Dichotomy of Control

“Some things are up to us and some are not up to us.” This is how Epictetus introduced the dichotomy of control framework.

He continues: “Within our power are opinion, aim, desire, aversion, and, in one word, whatever affairs are our own. Beyond our power are body, property, reputation, office, and, in one word, whatever are not properly our own affairs.”

So what is up to us? Opinions we hold, our actions, our feelings, goals we set for ourselves, our values, our desires. These things are internal – we have complete control over them. Everything else is external to us, and thus we have little control over those things.

This is the framework that attracted me to Stoicism in the first place. It changed how I interact with people. Yes, people are probably the biggest source of negative emotions for me.

Unless I decide to spend the rest of my life with monks who have taken a vow of silence, I have to accept this reality of life: People I love (friends, relatives) or hardly know (the lady at the rental car counter, a telemarketer) will sometimes disappoint me. They’ll say something I don’t like or do something I don’t care for. I am not joining a monastery anytime soon. Therefore, though

I may not be able to control what people do or say, I can control how I respond to them. There is absolutely no reason to get worked up about things you cannot control (externals).

You can worry all you want whether the sun will come up tomorrow. The sun, however, is not aware of your existence or your worrying. It will either come up or it will not. As Epictetus so beautifully put it: “The more we value things outside our control, the less control we have.”

This worrying about something you have absolutely no control over increases the frequency and amplitude of unnecessary negative emotions. Negative emotions compound upon each other – a lot of little worrying results in big stress. If you worry about things you cannot control, you always suffer an extra time.

Marcus says, “You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” I don’t want to disagree with a Roman emperor, so I’ll just add that in addition to strength you’ll find happiness. Removing negative emotions from your life is like adding a small pinch of salt to a dish when you are cooking – it brings out flavor and enhances happiness.

Epictetus said, “No person is free who is not master of himself.” Our goal is to become masters of ourselves.

Let me tell you a story (I’ll be telling you a lot of stories here).

In the late 1990s I studied to become a Chartered Financial Analyst

(CFA). The CFA is a three-year program; it is like a super MBA program for investment professionals. As I like to explain to my accountant friends (poking fun at them, a little), it is like the CPA program but more difficult.

You buy books and a study guide in January. You study on your own or with a study group, then take the exam in June. If you pass the exam, you move to the next level (there are three levels). If you don’t pass, you just lost a year. You must wait till January and try again.

I did not want to fail and wait a year. I studied incredibly hard – probably twice as hard as my friends. The CFA Institute said that it would send out results at least a month and a half after the test, in late July or so. Starting in mid-July, I was stalking the mailman daily. At 11 a.m., I was right there at the mailbox. Being around me in mid-July and into August was not much fun. My results arrived in mid-August (and I passed). For those months from January to August each year, the test results were all I could think about.

Looking at this 20 years later, my approach to the whole thing was completely wrong. I tied my happiness and my self-worth to something I could not completely control – passing not just one but three exams.

Willian Irvine, in his terrific book on Stoicism, A Guide to the Good Life, took Epictetus’ dichotomy of control and turned into a trichotomy of control.

There are things that are completely up to us – our values and goals, our emotional responses (internals).

There are things that are completely not up to us – the sun rising tomorrow sort of things (externals).

And then, Irvine added, there are things over which we have some but not complete control.

Let’s apply this framework to my CFA exams.

Passing an exam has externalities. There could be questions on the test that are poorly phrased. I could have a headache while taking the test. I could inadvertently miss a section of questions (which I actually did and discovered 20 minutes before the end of a six-hour exam).

Therefore, passing the exams was partially but not completely under my control. Instead of setting a goal to pass the test, I should have set a goal to do the best job possible studying for each exam. This is a process-based goal where I design and execute the process. We want all our goals to be process-based, with short-term feedback loops so we can make course corrections. The best part is that the process is completely under my control.

Stoics would say that my passing the test should be a preference, not a goal. If I pass, I am happy. If I fail, I will not be upset about it – no negative emotions. I like this asymmetry of emotion. I put my absolute best effort into studying. I am proud of the effort I put in and what I’ve learned. If I fail, there is next year. (As I am writing this, across the table from me is my 19-year-old son, Jonah, diligently studying six hours straight for a statistics exam. I realize I really don’t care what grade he gets – that is external to him – but I am so proud of his focus – that is internal.)

Once I left the exam room I had absolutely no control over the result. At this point I should have just let it go and enjoyed my summer, telling myself that at this point it was not up to me. Any anxiety I’d experience would not change the outcome.

In our relationships we should set a goal, not for someone to love us, but to behave according to our values (to be worth loving) and to be a good, caring partner. We cannot control whether people will love us, but we can control our actions and our behavior.

I could not figure out for a long time why so many actors and musicians ended up having horrible lives. It’s clear to me now; happiness linked to adulation by others is like an addictive drug, and thus you want a constant flow of it and you want an increasing dosage. These people also tie their happiness to external forces that they have so little control over. Your fans may love you today and move on to another louder and shinier object tomorrow.

I am not the Lady Gaga of writing, but I get a lot of emails from my readers. They come in spurts. Emails showing up in your inbox carry little hits of dopamine. They can, if I let them, indicate to me that I matter. If I am not careful and I tie my happiness to them, I’ll increase the volatility of my emotions, getting little in return. Now, my readers’ emails come into a separate mailbox that I check only a few times a week.

Also, if I write with the goal of getting more emails (likes) from readers, eventually my writing will suffer. I’ll start writing what my readers care about, which may come at the expense of what is meaningful to me. I’ll trade my long-term happiness for bits of dopamine. I should just focus on writing (I can control that) and pay little attention to what others think of it.

The more we tie our happiness to things that we cannot control, the more we subject ourselves to the negative volatility of the outside world. Therefore, we need to be mindful in setting our goals. They should be internal to us, under our control, and process-based.

Labeling

In my daily life, as things that trigger negative emotions arise, I label them

“internal” or “external” (a trick I learned from practicing meditation). One day, my wife said something I didn’t especially like, and instead of mentally labeling, I labeled it out loud. “Honey, you are an external!” I exclaimed. She gave me a look that suggested the couch in the living room was all mine. Lesson learned – don’t label out loud.

I view Stoicism as mental Aikido. Aikido is a Japanese martial art that was born in the 20th century and is loosely based on Jujitsu. It tries to protect both practitioner and opponent. Instead of doing hard blocks of an opponent’s attack (as in traditional martial arts), it uses the opponent’s energy to redirect the opponent’s moves away from the practitioner’s body. To some degree, this is how I view the dichotomy of control framework: Once I recognize that whatever is bringing me negative emotions is external, I mentally let them fly by me.

I’ll let Marcus have the last word here: “You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”