Focus on what you can control

Do you complain about rents or house prices? About your salary, your employer? About timing and bad luck?

You’re wasting your energy and often spreading negativity onto yourself and the people around you as well.

If you can’t change something, you need to focus on what you do control.

When I hear people complain about situations that don’t suit them, or that feel like potential blocks, I wonder why they put so much energy into fantasising about alternatives they don’t govern.

What you don’t govern (and what you do)

Are rents too high? You can’t decide what homes cost, but you can decide where to live, how much to spend, whether to move, or how to increase your income.

Is your salary too low? You can’t force a company to pay you more, but you can build your skills, look for another job, change sector, negotiate better or build something of your own.

Does your employer not value you? You can’t change their mind, but you can change employer.

Is the market hard? You can’t change the market, but you can change product, strategy, skills, positioning and speed of execution.

Have you had bad luck? By definition you don’t control that. You can, however, control what you do next.

Not everything depends on us

That doesn’t mean everything depends on us. It would be naïve to think so.

We all start from different conditions, meet different opportunities and sometimes face events over which we have no power. Precisely for that reason I find it even more important not to waste energy on what we can’t govern.

Because in the end there’s only one path: work on the things you can change. Your skills, your decisions, the people you spend time with, where you live, how you use your time, how much you risk, how much you learn, how willing you are to change course when the current one isn’t working.

Complaining can even be legitimate, but it rarely changes the situation. Acting on what’s under your control, instead, gives you a few more chances.