You Can't Possibly Care Enough About Everything
Some of you are going to think I'm heartless when you read this, and that's okay. I know I'm not, and I'll frequently get knee jerk feedback from people who just want to disagree about everything and defend their tribe. But I hope you'll at least give this a fair hearing.
This is prompted after spending a week in Tuscany doing a 2 Bobs event, and trying to stay away from news and social media. And so it’s a little bit less about work and more about life.
We lived happier and less conflicted lives when news traveled slow...or didn't reach us at all. Children could be getting slaughtered in some needless war across an ocean, and we didn't know about it. That didn't make it any less tragic, but it also didn't consume us, far away, powerless to do anything about it anyway.
Now, within seconds, we may hear about Fresh Tragedy No. 483 of the Year of our Lord 2026 and get all up in arms, tense, pissed off, enraged, ready to chastise anyone who doesn’t care about the same things, to the same degree, that we do.
As a human, your evolutionary tendencies instinctively have you fixate on any perceived danger. Your heart races. Your eyes focus on it, to the detriment of everything else in your normal field of view. Think of an accident in front of you that needs to be avoided. All of a sudden your focus narrows, you stare at the danger, and you lose what we call the “wide view” in racing.
If you want to live your life reacting to every wrong that happens in the world—even the ones that you can do nothing about—you're not going to live a productive life, though you will live an angry, reactionary one. Your enraged attention will jump from one catastrophe to another, and soon you’ll want all your friends to be equally enraged.
And nothing happens. Except exhaustion.
We are not capable of caring deeply about every wrong that happens in the world. Stay focused on who you are and what you can control, confidently shaping your own world and letting the rest go.
The first undersea cables weren’t reliable until 1866, which created near instantaneous news. A year before that, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and it took 12 days to reach Ireland by ship, and then the rest of Europe. He was dead and there was nothing they could do about it, anyway. Nowadays, when something like that happens, your watch vibrates and tells you about the latest thing…that you can do nothing about. Concentrate on the things you can meaningfully impact. There are plenty of those things to go around. This applies to your business, too.
