You Can't Control It Anyway

The older I get, the more I realize that most of my stress came from trying to control things that were never mine to control.

One thing I’ve realized about myself over the last few years is that I have a strange obsession with certainty.

I’ve always liked having a plan. I like collecting data, building systems and trying to understand why things happen because it gives me the feeling that I’m reducing uncertainty. Looking back, I think that’s one of the reasons I was attracted to trading in the first place. Most people see trading as complete chaos, but once you’ve spent enough years doing it, you realize it isn’t really about predicting the future. It’s about building a process that gives you a small statistical advantage and then trusting that process over hundreds of trades instead of one.

The strange part is that while trading slowly taught me to accept uncertainty inside the markets, I was still trying to eliminate it everywhere else in my life. I wanted certainty that my strategy would continue working for years. I wanted certainty that every business idea I invested time into would eventually succeed. I wanted certainty that all the sacrifices I was making would pay off exactly the way I imagined they would. Deep down, I wanted life to guarantee me that if I did everything correctly, everything would work out.

Of course, that’s not how life works.

The more I think about it, the more I realize I wanted to believe that if I planned enough, researched enough and worked hard enough, I could remove uncertainty from my life altogether. The problem is that control is incredibly addictive because every time you think you’ve finally gained it, reality reminds you that there’s another piece of the puzzle that was never yours to control in the first place.

You can control how prepared you are before the market opens, but you can’t control what the market decides to do next. You can control how disciplined you are, but not whether your edge performs well this month or the next. You can control how much effort you put into your business, but not whether people decide to buy what you’re building. Even outside of work, you can control how you treat people, but you’ll never control how they respond to you.

For a long time I found that frustrating because I interpreted uncertainty as something that needed to be solved. These days I see it very differently. I think uncertainty is simply the price we pay for doing anything meaningful. If there were guarantees in trading, there would be no opportunity. If there were guarantees in business, everyone would become successful. The uncertainty is the reason the system exists in the first place.

I think one of the biggest shifts I’ve experienced over the years was understanding that my job was never to predict what would happen next. My job was to execute my process well enough that probabilities could play out over time. Once I genuinely accepted that, individual trades stopped carrying so much emotional weight because I no longer expected each one to prove that I was a good trader.

I’ve noticed myself applying that idea to other areas of my life as well.

When I publish a newsletter like this one, I don’t control whether people enjoy reading it or whether they’ll even open the email. When I post a video, I don’t control what the algorithm decides to do with it. If I decide to build a new project, I don’t control whether people will find it valuable enough to pay for it. The only thing I really control is whether I believe the work is worth creating and whether I can honestly say I gave it my best effort.

Oddly enough, I’ve found that much more peaceful than constantly chasing certainty.

I think a surprising amount of stress comes from taking responsibility for outcomes that were never entirely our responsibility to begin with. We blame ourselves for things influenced by timing, luck, other people’s decisions and circumstances we couldn’t possibly predict, and then we wonder why we constantly feel anxious or disappointed.

I’m definitely not perfect at this.

There are still days when I catch myself trying to force an answer that doesn’t exist yet or worrying about something that’s months away. The difference is that I recognize it much sooner than I used to. Whenever I feel myself spiraling into overthinking, I try to ask one simple question: Is this actually something I can influence today, or am I trying to control something that was never mine to control in the first place?

Most of the time, that question is enough to bring me back to reality.

The market has never promised certainty, and neither has life. Maybe that’s not something we should be trying to fix. Maybe real peace isn’t found by controlling more and more parts of our lives, but by becoming comfortable with the fact that some things will always remain outside of our control.

Bless you all.

Luke