Regain your sanity by focusing only on things you can control

By David McElroy · March 28, 2020

Can you distinguish between things you can control and things you can’t control? If so, do you have the ability to focus only on what you can control? Can you treat what you can’t control as simple environmental reality?

I’ve started noticing over the last week or so that there are different sorts of fear. Yes, there are a lot of specific fears, but I’ve suddenly become very aware of one basic differences between the types of fear.

Almost everybody who is aware of what’s going on in the world is afraid right now. We have just entered a dangerous time, so it’s rational to be afraid. But some people seem paralyzed by their fears and other people seem energized by their fears.

And these wildflowers in my back yard taught me the difference Friday afternoon.

Wildflowers can’t control where people build houses. They can’t control who wants a manicured lawn and puts out chemicals to kill them. They can’t control the weather or what soil is available to them or where someone might try to tear them out.

Wildflowers control only their own natural processes — and they completely ignore things they can’t control.

The people around me whose fears are paralyzing are focusing on things they can‘t control. They are furious at politicians for shutting down business around them — sometimes their own businesses or their own jobs — or they’re furious at other politicians for not doing enough to stop the spread of the new coronavirus.

They’re angry at stores that don’t have what they want to buy. They’re angry with other scared people who are buying up all the toilet paper or antiseptic wipes. They’re angry that the federal government is destroying the currency by printing phony money — or they’re angry that they’re not getting a big enough slice of the “stimulus” pie.

They’re angry. They’re scared. Most of all, they feel as though they have no control, so they feel powerless.

The people who are energized and determined aren’t arguing about what politicians ought to do or what should have been done in the economy 30 years ago or 75 years ago. They’re not worrying about whether an invisible new virus might invade their households.

They’re not oblivious to these things. They simply know they can’t control them. And their focus is on what their own reaction is going to be to an environment which they didn’t create and which they can’t control.

Knowing what you can control and what you can’t — and then focusing only on what you can control — is a key life skill, but it’s one that most people never learn. It’s taken me many years to understand this.

I used to waste my time arguing with other people — about politics or what should be done for the economy or whatever — even though I was well aware that those arguments made no difference. I rarely changed anybody’s mind, but even if I did, winning such an argument didn’t make my position in the world one bit better.

I used to waste a lot of time explaining to people what should have been done in the past, whether it was something personal or something political or even something in a business. I was sure I was right and I was driven to make sure others knew I was right.

I’ll still occasionally be sucked down the rabbit hole of explaining things to people who don’t see the world the way I do, but I generally pull out of those holes quickly. When I fall into such a trap, I become passive and I stop taking the initiative about how to fix something I can control.

I once read in a business book about all the personal fortunes which people started building during the Great Depression. That astounded me. I had grown up hearing from elderly relatives about how there were no opportunities and no jobs. Everything I had studied assured me that things were terrible for everyone except those rich people who hadn’t lost all of their inherited money.

But the truth is that some people had the initiative to try outlandish things and find ways to make them work. They were the ones who didn’t accept the “fact” that they were passive victims. They found ways to win — even though everybody told them there was no reason to try.

You can’t control whether the economy falls apart right now, but you can control your response to it.

You can’t control whether this coronavirus that causes COVID-19 makes it to your body, but you can control what you do until then — and you can control the plans you pursue after you (almost certainly) recover.

It’s that way with most things.

You can’t control another person’s actions, but you can control whether you allow that person to have control over your life.

You can’t control whether your spouse or partner is a terrible person, but you can control whether you remain with that person.

You can’t control whether people love your work or your product, but you can control whether you keep putting things in front of the world until someone is willing to pay for what you can make.

You can’t ensure that your life is successful. You can’t ensure that you’ll be happy or healthy or prosperous. But you can control your mindset.

A person who believes that other people control what happens to him is someone who is passively waiting for a tidal wave to hit him. That person has given up and has allowed other people to take control.

A person who believes that others control the environment around them — but that they control how they react to the environment — are like these wildflowers.

If you cut off one avenue I want to pursue, I will have another. If you tell me I can’t go to this place, I will go to that place. If you destroy something I have built, I will move to another spot and build something else.

I can’t control the environment. But I can control myself. I can control my attitude.

And like a wildflower, I will keep spreading my seeds and ideas and plans. I will keep coming back. And in the end, I will win, because I am not a victim. I will focus on what I can control.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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