Why Trying to Control Everything Leaves You Exhausted

The thing you’re gripping hardest is the thing keeping you stuck.

For most of my life, I believed I could control outcomes. Set the intention. Write down the goal. Outwork everyone. Stay disciplined, pay attention, leave nothing to chance.

And it worked. Mostly. For a while.

Then life started filing counterexamples.

I entered 4 expedition-length adventure races, the 400-plus-mile kind, with a full team each time. I finished exactly none of them.

In 2011, my gym (CrossFit LA, one of the first CrossFit gyms in the world) fielded a team that qualified for the CrossFit Games, the sport’s world championship. I trained to compete with them. An internal hemorrhoid and the surgery that followed made that decision for me.

I once planned a single perfect day at Lake Tahoe to propose to my girlfriend. She said yes. Over the next 6 months the relationship came apart, and we never married.

And in 2019, the Whole Life Challenge, an online health program I’d built from scratch that reached a quarter of a million people, dropped suddenly and without warning. Participation fell, revenue fell, the company’s value fell. That one shook me to my core.

Underneath all that effort sat a belief I couldn’t have named at the time. If I prove enough, achieve enough, manage enough, control enough, I’ll be accepted. I’ll be safe. I’ll finally be enough.

I thought the payoff would be freedom.

What I got was friction. Anxiety. Exhaustion. And a running scoreboard where my worth got recalculated after every result, so I was only ever as good as the last win.

Meanwhile, the world kept demonstrating how little say I had. Earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, fires. And since 2019 especially: markets shifted, teams changed, relationships surprised us, health threw curveballs. Politics, whew. No amount of planning made any of us immune.

Somewhere in there, a line landed for me and stayed.

The tighter you grasp, the less you actually hold.

Because here’s what I kept missing while I was busy managing everything: the one place I have real influence is my response to life. That’s also where the peace is. Same address.

Try this test. Finish the sentence “I’m upset because…” If what comes next is a person or a circumstance, something outside you, that’s the flag.

Whatever comes after “because” is just the trigger. The real machinery is inside: the meaning you’ve assigned to the thing, how attached you are to that meaning, and whether you can stay present and composed while it’s happening.

I want to be honest about the cost of missing this, because I paid it for decades.

Life is unpredictable, so trying to manage the unmanageable produces a permanent low hum of frustration. When the control slips anyway (and it will), you lose more than the outcome. You lose your peace along with it. And all that energy spent gripping the external stuff is energy unavailable for the things you can actually shape: your inner state, your values, your integrity.

So here’s where I’ve landed, and what I work on with the founders and executives I coach.

My team will do what people do. How I lead them, with integrity and some compassion, that part is mine.

The market will move without consulting me. Whether my actions match my values, mine.

Uncertainty is a permanent guest. Meeting it with curiosity instead of fear, also mine.

For years I assumed letting go would feel like quitting. When I finally did it, it felt like setting down a pack I’d carried so long I’d stopped noticing the weight. Letting go turned out to be its own kind of mastery: knowing exactly where my lane ends. Freedom starts right at that line.

If you feel a tension reading this, some part of you arguing that your situation really does require the grip, I get it. I argued too.

But that tension might be the signal. Something in you already knows what it’s time to put down.

With love, Andy

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