a book in his hands on his way to games). And now it’s a HUGE hit with youth, and the books are on back order.

Image credits: San Antonio Public Library

Oh and I forgot … Wemby loves playing chess

Image Credits: San Antonio Spurs

Disclaimer: I wrote this without the use of AI. I used Grammarly for basic spelling and grammar correction, but not major stylistic rewrites.