Hold It Lightly

Don’t buy the false choice between obsessing and giving up

Not long ago, I was chatting with a friend and fellow student of mindfulness meditation about a goal I was pursuing where I felt I was constantly coming up short.

There was a specific set of expectations, clear metrics for success, and I was clearly far from satisfying them with anything approaching perfection. In my mind, it felt like I should just “take the L” if I couldn’t do it right.

My friend’s three-word response was so simple, but unlocked something all my hand-wringing could not: “Hold it lightly.”

You could interpret this as a nudge to just chill the heck out, which is usually good advice. But in this case, the wisdom embedded in the phrase goes much deeper.

Why all-or-nothing thinking is a trap

So often, we are caught in a false dichotomy, believing we must either force things to be how they should through sheer will, or just not bother. The stakes are so high that compromise seems totally untenable.

This is especially true in high-stakes work like politics and media, where there’s an unspoken assumption that intensity equals commitment. It comes from a good place – strong convictions, high standards and a sense that failure isn’t an option – but it’s almost always counterproductive.

You can think of it like an open tube of toothpaste in the palm of your hand. Loosen your grip entirely, and it’ll fall to the floor. But squeeze with everything you’ve got, and you’ll end up with toothpaste all over your shirt.

Black-and-white thinking is almost always a trap. But when we’re caught up in it, it can be nearly impossible to see that there’s a middle way.

This isn’t a new problem

One of the oldest observations in human psychology — long predating modern therapy or neuroscience — is that clinging causes suffering. By clinging, we mean the rigid insistence that things must be a certain way, and that only one specific outcome is acceptable. We hold on as tight as we can because we convince ourselves we have more power than we actually do to impose the outcome we want.

Buddhist teachers identified this pattern roughly 2,500 years ago, and while you don’t need to adopt any particular worldview to see the truth in it, the observation has held up remarkably well. What they noticed was that the pain usually isn’t in the situation itself, but in the gap between what’s happening and what we’ve decided must happen.

The Stoics were working on a similar problem. Epictetus drew a sharp line between what is and isn’t within our control. We control our intentions, effort and choices. We don’t control outcomes, other people, or the political winds. Epictetus didn’t counsel indifference, but precision, putting your energy where it can actually do something.

The Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, ruling an empire while writing philosophy in his private journal, kept returning to the same idea: Do the work, and care about it, but ultimately release the result.

But isn’t this an excuse for passivity or nihilism?

This objection comes up a lot, so it’s worth addressing head-on. Politics, media and advocacy tend to involve fierce people who commit to principles they care about deeply. Doesn’t loosening your grip just mean fighting less hard?

I don’t think it does. Fierceness and attachment are not the same thing, and you don’t have to choose between them. In fact, you almost can’t be effective if you’re blinded by the impulse to make the perfect the enemy of the good.

It’s worth being precise about where cynicism actually comes from, because conventional wisdom often gets this backwards. The “nothing matters, it’s all broken” collapse that claims so many talented people in this work usually isn’t the result of caring too little. Sometimes, it’s the result of gripping too tightly, and fusing your identity so completely with a specific outcome that when it doesn’t happen, you have nothing left to stand on.

So the next time you feel yourself white-knuckling an outcome, try separating the commitment from the attachment. Ask: What do I actually control here? It’s the loosened grip that actually keeps you in the game.