Do Everything You Can Influence, but No More

I often run into stories where people are desperate to reach their goals, pour in enormous effort, and still never get the result they wanted. And it can repeat again and again, turning life into an exhausting fight with windmills and breeding a sense of despair and cosmic injustice. I’ve lived through that myself.

But what if pushing too hard is a symptom of being out of tune with the universe?

For a few years now I’ve tried to lean on one principle: “Do everything I can influence, but no more.” And then watch how things unfold — scaling the effort up when favorable conditions appear, or, the other way around, dialing it back when there are no positive signals.

In most cases we don’t truly know which outcome will serve us best in the long run. Excessive stubbornness and the drive to reach a goal at any cost set our wishes against the natural course of events. And that, in the end, leads to a feeling of powerlessness — because our means are no match for the combined force of outside circumstances.

Sometimes entirely new, unexpected, astonishing possibilities open up for us — ones we’d never even have learned about if everything had gone according to our original plan.

For me personally, the real discovery was a skill that grows out of this hypothesis: knowing how to say “no” to scenarios where I did everything in my power and still got no positive “response” from the world. Or knowing how to put those scenarios off indefinitely, letting the situation “ripen.” At times circumstances simply need time, and when that moment comes, everything falls into place on its own — no need to batter at closed doors, naturally and in harmony.

Here’s to reasonable persistence — and a keen ear for the signs of fate! 😎