You Only Control The Effort, Not The Results
The dichotomy of control.
The title of this story was a tweet by Ryan Holiday.
Ryan is a best-selling author who writes and teaches Stoicism — an ancient philosophy for understanding life, nature, and other human practices.
One of many essential stoic lessons is to differentiate the things within your control and those not in your control.
For example, writing a Medium story is within your control, but the views, responses, and earnings are not.
I have experienced this dichotomy of control many times in writing.
For instance, I have written over 200 articles online. However, only a few are responsible for my growth and success. But the strange part is that I did not decide which of my articles would bring success.
I have written many articles thinking that people will love them. I felt that those articles would bring thousands of visitors to my blog. Guess what? None of them did as I had expected.
On the contrary, other articles (which I had written without much thought) have done far better. They have brought more audience engagement.
