The Only Question That Matters In An Incident
Epictetus was born a slave. He controlled basically nothing about his external life — not his body, not his freedom, not his circumstances. So he built a whole philosophy out of the one thing nobody could repossess: what he did with his own head. His handbook opens with one distinction he thought was the entire game. Some things are up to us, some aren’t. Mix them up and you suffer. Sort them and you’re free.
I think about this every time a launch goes sideways. The crisis instinct is to spend all your energy on the part you don’t control — the market’s reaction, the competitor’s timing, the customer who’s already furious, the number that already dropped. All real, none of it yours. Epictetus would say you’re grabbing the wrong end of the rope. Price moved, not up to you. User churned, not up to you. What’s up to you is the next decision, the next message, the next fix. Tiny surface, which is exactly why it’s the only one worth touching.
Engineers have a clean technical version of this. Blast radius. You scope the failure, find the boundary of what you can affect, act inside it. What you don’t do, if you’re any good, is run around the parts of the system you have no access to, yelling at them to behave. Same move, applied to a career and a nervous system. Find the edge of your agency. Pour everything inside it. Spend nothing outside it.
The part people skip: this is not an excuse to relax. Opposite. Once you’ve correctly named what’s up to you, you have no excuses left about that part. Can’t blame the market for your shipping speed. Can’t blame the funding climate for whether you wrote the thing well. The doctrine deletes the comfort of external blame and hands you total, uncomfortable responsibility for the small zone that’s actually yours. Most people quietly hate this. They’d rather own a big territory they can complain about than a small one they’re accountable for.
I find it clarifying to the point of being a bit aggressive about it. In any mess I ask one question: which part of this is up to me. Everything else is weather. Weather isn’t good or bad, it just is, and arguing with it is the purest wasted motion there is. Deal fell through, weather. Someone copied the idea, weather. The thing I shipped is slow — that’s mine, and I’d better fix it.
You don’t get to pick your circumstances. A slave understood that better than any of us will. You only ever get to pick your response, and that turns out to be enough to build a life on. Sort the rope. Pull the end that’s yours.
One of a series of essays. I’m Prajjwal Chittori. prajjwalchittori.com.