Control is a hell of a drug.
One of my old business partners had a line he loved: "If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there." He used it rather effectively to scare anxious clients into buying brand strategies. It was meant as a warning. I always heard it as perversely optimistic. Maybe not knowing is exactly where the magic happens. Maybe the road reveals itself when you stop trying to pave it.
But control is seductive. It offers the feeling of safety, of certainty, of competence — of mattering. So we micromanage our calendars. We draft and redraft the reply. We leap into every crisis with an iPhone and a plan, and frequently just the iPhone.
Because doing something feels better than doing nothing. That's the whole scam, right there. Most of the time you're not solving; you're soothing. You're manufacturing the feeling of progress the way a slot machine manufactures the feeling of winning. And then — this is the best part — we name it. We call it drive. We call it leadership. We call it making shit happen and we brag about it.
I ran on that fuel for most of my career, and I want to be honest about how it felt, because from the inside it does not feel like a problem. It feels like being good at your job. The all-nighter feels heroic. The instant reply feels professional. The weekend spent "just getting ahead of a few things" feels responsible. Nobody hands you a pamphlet that says: you are treating anxiety with activity, and the dosage keeps going up.
Here's what control actually promises, if you read the fine print. It promises that if you touch everything, nothing will break. That if you respond to everything, nothing will be missed. That if you're involved in everything, you'll always be necessary. And here's what it delivers: a life spent proofreading other people's work at midnight, a nervous system that treats a Slack notification like a smoke alarm, and the creeping suspicion that you haven't had an original thought since sometime last spring. Hiding behind busyness, tactical as an excuse to not be able to think strategically.
But there is a difference between anxious motion and purposeful stillness. Real meaning lives in the space between them: in the discipline to resist the premature fix, to hold off on the answer, to do nothing until the right something emerges.
And by the way? It always does.
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I should warn you about something before we go further, because nobody warned me. When you first try to loosen the grip — actually try, not think-about-trying — it feels terrible. Not peaceful. Terrible. You leave the email unanswered for a day and your skin itches. You skip the meeting and spend the whole hour imagining the decisions being made wrongly without you. You let your team run the presentation and your leg bounces under the table like it's auditioning for Riverdance.
That's withdrawal. It's the drug leaving your system, and like all withdrawal, it feels like proof that you need the drug. You will interpret the discomfort as evidence that inaction is wrong — that's the addiction talking, and it's very persuasive, because it's been right there with you for every promotion. Sit through it anyway. The itch is not information. It's just the itch.
That idea — that restraint could be a strategy rather than a failure — ran against everything I'd been taught and everything I'd ever been rewarded for. Which is exactly why I didn't trust it at first. I'd spent my whole career being paid, praised, and promoted for gripping tighter. Nobody ever pulled me aside after a big win and said, "Great job not doing that thing." Restraint doesn't show up in a performance review. It doesn't demo well.
Because the culture I came up in doesn't just tolerate constant motion. It celebrates it. It promotes it. It gives it a parking spot. Somewhere along the line, "busy" stopped being a condition and became a credential.