Between black swans and butterfly effects, nothing is under your control.You put the pen down with a big smile on your face. That was a lot of work, you think, but it was worth every bit of effort. You take a sip of your coffee, sit back in your seat, and read your notes one more time. This percentage of my monthly income goes to my retirement plan, and that percentage goes into the savings account. A standing order will pay my credit card and mortgage. I got the car insurance, life insurance, health insurance, disability insurance, homeowner’s insurance, credit card fraud insurance, and on top of all of those, the umbrella insurance.
Have I missed anything? Nope. Looks complete, you say loud and proud, even though there’s no one around to hear you.
You lean forward, grab your calculator, and go over the numbers one more time.
Click, click, check. Everything’s in order. You throw the note pad on the coffee table with a confident flick of the wrist and stretch back with your hands behind your head. Well done! You have it all under control.
Those are the best moments ever, aren’t they? When we feel we’ve truly done all our homework, thought through every possible scenario, followed expert advice, and planned a clear path forward. It gives us peace of mind that everything is under control and that we’ll be just fine.
Many people I know, all over the globe, were in exactly this situation back in 2008. They thought they had it all figured out—right up until the U.S. housing bubble burst, triggering the largest economic crisis the world has faced since the Great Depression. The market crash took away most of the equity in their houses; the companies they worked for went belly up; some failed to pay their debts, and some even saw their homes foreclosed on. Over the span of a few months many went from “All figured out!” to “What just happened!?” Some recovered, and some are still suffering, but everyone learned that things can, and frequently will, go wrong. Very wrong.
Our need for security and control is instinctive. In other species, survival is a matter of running when the tiger shows up, but we humans carry the burden of being a lot more sophisticated. We can forecast risk and plan our escape route long before that tiger is even born. We can scan the terrain and identify every possible threat, including those that are wildly hypothetical. We can take preventative measures, erect fences, and add surveillance cameras. Furthermore, we can extend our plans to include those we love because we care for them—and because their safety is part of our emotional safety. This very human set of survival skills is partly why we’re still here while so many other species are not. We’re able to take control—or at least believe that we’re in control—while the best other beings can do is to react appropriately when the trouble starts.
Since the beginning of the Industrial Age, humanity has taken that control to a whole new level. Laying a railway track, erecting a high-rise building, and mass-producing an iPhone require spectacularly intricate planning and control. Call centers where every word is scripted, delivery services with real-time tracking—the limit to how far we can go to eliminate uncertainty keeps getting pushed further and further out. Our ability to stay on point in the simulated and hypercontrolled environment called work makes us believe that we can meticulously control our personal lives as well. And I’m no exception.
Although life has given me more than I need and assured me a future of financial independence, I still plan meticulously. I’ve got my career mapped out to the tiniest detail five years ahead. I plan my investments, savings, and where I’ll live, plans that naturally extend to cover my family as well. I bought properties to ensure our prosperity, planned the kids’ education, and invested in insurance and savings plans so that my loved ones will have what they need even when I’m gone.
I had pages of comprehensive plans and then, well, you know what happened. Four days into our (well-planned) summer vacation, Ali was admitted to the “wrong” hospital, where an error measured in millimeters led to his departure. How about that for control?
This tragic, surprising event wasn’t part of any plan. We say we can’t plan for such a dramatic turn of events because they’re so unexpected, but is that really true? How often do those kinds of events happen? All the time!
I know you might not like hearing it, but in the United States alone, medical errors are the third leading cause of death, with various estimates of the loss of life to be somewhere between a quarter and half a million deaths per year. In countries where malpractice litigation isn’t as advanced, those numbers multiply to millions. Other human errors, such as driver error and violence, take the lives of millions more. Although unexpected death is all around us, we choose to think of it as exceedingly unlikely.
Similarly, we choose to ignore most other disruptive events that occur hundreds, thousands, and millions of times every day. Natural disasters, economic crises, victimization by fraud, bankruptcies—life-changing, plan-altering events take place everywhere all the time. I call these events left turns because they point us down a road we weren’t expecting to take. And our path through life seems to turn left way too often.
In his New York Times bestseller, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb demonstrates that rare and improbable events occur much more often than we dare to think. His examples include the outbreak of World War I, the 9/11 attacks, and the rise of the Internet. The repercussions of these unanticipated “black swans” touched every single life on the planet.1
Consider for a moment how many similar events have happened in your lifetime and how many personal black swans have shaped your own life.
Taleb argues that our blindness with respect to randomness, particularly to large deviations, extends much further than our conscious awareness can even comprehend. This dovetails with what meteorologist Edward Lorenz called “the Butterfly Effect,” the ability of seemingly minor and unrelated events to cause major changes. Lorenz ran a series of weather models in which, after inputting the initial conditions, he added tiny changes in the wind speed. Even though these changes were almost imperceptible—he compared them to the turbulence created by a butterfly flapping its wings—the ultimate outcome changed significantly, leading to the speculation that the flapping of the wings of a butterfly in Brazil can cause a hurricane in Florida.2 Trillions of butterfly effects are buffeting us every minute. They alter our paths more than we can imagine.
To consider Ali’s life as an example, the black swan was the medical error, but many butterfly effects also led to the tragedy of losing him, including the proximity of our home to that specific hospital, the repetition of his easily treatable belly pains, and the germ that might have started the inflammation of his appendix. All these occurred months or years earlier. Could I have controlled or planned them all? No. Control is an illusion.
Between black swans and butterfly effects, nothing is under your control.
Before we jump into deeper water, I should highlight that it’s not my intention here to depress you. As any successful businessman will tell you, success (which in our case is happiness) doesn’t come from ignoring unpleasant realities. It comes from realism and objectivity in understanding life with all of its imperfections. Happiness comes from our ability to navigate such reality based on facts, not illusions.
Acknowledging our limited control shouldn’t cause us to despair. Addressed head-on, it should lead us to a realistic path to happiness. It all starts with understanding the true nature of our control. We think we are in control of everything—our money, friends, and career. But, honestly, how much control do you really have over those things you’re hanging on to? Take any example, say, your money. Is your money really under your full control? “Sure,” you say, “it’s my hard-earned money. I can do anything I want with it. I can choose to spend it, give to charity, invest it, or save it.”
But can you really? What if your bank goes bankrupt? It’s happened before. What if taxes increase? Have you considered how inflation is taking away from your money, your purchasing power, while you can do nothing about it?
Neither is your career fully under your control. Your company could go out of business or might decide to lay off the workforce. Nor are your possessions, friends, or health. We all lose things and people we love, and we all get sick sometimes. Which has to leave you thinking: is there anything ever under our total control?
Yes, two things are: your actions and your attitude.
As an engineer, a senior executive, and a businessman, I’m the worst when it comes to control. For years I attempted to assert full control on every aspect of my life. At work, I wanted everyone, every system, and every data point in my organization to fully match my expectations. In my personal life, I tried to control my wife, the progress of my kids, and even the number of full loads of laundry that ensured the optimum use of water and electricity at home.
But no matter how hard I tried, events in the real world defied me. So what did I do? I tried harder still. I was in a state of constant suffering, and it took me years of rejection, anger, and frustration to see the light and accept the truth: I wasn’t in control. When I realized that, I felt a ton of weight removed from my shoulders. My actions remained committed, but my attachment to outcomes completely vanished.
My first breakthrough came when a friend taught me about the Hindu concept of detachment, when you strive to achieve your goals knowing that the results are impossible to predict. When something unexpected happens, the detachment concept tells us to accept the new direction and try again. There is no sadness or regret, and no grief over the loss of control.
Initially I resisted this teaching. It was hard to surrender my fate to what seemed like pure chance. But then I found a wonderful story. To practice surrendering control, the early Muslims left their horses untied. But not until they learned to “tie the horse and then surrender” did they truly give up control. That’s when I learned what I came to call committed acceptance.
Take the responsible action first, then release the need to control.
The beauty of committed acceptance is that it doesn’t take away from your chances of success. Quite the opposite: it’s not your expectation of success that drives results; it’s your diligent action that delivers them.
Here’s a little riddle that conveys the same lesson. My drive from home to work has no traffic lights. When I drive at the speed limit it takes exactly eleven minutes. On Monday, I expected to get to work in nine minutes; on Tuesday, I expected the drive to take fifteen; on Wednesday, I was in full control and on time for my first meeting; on Thursday, I was stressed, worried, and late; on Friday, I really enjoyed the drive. Each day I acted as I should and drove exactly at the speed limit. How long did it take me to get to work each day of last week?
Eleven minutes!
If you take exactly the same steps, you will always reach exactly the same outcome regardless of your expectations, frustrations, pressures, or joy. The quality of your actions should not vary, and neither should your persistence in the face of challenges.
I made practicing committed acceptance my priority. I focused on doing the best I could every minute in every situation. I kept aiming high but remained emotionally detached from the results. If I missed a target, I looked back, learned, and tried again as if nothing was lost—because nothing really had been lost. At work I realized that I couldn’t control every one of my employees, especially the really, really smart ones. I couldn’t force a customer to buy my product, and I couldn’t get the engineers to build it to my specs, or finance to price it as I wished, or legal to offer easy terms. Everyone had a different objective, and I needed to bring them all along. I learned to do the best I could without exerting, or expecting, full control.
In my personal life I make it even simpler: I plan, but I don’t attempt control beyond the span of the present moment. Like Ali, I’ve learned to do the best I can in every situation and trust that all will work out fine.
While actions are the visible levers of achievement, attitude is the true game changer. Consider the story of Tim and Tom.
When it was time to wake up, Tim hit the snooze button twice, then realized he’d be late for his nine o’clock appointment. He jumped out of bed in a panic, only to realize that it was raining so heavily that he’d certainly be even more delayed. He skipped his coffee and jumped in the car, looking shabby and feeling grumpy. This is going to be a lousy day, he thought. Already tense, he let his stress get the best of him, and he started switching lanes, banging on the steering wheel, and shouting “Come on!” Then—BAM—the car behind him rear-ended his. It was nothing more than a fender bender, but he jumped out of his seat, charged toward the other car, and violently banged on the hood, screaming and swearing in anger. Tim’s behavior was so out of control that he ended up spending the night in a jail cell. I knew this was going to be a lousy day, he thought. And ignoring the impact of his own attitude, he went on to think, All because it rained.
Now let’s replay the same sequence of events—snooze button twice and rain—only this time it’s Tom realizing that he won’t make his nine o’clock. So he brewed a good cup of coffee, showered and shaved and dressed in his favorite shirt, then grabbed a CD of Tina Turner’s “I Can’t Stand the Rain” because he knew it was going to be a long, slow commute. I love the rain. I’m going to enjoy today, he thought. He called his appointment to apologize and found out that she too was stuck in traffic. He sipped his coffee while he inched along, tapping his fingers rhythmically to the music, feeling really great. Then—BAM—the car behind him tapped his rear bumper. Curious, he got out and realized it wasn’t a big deal. He smiled at the other driver and said, “Are you okay?” Relieved, she got out of her car, and she was stunning. “Hi, it’s good to meet you!” he blabbered. She laughed and said, “Good? But I just crashed your car!” “Oh, but it’s a good crash,” he replied. Then she laughed again and said, “I love the song you’re playing.” And so it went. It felt like a moment from a romantic comedy. The rain added to the romance, and before long they both knew it was going to be a memorable day—all because it rained.
What’s the rain got to do with anything?
Choose your attitude!
I once attended a training course on change management in which we spent most of the time watching the movie Apollo 13, the one in which Tom Hanks plays astronaut Jim Lovell, whose mission was scheduled to land on the moon until an oxygen tank exploded two days after launch. Suddenly success was no longer a question of a successful moon landing but whether the crew would ever make it back to Earth.
There’s a long moment of silence as the tension mounts, and then the silence is broken by Lovell’s calm, confident, almost cheerful voice saying, “Houston, we have a problem.” There is no trace of panic. If you’d just walked into the room, you’d think his problem could be nothing more than a flat tire. He then proceeds to describe what happened and asks for advice on how to handle the situation. Step by step, the crew devises an ingenious solution, and, eventually, they make it back home.
This concluded the training. The instructor had nothing more to say because Lovell’s calm and assured attitude was what we were there to learn.
Life is bound to deal you a few bad hands now and then. You don’t need to make a big deal out of every unexpected turn of events. Your path may be rerouted, but nothing is lost unless you decide to quit. Through it all, arm yourself with the right attitude. As Oscar Wilde said:
“It is all going to be fine in the end. If it is not yet fine, then it is not yet the end.”
There is nothing wrong with planning and trying to assume control. The way we react when something unexpected happens is where we go off track. When things change, we react by trying to exert more control in an attempt to get back on track. What we should do instead is look at the current situation with an open, fresh perspective and attempt to use the new events in our favor, despite their having taken place beyond our control.
In algebra, when a parameter is irrelevant to the solution of an equation, we cancel it out. For example, If A+C=2B+C, it doesn’t really matter when solving the equation what the value of C is. A will always be equal to 2B regardless, so we treat C as if it doesn’t exist and solve the rest of the equation. C represents the parameters you can’t control.
In the movie Life Is Beautiful, Roberto Benigni plays a Jewish father arrested along with his son during World War II and sent to a concentration camp. Despite the misery, sickness, and death that surround them, the father convinces his son that the camp is actually a complicated game in which performing certain tasks will earn them points, and whoever gets to one thousand points first will win a tank. Viewed within the context that it’s all a game, the guards are mean only because they want the tank for themselves, and the dwindling numbers of children (who are actually being killed in gas chambers) are only hiding in order to score more points. The father realizes that the suffering his son is being exposed to is inevitable; the best thing he can do is be happy and playful to help his child survive.
From time to time we may all face a hardship that is inescapable. If there’s nothing you can do to change your current circumstance, then cancel the surrounding environment out of your Happiness Equation and solve the equation by using the rest of your life.
When life gets tough, some of us feel that we’ve lost the game and life has won. But life isn’t trying to defeat you. Life isn’t even a participant—the game is yours.
We’re each handed a set of cards—some good, and some not so good. Keep focused on the bad ones, and you’ll be stuck blaming the game. Use the good ones, and things become better: your hand changes and you move forward.
My happiness idol, His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, is a shining example of this kind of commitment. He has been exiled from his country. His people have been subjected to violence and have had to endure years of lack. Yet with wisdom and peace he has done what is within his control while accepting what is not. In so doing he’s become an ambassador for happiness to the whole world.
In my case, nothing has helped me through the tragedy of losing Ali more than the understanding of the Illusion of Control. Is there anything I can do to bring him back? Was there anything I could have done to save him? Is there a way to spend a minute more together? Would any amount of grieving be rewarded with a chance to see him again? No 
!
I set the expectation side of my Happiness Equation based on the truth: Ali left. All I can control now is my actions and attitude. I choose to be positive and grateful for the years he blessed us with his presence. I choose to honor his life with my actions. That’s within my control. I will turn sadness into happiness and do what I can to continue his life through the life of those who will reap the benefits of the contributions I make in his honor. I will give away the investments I planned for him and the fancy cars he never enjoyed. I will turn tragedy into smiles. Whenever I feel down or defeated, I hear him singing a line from the theme song from one of our favorite video games: “There’s no sense crying over every mistake. You just keep on trying till you run out of cake.” This is how the game of life is won. This is all I can control.