What do you actually control?

There's a better metric for success

Photo by Michael Carruth on Unsplash

Here’s an archetypal story that everyone knows, but is never really talked about. There’s a middle-level manager at a consulting firm who hates his job. He dreams of being an artist and wishes to work for himself one day, but has never had the confidence to take the plunge. After a few months, this guy has a death in his family, and decides, after being faced with his potential mortality, that he is going to chase the dreams he has been avoiding for his whole life. The dude quits his job and starts working toward this dream of his. He makes progress and garners some attention, but after 15 years of fighting to make ends meet as an artist, is depressed with the realization that he must retire before gaining the acclaim he dreamt of. That’s it. No satisfying payoff, no happy ending, just a very sober tale of a guy trying, and failing.

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For a long time, I have been trying to understand what it means for an action to be classified as “good.” Does a billionaire's self-aggrandizing donation of 1/10th of a percent of their wealth count as “good” if it helps 100,000 people eat? Or does the selfless donation of 100 percent of the wealth of a monk somehow count as “more good” than that of the billionaire, though their contribution can only feed one mouth? 

When the fictitious manager whose story was laid out above took the leap to chase his dream, I think we can all agree that his intentions were brave and pure; however, does the inevitable failure of this character take away from how good an action this was? It’s easy to say in retrospect that this guy should’ve kept his job, but do the years of struggle that followed this brave sojourn into the unknown invalidate the significance of his conquest? I’d like to argue that, no, the outcome does not invalidate his noble intentions, and that a better definition for what actions count as “good” is in order. 

It’s easy to attach our emotions to the outcome of our actions, a problematic tendency since the outcome is the one part of the equation that we don’t control. Something that has helped me to detach my emotional state from an outcome is to reword all of my goals from “outcome-centric goals” to “process-centric goals”. For example, rather than aiming to “have a $100,000 salary by the end of the year”, one should endeavor to “work on gaining skills that will increase my value every single day for 3-4 hours.” Despite how seductive it is to put a figure down, you don’t actually control if people decide to give you money or how well your shiny new resume is perceived. What you CAN control is how much time you commit to working on the things that tend to increase your income. Now, whether your income is more or less than what your goal was, you can relish in the fact that you did what you said you would do; Your sense of worth is tied to what you can actually control, not outsourced to the judgments of others. 

I believe that truth is the best measure of how “good” an action is. Figuring out which actions are grounded in truth is not always an easy task, however. For example, telling a friend a harsh fact about themselves may come from a place of truth, but doing so in a way that belittles them likely stems from insecurity. Untangling our intentions is difficult, but doing the work upfront makes choosing how to conduct oneself a lot simpler.

I encourage you to wake up every morning and ponder this question: “What is one thing I can do today that is truthful, in my control, and would make the most positive long-term change for myself and others?” If you define “good” actions with this framework, you are in the driver's seat, and the results that you receive from your actions serve only as a way to create better results in the future, rather than the determinants of your mood. Focus only on that which you can control, and choose to see all that comes from it as “good”.-

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