Process Over Outcome
Fix attention on controllable form cues, not the finish line, and the result follows
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 75%
Learned from the Royal Marines, Edgley's rule is to keep attention exclusively on the controllable elements of execution rather than on the outcome. On a treadmill you focus on foot strike and cadence, not the clock. Swimming, he checks his high-elbow catch, whether he is finishing his stroke, and his leg kick, not how far is left. The mechanism has two parts. First, outcome-checking is emotionally volatile: a bad distance reading crushes you, a good one is a fleeting high, and the environment itself can mislead (he once swam hard for four hours in a counter-current and went backwards). Second, blindly executing the process is what actually produces the outcome, so obsessing over the metric is both destabilising and redundant. He reinforces it with Huberman's treadmill-corridor study showing perceived speed is easily manipulated, which is why he prefers not to know his split at all.
Origin
Adopted by Ross Edgley from the Royal Marines and applied across his marathon sea and river swims. He pairs it with an Andrew Huberman-cited study on manipulated perceived running speed, concluding he would rather not know his metrics and instead focus purely on stroke mechanics.
Core principles
- 01Asking how far is left is focusing on outcome, not process
- 02Attention belongs on the controllable mechanics in front of you
- 03Chasing progress metrics invites demoralisation when they disappoint
- 04By focusing solely on the process the outcome becomes inevitable
- 05The environment can lie about your progress, so anchor to what you control
How to run it
- 1
List your controllables
Define the specific, controllable mechanics of your task: for swimming, the catch, the stroke finish, the leg kick; for running, cadence and foot strike.
- 2
Anchor attention to the cues
Keep your mind on executing those cues moment to moment. This is the process, and it is the only thing you can directly influence.
Pro tip Rotate through your cues as a rolling mental checklist to stay engaged.
- 3
Stop checking the outcome
Deliberately avoid asking how far you have gone, how far remains, or what the clock says. Treat these questions as traps that pull you off process.
Pro tip Edgley often tells his crew not to give him distance updates at all.
Watch out Environmental cues can lie: he once swam hard for four hours and lost 200 metres to a current.
- 4
Redirect when you drift
When you catch yourself craving a progress hit, gently return attention to the next stroke or step and trust the process to deliver.
In the wild
After an 18-hour swim, Edgley hit a counter-current in St Lucia and swam as hard as he could for four hours without moving. When he stopped and complained to the captain that they had made no progress, the captain pointed out that during the 20 seconds of complaining he had drifted 200 metres backwards. The lesson: the ocean does not care, and outcome readings can be brutally misleading, so attention is better spent on process.
→ Reinforced his commitment to process focus over chasing distance metrics.
Common mistakes
Riding the metric rollercoaster
Constantly checking distance or the clock turns your emotional state over to numbers you cannot control, so a bad reading crushes you and a good one is a fleeting high.
Trusting the environment for feedback
Landmarks, currents, and darkness can make you feel you are flying or stationary when the truth is the opposite, so external progress cues are unreliable pacing signals.
Is it for you?
Best for
Endurance athletes and long-project workers prone to checking the clock or distance-remaining.
Not ideal for
Tasks where real-time outcome feedback is essential for pacing or safety decisions.
From the transcript
“when you're focusing on the outcome you're not actually focusing on the process ... how's my high elbow catch am I catching am I finishing…”
“by just solely focusing on the pro process the outcome becomes inevitable”
From the episode
317 Miles: Breaking The Longest Non-Stop Swim Record - Ross Edgley - #824
Ross Edgley