How did I find my self 25 feet above the ground, in a fall rainstorm, ten feet away from the backyard power lines, putting shingles on my kids playhouse? I mean, building a two-story playhouse was challenging enough in good weather, but I’d put off finishing it long enough.

It wasn’t raining when I started, but I was determined to keep going. I got it done, even as the rain turned into sleet, then snow, before it got too dark, and so I counted it a success. Even though I couldn’t feel my hands. Looking back now, I might do things differently.

I’ve often had trouble stopping once (if) I’ve started something. You might call it hyper-focus, loyalty, or obsessiveness. Military training reinforced that tendency – driving to ‘complete the mission at all costs’.

On the other hand, I never wanted to play the trumpet as a kid, but I actually got pretty good at it. I would have rather played guitar, but my parents didn’t think that was a ‘real’ instrument. So trumpet it was. Being good at something as a kid gives you the confidence to try to be good at other things. So that worked out.¹

To be clear, the drive to complete things, to stick with ‘the mission’, is something that’s helped me be successful in many parts of my life. But not always. Sometimes it led me to push for a specific outcome or result that just wasn’t going to happen, and in fact led to more bad things happening or relationships going south.

https://practicalmanagers.com/2026/02/28/why-marriage-is-hard/#marriagefrustration

Which leads me to my reading of Epictetus’ Enchiridion,² the most compact of the manuscripts on my Stoics Reading List.

https://practicalmanagers.com/2026/02/21/stoics-read-along/

I pulled three core ideas out of this reading:

Separate what you control from what you can’t

This one took me a while to figure out, but mostly as a function of my stubbornness. You can’t drive to completion if you’re trying to control things that aren’t yours to control. So I figured out what outcomes I could affect, and moved on from there. Not always quickly (still being stubborn), but eventually I get there.

It also meant that I had little tolerance for processes or procedures that were ineffective and didn’t make sense. So I went off script, or re-wrote them…which, it turns out, wasn’t always appreciated.

I still don’t like ‘failure’, but I’ve learned to re-frame it as What am I learning from this experience?

Judgments can create more disturbance than the events

Emotions are information, not reality.

Or as Shakespeare put it as: There is nothing good nor bad but thinking makes it so. Which is objectively not true (bombing schools: bad). But it does speak to our ability to choose our own mindset. Which is, interestingly, under our control.

I feel I’m still integrating this idea into my habits and life. That gap between reaction and action, between feeling and thought, between stimulus and response, is where most personal change and leadership takes place.

The ability to choose how we act, and what our attitude is going to be, is fundamental to being who we are. It is the space in which we get to decide who we want to be, and how we want to show up in the world.

Align your will to reality, not reality to your will.

There are many ways we have to be honest with ourselves and others in order to have integrity. Seeing things as they are, not how we’d like them to be, is one of them. Not even kings or presidents can get away with bending reality forever.

This one is the hardest for me, and I’m still working on it. It’s mostly about being attached to a particular results, or doing things a particular way (usually my way), which won’t actually get me to where I think I want to go.

Epictetus advocates to always guard one’s character and reputation. Act rightly, but let the outcome be what’s it’s going to be. If we sacrifice our integrity to force a particular result, then we have nothing.

I would argue that even our ‘reputation’ isn’t under our control, but our own disciplined action is.

Regardless, the decision of when to keep going and when to stop is often one of the hardest to make personally, in family, in business, and in leadership. When I reflect on who I am and how I want to be in the world, that makes the decision a little less dramatic.

When do we double down, and when do we walk away? Well, the decision might go back to Epictetus’ first point: is there still a point of leverage we can affect, or not? When the constraints are out of our control, when we let go of the sunk-costs and the effort to complete is still worth it, then we can keep going.

If not, we should stop.

https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/the-sunk-cost-fallacy

As I reflect over my life and my behaviour, I often didn’t even ask the question. When is it time to change, let go, stop, to fail, to admit defeat? How is this thing I’m obsessed with, forcing to be the way I want it to be, affecting me, my family, my co-workers, my life?

Sometimes it isn’t mine to fix.

Letting go of that still feels like a failure sometimes, but at least I’m asking the question more often. Not whether to act, but when to stop acting, and that’s success.

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1. I’ve recently started playing again, after a lifetime of trying different things like playing in a bagpipe band, hand-drumming, didgeridoo, and self-taught guitar. If anyone knows a local om-pa-pa band that needs a trumpet player, please let me know? ↩︎
2. Or literally ‘in the hand’. To learn more about Epictetus, Wikipedia is a good starting place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epictetus. ↩︎