What you can’t control is an asset

Last week I wrote about the first thing high performers do when something shifts at work.

They run emotional patterns. Taking it personally. Blaming. Worrying about what people think. Those are recognisable. Most people can catch them if they are honest.

The second thing is harder to catch. Because it looks like good judgement.

When a role changes, a new manager arrives, or an industry starts to shift — the rational impulse is to find out what happens next. Who will the new manager be? How will the organisation move? What does this mean for me in six months?

So you start gathering information. Reading every signal. Building mental models of possible futures. Trying to figure out exactly what to do next.

It feels like preparation. It looks like exactly what a serious professional should do.

The return on that effort is almost always poor.

In investing, when conditions shift suddenly — a geopolitical shock, a regulatory change — the instinct is to predict exactly what happens next. But point prediction on genuinely uncertain events has a limited return. The more productive move is scenario analysis: understand what you know about the asset you hold, and how your position might move across several possible outcomes.

The question shifts from 'what will happen?' to 'what do I know that holds regardless of what happens?'

That is the same question worth asking about your career.

I spent weeks trying to figure out what my new manager would value before I had ever met them. Weeks of mental capital on an unresolvable question. What helped was deciding to stop spending on it — and directing that energy toward what I could actually build.

What you cannot predict is not a problem to solve. It is a boundary. Everything on that list is off your energy budget. Not because it does not matter. Because spending on it does not generate return.

What you cannot control is an asset — once you stop treating it as a liability.

https://substack.com/@charmianlong

Where are you currently spending energy trying to predict something you cannot know — and what would you do with that energy if you drew the line today?