On May 14th, 2013, Sam Hinkie was hired as the president of the Philadelphia 76ers, a basketball franchise that had just gone 34-48, missing the playoffs by 7.5 games and losing their division by 20. He would stay in his role for the next three seasons, during which the 76ers would win 19, 18, and 10 games, respectively. Winning 47 games in three seasons is the worst three-year stretch in NBA history.
On April 6, 2016, Sam Hinkie resigned in the form of a 13 page manifesto. His time at the organization had come to an end, and he no longer felt he was able to execute the plan he had come in with in the environment he was given. Almost anyone with an outsider’s view of the organization could understand why—in a sport shifting more and more toward analytics, one had only to look at the win/loss column to see the writing on the wall. Sam Hinkie was not winning games. Sam Hinkie did not have a job.
This is not a story about basketball.
[Ed. note: I hate to string my dear readers along, so let me roadmap the rest of the piece: I am going to let Mr. Hinkie1 speak for himself, and then I am going to posit both that he was right about everything he did and that his actions can shape your spiritual life in a way that leads you to heaven. Hold tight.]
In Sam’s original press conference, given the state of the 76ers prior and the talent that was leaving the organization before he even stepped foot in the door, he level-set about his plan for the team:
We talk a lot about process—not outcome—and trying to consistently take all the best information you can and consistently make good decisions. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don't, but you reevaluate them all.
The 76ers arguably had one good player on the night of Sam’s first draft as president. He was traded for a rookie and a future 1st round pick. Jrue Holiday, that 76ers player, has accumulated 24.7 Win Shares (a one-stop metric that attempts to approximate a player’s value, per Basketball-Reference) since. Their trade was for Nerlens Noel, who has accumulated 26.4 Win Shares since. That future 1st they received was later used to select Joel Embiid, a future 5 time NBA All-Star (31.6 Win Shares). Embiid’s nickname is “The Process”.
St. Ignatius of Loyola is commonly known for being one of the founders of the Jesuit order and for his Spiritual Exercises, a set of meditations and practices that many have found great fruit in. Later in this text St. Ignatius posits 14 Rules (eat your heart out, Jordan Peterson) for Discernment of Spirits. These rules, and the exercises around them, are meant to help those who abide them discern the will of God in their lives, for large and small things alike. I have personally found them—through the practical guide written by Timothy M. Gallagher, The Discernment of Spirits: An Ignatian Guide for Everyday Living—to be immensely helpful in my own life and prayer2.
Rules 3 and 4 posit two movements of the soul, consolation and desolation. Here are their definitions:
I call it consolation when some interior movement in the soul is caused, through which the soul comes to be inflamed with love of its Creator and Lord; and when it can in consequence love no created thing on the face of the earth in itself, but in the Creator of them all. […] I call consolation every increase of hope, faith and charity, and all interior joy which calls and attracts to heavenly things and to the salvation of one’s soul, quieting it and giving it peace in its Creator and Lord.
I call desolation all the contrary of the third rule, such as darkness of soul, disturbance in it, movement to things low and earthly, the unquiet of different agitations and temptations, moving to want of confidence, without hope, without love, when one finds oneself all lazy, tepid, sad, and as if separated from his Creator and Lord.
I would be shocked if you are reading this and aren’t familiar with both of these movements in your own life. But the more interesting piece, to me, is how St. Ignatius calls us to respond to each of these states. From Rule 10:
Let him who is in consolation think how he will be in the desolation which will come after, taking new strength for then.
And from Rule 5:
In time of desolation never to make a change; but to be firm and constant in the resolutions and determination in which one was the day preceding such desolation, or in the determination in which he was in the preceding consolation. Because, as in consolation it is rather the good spirit who guides and counsels us, so in desolation it is the bad, with whose counsels we cannot take a course to decide rightly.
This advice follows two common themes: trusting our original plans that got us here, and preparing ourselves for a different future based on them. We know that there will be variability in the spiritual life because our emotional state and the state of our souls will change over time; the important piece is that we stay connected to God through the sacraments, prayer, and community, no matter how we feel. We also know that in consolation, there will come future desolation (St. Ignatius is clear here about prepping for it), but too in desolation, there will come future consolation. St. Ignatius doesn’t delve deeper here, but he reminds the reader many times that consolation is always closer than we believe it is when we are desolate. That is a great comfort in tough times.
When one decides to Trust The Process (whatever that process may be), bad results may occur anyway. Logically, this could be the outcome for two different reasons: the process you worked with was bad, or variability introduced into that little black box that process flows into and results flow out of caused a bad outcome3. Understanding which one of these is the case and responding appropriately is most of the battle.
For most things in life, it’s hard to tell whether bad process or variance is driving bad results—we don’t often know what good process looks like, because that requires knowledge of some objective truth about how things work. And that’s often hard to find, or know fully! Did Sam Hinkie make the right draft pick with Joel Embiid, or did he just get lucky? Was that thing that just happened a 10% or a 20% chance? When the margins are very thin and the sample size is unbelievably small, you may never know.
When we put together a process of growing in the spiritual life: regular prayer, sacrifice, reflection, etc, there will be times when we do not feel as though we are growing nearer to God, even if we’re doing all the right things. Sometimes the process may need some tweaking: we’re not praying enough, or we’re putting some unreasonably high expectations on ourselves relative to where we are in our journey. But almost always, we have the right process on the whole. We earnestly want to grow nearer to God, and we try to take steps to get there. That allows us to confidently assert that when things are going wrong and we feel bad, it’s just variance.
(Variance, of course, can be many things. God may be letting us suffer for our own mortification, or to learn something, or any number of other reasons. Some we might find out eventually and some we may never know this side of heaven. I think the principle here is that we don’t always have to solve for God’s will—it’s often a fruitless exercise, one only solved with time. Then again, I’m nowhere near qualified to give spiritual advice. You do you.)
Perhaps my brain is just monumentally destroyed by years of thinking about things this way4, but realizing that the process is good and desolation is just something that happens gives me a lot of peace. It’s hard to exist in desolation for extended periods, even knowing this. But if you are, on paper, doing the right things in your spiritual life, you can make it through. And you can make it through with confidence that you’re doing the right thing. That counts for a lot!
The unifying factor here is looking at things in the long view. In the beginning of Sam Hinkie’s resignation letter, he talks of an annual ESPN story that ranks NBA teams by their estimated future success, projected over the next three years of the franchise. Under the final substantive heading of his letter, entitled “Outlook”, he writes:
Your club is on solid footing now, with much hard work yet to be done. As we continued to invest in young players, acquire more draft selections, and maintain cap flexibility the forward-looking markets took notice. Our Future Franchise Rankings (ESPN’s) that began at 24th in a 30-team league in May of 2013 climbed to 19th in 2014, 17th in 2015, and most recently via RealGM’s rankings in December of 2015, 12th. I think that is imminently reasonable, as is a couple of spots higher.
The Philadelphia 76ers, as of me writing this, are leading 3-0 in their opening playoff series against the Toronto Raptors. They have the 6th best odds to win the NBA Championship, and are looking like one of the most complete teams in the playoffs.
If it worked for the 76ers—a team run by a man who made mistakes—how much more can we trust the process that the infinitely good Lord has for each and every one of us?
‘For I know the plans that I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans for prosperity and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.’5
P.S. The Philadelphia 76ers have one of the most delightful retro themes of any team in any sport. I dare you to watch any video from this Twitter account and not feel the joy. The original song devoid of accompanying memes can be found here.
He really should’ve sold off-brand Kleenex after this. Who wouldn’t blow their nose into a “Mr. Hinkie”?
While I still think about this book a lot and will re-read it eventually, it would be dishonest of me to not mention that I was given it by a vocations director when I thought I was being called to discern the priesthood, and it started me along the path to realizing that I absolutely was not called to discern the priesthood. I suppose that is, in and of itself, a discernment. Sorry Fr. Bryan. But also, thanks.
Consider if someone offered you a wager where you pay them $10, and they flip a coin for you: heads they will pay you $100, tails they will pay you $0. Your accepting of the bet is good process, regardless of which side of the coin comes up and whether or not you make money.
Fact check: true.
Jeremiah 29:11. If there’s a more "trust the process” Bible verse out there, I’d love to hear it.