Your competitor just launched a product that threatens your market position. A key employee gave notice. Your largest client is restructuring and may cut spending. The economy shows signs of slowing. Interest rates are unpredictable. AI is disrupting your industry.
You can spend your energy worrying about these external factors, or you can redirect that energy toward the elements within your control. The difference between entrepreneurs who thrive through uncertainty and those who spiral is where they focus their attention.
Coming up, we’ll explore why controlling the controllables is one of the most powerful frameworks for decision-making, how elite performers apply this principle under extreme pressure, and the specific process for identifying what deserves your focus versus what deserves your acceptance.
What 60 Hours of Tennis Teaches About Control
James Cluskey played professional tennis at the highest levels before breaking the Guinness World Record for the longest doubles tennis match at 60 hours continuous play. Both experiences taught him the same fundamental lesson about performance under pressure.
In tennis, there’s a lot of things that are out of our control. I can’t control if it’s really windy. I can’t control if there are bad line calls. There’s a lot of things that are out of my control. So I think focusing on the controllables gives you confidence to take care of what you can control, and then being okay that things are going to happen, things are going to go wrong.
This principle applies directly to business leadership. The entrepreneur who fixates on external factors they cannot influence wastes mental energy that could be directed toward factors they can influence. Meanwhile, the entrepreneur who clearly distinguishes between controllable and uncontrollable factors makes faster decisions, experiences less anxiety, and achieves better outcomes.
The framework sounds simple. In practice, most business owners blur the lines between what they can control and what they cannot. They spend hours discussing market conditions they cannot change while neglecting operational details they could improve immediately. They catastrophize about potential competitor moves while ignoring gaps in their own execution.
Why We Focus on the Wrong Things
Human psychology naturally gravitates toward worrying about external threats. Our brains evolved to scan for danger, and uncertainty triggers anxiety. When you hear about a competitor’s new product, your mind immediately starts gaming out worst-case scenarios. When economic indicators shift, you imagine how they might impact your business.
This tendency served our ancestors well when threats were immediate and physical. It serves modern business owners poorly because most of the things we worry about are either beyond our control or much less consequential than we imagine.
The trap works like this. You encounter an external factor that creates uncertainty. Your mind starts analyzing it, searching for ways to influence or predict it. This analysis feels productive because you’re thinking hard about your business. But if the factor is truly outside your control, the analysis generates anxiety without producing actionable insight.
Meanwhile, controllable factors get neglected. Your sales process has inefficiencies you could fix. Your team lacks clarity on priorities. Your customer onboarding creates unnecessary friction. These issues are within your control and would meaningfully impact results. But they require difficult work rather than abstract strategizing, so they stay on the back burner.
The entrepreneur who masters controlling the controllables develops a different relationship with uncertainty. They acknowledge external factors, assess how those factors might affect their business, and then ask a single question: given these conditions, what should I do differently?
The Three Categories of Business Factors
Every factor affecting your business falls into one of three categories. Understanding which category something belongs to determines how you should respond.
Category 1: Direct Control.
These are factors you can change through your own decisions and actions. You have unilateral authority to change these factors, including:
- Your pricing strategy
- Your product features and offerings
- Who you hire and how you build your team
- How you structure your operations
- Your marketing messages and positioning
- How you spend your time and prioritize work
Most entrepreneurs dramatically underestimate how much falls into this category. They focus on external constraints while ignoring the dozens of levers they could pull immediately to improve results.
Category 2: Indirect Influence.
These are factors you cannot control directly but can influence through persuasion, negotiation, or incentives, including:
- Whether a prospect becomes a customer
- Whether an employee stays or leaves
- Whether a partner agrees to new terms
- Whether investors fund your business
You cannot force these outcomes, but you can meaningfully impact the probability through how you show up, what you offer, and how you communicate. Many entrepreneurs waste energy treating these factors as either fully controllable (leading to frustration when others choose differently) or completely uncontrollable (leading to learned helplessness).
Category 3: No Control.
These are external factors you can neither control nor meaningfully influence, including:
- Market conditions and economic trends
- Competitor actions and strategies
- Regulatory changes and compliance requirements
- Technological disruptions in your industry
- Macroeconomic factors like interest rates
You can observe them, you can prepare for their potential impact, but you cannot change them through any action you take.
The key insight is that Category 3 factors should consume the smallest portion of your mental energy, while Category 1 factors should consume the largest. Most entrepreneurs invert this ratio. They obsess over things they cannot control while neglecting things they can.
How to Apply the Framework Daily
Implementing this framework requires deliberate practice. Your default mode will be to worry about external factors and defer action on internal ones. Rewiring that tendency takes conscious effort.
Start each day by listing the top three things you need to move forward. For each item, identify whether it falls into Category 1, 2, or 3. If you find yourself listing mostly Category 3 items, you’re focusing on the wrong things.
When you encounter a problem or challenge, pause before diving into analysis. Ask yourself which category it belongs to. If it’s Category 3, acknowledge it and move on. If it’s Category 2, identify your best opportunity to influence it. If it’s Category 1, determine your next action and execute.
This discipline prevents you from spiraling into unproductive analysis. James Cluskey described how this played out during his world record attempt:
For me in terms of mindset and performance, I think consistency is key. Showing up and doing your best and controlling what you can control sets you up to be successful.
Consistency in execution beats brilliance in strategy. The entrepreneur who consistently executes on controllable factors outperforms the entrepreneur who crafts perfect strategies for managing uncontrollable factors.
During team meetings, notice how much time gets spent discussing external factors versus internal execution. If most of the meeting focuses on what competitors are doing, what the market conditions look like, or what might happen in the future, redirect the conversation toward what your team will do differently based on that information.
The discussion about competitors should last five minutes and produce specific actions. The discussion about your execution should last fifty minutes and produce accountability for improvement.
When External Factors Demand Response
Acknowledging that you cannot control external factors does not mean ignoring them. It means relating to them differently.
When a significant external change occurs, a competitor launches a threatening product, a major client churns, or market conditions shift, you go through a three-step process.
- Assess the impact. How does this external factor change the landscape you’re operating in? What new constraints or opportunities does it create? This assessment should be thorough but time-bound. Spend enough time to understand the implications, then move on.
- Identify your controllable responses. Given this new reality, what can you change about your approach? What should you do differently? This is where your focus should concentrate. External factors matter only to the extent that they inform your controllable actions.
- Execute your response. Stop analyzing and start doing. The entrepreneur who spends three weeks discussing how to respond to a competitor has already lost time that could have been spent adapting.
This process prevents two common failure modes. The first is ignoring external factors entirely and assuming that what worked before will continue working. The second is obsessing over external factors without translating that attention into different actions.
The external factor is just information. Your response to that information is what determines outcomes. One entrepreneur hears about a competitor’s new product and spirals into anxiety. Another hears the same news, assesses their differentiation, identifies ways to serve customers the competitor will miss, and executes a revised strategy. Same external factor. Completely different outcomes based on where they focused their energy.
Building Confidence Through Control
One of the most underappreciated benefits of focusing on controllables is the psychological impact on confidence and decision-making speed.
When you direct your energy toward factors you can control, you get immediate feedback. You change your pricing and observe how customers respond. You adjust your sales process and see conversion rates improve. You clarify team priorities and notice execution gets tighter. This feedback loop builds confidence because you see direct connections between your actions and results.
The entrepreneur who focuses primarily on external factors never gets this feedback. They spend months worrying about market conditions, but they cannot change market conditions through their actions. The lack of agency erodes confidence over time. They start feeling like victims of circumstances rather than architects of outcomes.
James Cluskey emphasized this connection between control and confidence:
Focusing on the controllables gives you confidence to take care of what you can control, and then being okay that things are going to happen, things are going to go wrong.
This mindset creates resilience. Things will go wrong. Competitors will make moves. Market conditions will shift. Customers will churn. None of this is surprising to the entrepreneur who has accepted that external factors exist and focused their energy on building strong internal capabilities.
Your confidence comes from knowing that regardless of what happens externally, you have the capability to adapt, execute, and compete. That confidence comes only from repeatedly exercising control over the factors within your domain.
The Distinction Between Planning and Worrying
Strategic planning requires thinking about external factors. You analyze market trends, study competitors, and consider scenarios. This is appropriate and necessary. The question is what you do with that analysis.
Planning converts external analysis into controllable actions. Worrying loops on external analysis without producing actions. The distinction is clear in practice but often blurred in the moment.
You can spend an hour in a strategic planning session discussing how AI might disrupt your industry. If that hour produces three specific initiatives you will launch to position your business for that disruption, you were planning. If that hour produces anxiety about uncertainty without generating specific next steps, you were worrying.
The test is simple. After any discussion about external factors, ask what you’re going to do differently as a result of that discussion. If the answer is nothing, the discussion was unproductive. If the answer is specific controllable actions, the discussion was valuable.
Many entrepreneurs confuse motion with progress. They attend conferences about industry trends, read analysis about market conditions, and have lengthy conversations about competitive positioning. All of this can be valuable if it informs controllable actions. Most of the time, it substitutes for the harder work of execution.
What Changes When You Change Your Focus
Entrepreneurs who fully internalize this framework report several consistent shifts in how they operate:
- Team culture shifts from excuse-making to problem-solving. When leadership models focus on controllables, teams adopt the same mindset. Meetings become more action-oriented. People stop explaining why external factors prevented success and start identifying what they could have done differently.
- Decision-making speeds up dramatically. When you stop waiting for external conditions to become favorable and start acting based on current conditions, you eliminate weeks of delay. You make decisions with the information available and adjust based on results rather than trying to achieve certainty before acting.
- Anxiety decreases while agency increases. You stop feeling at the mercy of external forces and start feeling empowered to shape outcomes. This shift is psychological, but it affects real behaviors. The entrepreneur who feels empowered takes more initiative, experiments more freely, and recovers from setbacks faster.
- Execution improves because energy concentrates on fewer priorities. Instead of spreading attention across dozens of external factors you cannot control, you focus intensely on the handful of controllable factors that drive results. This concentration produces better outcomes than diffuse attention.
The Long-Term Compound Effect
Small improvements in controllable factors compound over time into substantial competitive advantages. The entrepreneur who consistently improves their sales process, refines their operations, develops their people, and serves customers better accumulates capabilities that competitors cannot easily replicate.
Meanwhile, the entrepreneur who focuses primarily on external factors accumulates nothing durable. They react to competitors, chase market trends, and constantly pivot based on external signals. They build nothing sustainable because their attention shifts with every external change.
This is why some businesses thrive for decades while others struggle perpetually despite being in the same industry facing the same external conditions. The difference is not luck or circumstances. The difference is where leadership focuses energy and what they choose to control.
James Cluskey made the connection explicit between his tennis career and business:
The way I prepare for a tournament, the way I prepare for a match, my gym, my practice, there’s a lot of things that are in my control. I think you know, for me in terms of that transition in business, controlling the controllables, there’s a lot of things I can control in terms of my daily life.
The daily practice of identifying and executing on controllable factors builds the capability to perform at high levels regardless of external conditions. That capability becomes your durable competitive advantage.
Starting Tomorrow
You do not need to overhaul your entire operation to begin applying this framework. Start with awareness.
For the next week, notice where your attention goes during the day. When you’re thinking about your business, what percentage of that thinking focuses on external factors you cannot control versus internal factors you can? Most entrepreneurs find the ratio is 70-30 or worse toward the uncontrollable.
Once you see the pattern, you can begin shifting it. When you catch yourself worrying about a competitor, redirect to what you can do to serve customers better. When you catch yourself obsessing over market conditions, redirect to what operational improvements you can make regardless of market conditions.
The goal is not to ignore external factors entirely. The goal is to process them quickly, extract actionable insight, and then redirect energy toward controllable responses. This discipline transforms how you lead and how your business performs.
If you want help identifying which controllable factors would produce the highest return in your business and building the discipline to execute on them consistently, consider booking a complimentary strategy session with one of our business coaches. We’ll help you audit where your energy currently goes, clarify your highest-leverage controllable factors, and create a framework for making faster decisions with greater confidence.
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