There are probably less crude ways to phrase this than the title, but the idea is simple: trick yourself into expanding your horizons and stop wasting time blaming things that seem out of your control.
Let's take an example. I'm leading a team, and a few members aren’t pulling their weight. Naturally, I'd say something like "they're unmotivated” or “I can’t make people care.” That's lazy. These days, I’d pause and ask – what if I’m missing a skill that could make them more motivated? What if I could be 10% better at communicating expectations or structuring work in a way that fits how they operate best? Am I actually giving 100% from my side before deciding it’s just “their fault”?
That shift – from “this isn’t my fault” to “this might still be in my control” – changes everything. It’s not about taking the blame; it’s about taking back control. Once I started assuming that every bad outcome had some lever I could’ve pulled differently, things stopped feeling random. I’ve been doing this explicitly for about a year now, and it’s changed how I approach hard problems. It forces me to zoom out, look for leverage, and stop hiding behind “out of my hands.”
College has been a good sandbox for this.
Last fall, I TA'd a proof-based algorithms course. Every Sunday, I’d spend 5–6 painful hours grading and reading questionable proofs and wondering why I’d signed up for it. But once I reframed it as a skill issue – “what if I could get faster at spotting common mistakes?” “What if I could write clearer feedback?” – it got less miserable. By week ~8, I was noticeably quicker and more consistent. Same task, same students, different framing.
Same thing with assignments that triggered the usual “when am I ever gonna use this in the real world” reaction. It’s such an easy out. But if I were truly good – if I actually deeply understood the underlying ideas – I’d be able to make the connection myself. That question usually meant I didn’t know the material well enough to see where it could apply. So instead of rolling my eyes at the assignment, I started taking it as a challenge: could I get good enough at this thing that its relevance became obvious?
I find this idea pretty ubiquitous – I’ve seen versions of it all over the place:
- Internal vs external locus of control: deciding whether the world acts on you or you act on the world.
- Making your own luck: most “lucky breaks” are just people who built the skills and surface area for luck to hit them. This argument comes in a lot of flavors: athletes don’t get scouted because they’re “lucky”; they get scouted because they’ve elevated their game to the point of being unignorable.
- Antifragility: using setbacks as data to strengthen the system instead of proof that the system’s broken.
- Systems thinking: zooming out far enough to notice which knobs you can actually turn.
Different names, somewhat the same core principle: assume it’s a skill issue until proven otherwise, not because it always is, but because it’s a better default.