Russ Lowry presents a short motivational YouTube talk (“Control The Controllable’s”) urging listeners—especially early-career students and professionals—to focus on things they can control (their effort, attitude, skill-building, mentorship choices, job moves) and to stop obsessing over uncontrollable externalities (organizational politics, HR decisions, referees, distant politics). He contrasts learning from good and bad managers, emphasizes personal responsibility, resilience, and practical strategy-finding (learn the rules, then win within them), and encourages redirecting energy to family, work, and self-improvement.
Chapters
Today let's talk about a philosophy that will either help you succeed in life and control what's going on or it'll chew you up, spit you out and you'll spend the rest of your life just wallowing in self pity, which is something we don't do. So let's call today's discussion control the controllables. Especially as we hang out with you guys. As you're growing in your professions and your work and school, you get caught up in the same thing everybody else does. Just whining and bitching and complaining about things you can't control. Things that are completely out of control. How your education system is, you know, maybe politics a little bit. Generally I'm focusing on things in your career you're seeing as you get ready to start your career or you're starting your career and you don't like how the administration does things, you don't like how your boss does things. Control the controllables. So you can't always control how an organization acts. You can go work somewhere else. That's how you can control that. If you're in that system trying to learn to make yourself better, you can't let that eat you up. You have to focus on what you can do so you can be the best employee, you can be the best person. You can help your other co workers rise above what they're at now. Be a shining light. But you can't sit and waller and bitch about all the little things. You have no control over HR decisions. Maybe sports, maybe you're coaching and the refs are horrible. The refs are going to be bad and they're going to be good. But you can't control that. All you can do is control how well you play a game, how well you play life and control that. Otherwise it will eat you up, spit you out. You'll be like these people that just wallers self pity in their mom's basement bitching about how the world owes them this and they haven't. They never get a break. Well there's a reason they never get a break again as you'll see a philosophy in all my speeches. They make poor decisions and they're fucking lazy. People just want everything spoon fed to them and that's not how life works. Sometimes you get lucky and you get a good mentor. You get someone that helps you out. Riley's coach Cobble at Oklahoma Christian has really been a good mentor from what I've seen on the other side of the coin there, he helped him get his first job, was A great guy, well respected. Occasionally you're going to stumble across those guys and other times you're going to have someone in your life that is a great example of what you never want to be. And that's one thing I focused on when I was a boss and started my own companies. I like that term, was looking at the bad managers I had and the good managers and seeing what kind I wanted to be. But I didn't just focus on bad managers. And believe me, I worked for a Fortune Top 25 company in the world with Big Reynolds Tobacco, and I had some pretty shitty managers that were Peter principled up the ladder that, you know, shouldn't have been even working around people, much less managing lots of people. But they were in the, you know, some kind of system. Someone knew them somehow they crawled that way up the ladder and they were horrible people. And I learned from them. And then I had some good bosses. The same thing that gave me a chance to get into sales, and I took it and I ran with it and led the region in sales from my first year out there. So control what you could control. Stop bitching about shit you don't control. It will just eat you up. It makes you a bitter person. You can get mad about it, but get mad and then get glad in the same second. Just let it go and think, how can I work around this? And that is one of my skills is finding out rules, how to play the game, and then figuring out how to win the game based on those rules. And all you guys have pretty much played for me besides Sydney just a little bit. And you know what I'm talking about. You know, there's always strategies to win outside just complaining about stuff. So think about that. Control what you can control. Let it go if you can't. Politics is a good one, too. Your mom lets that shit eat her up because she just listens to Politics24. 7. You can go vote. You can be active. But complaining about what someone's doing five states over isn't really helping your mental health. It's just detrimental to you. So focus on your family, focus on your spouse, focus on your business, and control what you can control.
