OBSESS OVER INPUTS, NOT OUTCOMES

Welcome to Nights & Wknds, a weekly newsletter for ambitious professionals building successful careers and lives.

Honest reflections. Practical frameworks. Lessons learned the hard way, written by someone who's been in the trenches and is still learning.

Whether you're learning to deliver under pressure or protect your energy during busy seasons, this newsletter is here to help you play the long game.

This week…

Why obsessing over outcomes was making me miserable, and what changed when I shifted my attention to inputs instead.

Three things: inputs over outcomes, presence over time, judgment compounds quietly.

Let's get to it!

Aaron

I used to stress constantly about outcomes. Big presentations. Hosting events. Career milestones. The internal monologue was always some version of: "if I just do X perfectly, then Y will happen."

That's a tempting story. It's also a recipe for a low-grade anxiety that follows you around. Here's what changed for me, and what I think it means for ambitious people who think their job is to control the outcome.

People who care about their work, strivers and high achievers, tend to deal with this. It could be a meeting, a launch, a pitch, something that really matters to you.

The answer isn't to stop caring. The answer is to redirect the caring toward something you can actually control.

You have way, way, way less control than you think. Whatever amount of control you think you have, take 10% of that. That's closer to reality.

When I shifted from obsessing over results to obsessing over inputs, preparation, effort, energy, the stress dropped dramatically. Not because the stakes got lower. The stakes were the same. I was just no longer trying to control the part of the equation I couldn't.

Sometimes the anxiety still creeps in. "What if my hard work doesn't pay off?" But it's tempered now by a different line. "I did my part. That's all I can control. That's enough."

There's another lesson here that took me longer to figure out, and it's about how we feel time.

I've been learning to slow down after years of optimizing everything. There's a line that stuck with me from Dr. Arthur Brooks.

Some weeks blur and vanish. Others, when I'm fully present even for a moment, stay with me for years. I started paying more attention to those moments, laughing with someone I love, mentoring or teaching, actually being in the day, not racing through it. It's not about making time go slower. It's about making it count. How we feel time is how we live it.

The third piece is one I noticed recently and want to share, because I think it's especially important if you're in your late 20s or early 30s.

I looked back at my calendar recently and noticed something. Most of my meetings weren't about status updates or project asks. They were about input. People came to me for perspective. For feedback. For my take.

It's easy to take for granted how the value of your judgment grows over time. Especially when you're surrounded by people with more experience or more senior titles. But if people consistently come to you for how you think, that's a signal. Trust it.

Here's how those three pieces tie together. Outcomes are out of your hands. Inputs are in them. Time is in your hands too, but only if you treat the moments as the work. And the value you bring to other people's outcomes, your judgment, is the asset that compounds while you're focused on inputs and presence.

If your day-to-day is about preparation, effort, energy, and showing up fully when you're with people who matter, the outcomes will start to take care of themselves. Or they won't, and you'll be alright either way. Both are fine outcomes for someone who knows they’ve done their part.

The hardest part of this isn't intellectual. It's emotional.

Letting go of the outcome means accepting that you might do everything right and still not get the result.

Peace is on the other side of accepting that. Anxiety lives in trying to negotiate around it.

One of my favorite parts of writing this newsletter is hearing how these ideas show up in real life.

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