Do you consider yourself to be controlling?
Most people would say "no." Being seen as controlling means being judged as selfish—prioritizing your desires over others'—or fragile, too weak to tolerate anything outside your exact preferences. Most of us don't want to see ourselves that way.
Maybe that's the wrong question.
Do you consider yourself goal-oriented?
Far more people would answer "yes" to that. We see goals as worthwhile pursuits: lifting a certain weight, reaching a certain level of income or revenue, our business's revenue, starting a family with someone we love.
But being goal-oriented is just another way of saying you invest significant effort in reaching your desired outcomes. You want to control your body, your business, your relationships, your life experiences in a particular way.
The truth is, at a micro level, we've gained enormous control over our lives compared to past generations. We control what we eat for dinner, what music we listen to or shows we watch, when and how we travel to nearby or distant destinations. At work, most of us aren't watched by a supervisor every minute—we have freedom to choose how we complete our tasks. We can retrieve information on any topic in seconds, contact people we know, record and save anything we see or hear. We can plan events far into the future, receive news about happenings worldwide, communicate our ideas in text or video to people across the globe.
With effort and money, we can change our workplace, where we live, what we look like. With more effort, money, and some luck, we can own and operate a business, become a government official, or shift public opinion on an issue, policy, or idea.
We've gained an enormous amount of control that many people in the past never enjoyed.
And yet, when it comes to large-scale change and creating significant impact on the world, we experience only limited gains in control.
A rapidly warming planet, the rise of political violence and right-wing leadership, the economic and existential risks of AI development. The world is increasingly complex and interconnected. Large interconnected systems resist change—until they reach a tipping point where they behave in extreme and unpredictable ways. Think recessions, wars, and pandemics.
There are many players, each with their own agenda and ability to apply resources and effort toward their own goals—which may not align with yours. Thanks to capitalism and technological innovation, a small number of people have, due to their wealth and status, many orders of magnitude more power than ordinary citizens.
A successful doctor or lawyer may be worth single-digit millions. A famous artist or athlete may be worth hundreds of millions. A business mogul may be worth tens of billions. Meanwhile, the median net worth of a US household is $192,000.
These resources give the wealthy and powerful far greater control over the world around them than any king or emperor of the past. They can hire or fire hundreds of thousands of people, cut or grant access to valuable products and services, and make investments that shape the future for decades to come. And we as ordinary people have never had greater awareness of these individuals and their access to resources many orders of magnitude larger than our own. Through news and social media, we see how the powerful spend their money and exert their will on society.
I think this is what creates that strange feeling: despite having more micro control over our environment, we feel unsettled about the world around us. We’re aware of what’s happening yet feel powerless to stop it—despite having more levers at our disposal to do so.
Ambitious individuals, like the founders and outliers I work with, are used to controlling their environment and reaching tractable goals like starting a business, building a product, or articulating an idea. But the more audacious goals—building sizable operations that change how people behave and companies operate on a large scale, and earning life-changing sums of money as a reward—are much harder. Like how the land under the water falls away rapidly from the beach into the nearshore ocean, our ability to control our reality becomes increasingly more challenging as our ambitions grow.
In other words, control is sublinear.
So what can we do about this?
Don’t discount the greater degree of control we have over our immediate environment—how we spend our time, who we spend it with, what we consume in our bodies and through our media devices. We still have tremendous power at the local level: the ability to build, create, and influence the people and projects closest to us. This agency gives us a remarkable ability to shape our moment-to-moment reality.
Understand your reasons for wanting to pursue more ambitious targets—what are you really trying to gain here? Is it to feel personally worthy of love and safety, an intrinsic desire to enact the change you wish to see, or simply because you enjoy taking on hard challenges? The answer will likely be a combination of all three. But knowing the difference will play a significant role in your experience, and may help you realize that there are other, more easily achievable paths to what you want.
Better understand the systems we live under to find leverage points to intercept and influence toward your desired goals. Study history, past successes and failures in your field, and what the best are currently doing. In demolition, a few explosives placed at a building's load-bearing points can collapse a structure weighing thousands of tons—the key is knowing exactly where to apply force. You can’t control what you don’t understand and there’s more to understand than ever.
Play long-term games—you likely don’t have the skill, position, or resources to reach your most significant goals today. And that’s ok. Amassing significant power at a young age is a statistical and historical anomaly. Most meaningful leverage is acquired through deep expertise and trusted relationships, both of which are time-gated by nature. Being patience and taking a long-term view isn't a passive decision, it's the strategic choice to invest years building the exact forms of leverage that matter most, knowing that expertise, trust, and compounding momentum cannot be rushed or faked.
Accept that the greater the quantity, ambition, and specificity of your goals, the less likely you’ll be to reach all of them. Shift your expectations from requiring particular outcomes to embracing the idea that there are many desirable results you could attain and enjoy. Give yourself the self-compassion and grace to remain open to disappointing or unexpected outcomes. Luck, mistakes, and outside forces will be part of the equation whether you want them to or not, but meaning is made in the striving itself, not in any particular destination we reach.
