Stop Spending Your Week on Things You Can't Control

About two thousand years ago, the most powerful man in the world sat in a tent on the edge of a war zone and wrote himself a note.

Marcus Aurelius was running the Roman Empire. Plague, wars on two fronts, a treasury under pressure, and a family life that would break most of us. And in his private journal, the book we now call Meditations, he kept coming back to one idea.

You have power over your mind. Not over outside events. Get clear on that, and you’ll find your strength.

He didn’t invent it. His teachers, the Stoics, had been saying it for centuries. Some things are within our control. Most things aren’t. Wisdom is knowing which is which, and spending your energy accordingly.

I’ve been in hospitality for more than thirty years, and I’ve coached owners for over twenty of them. I can tell you that most new operators I meet are living the exact opposite of that advice.

The worry list:

Here’s what fills a typical owner’s head on a Monday.

The weather. The landlord. The new place opening across the road. What they’re charging. The one-star review from the table that was never going to be happy. Interest rates. The council. The supplier who’s put prices up again. The staffing shortage across the country.

Sound familiar?

Every one of those is real. Not one of them is in your control. And yet they eat up the week. They’re what keep owners awake at 2am and what they talk about at the pass on a Friday night.

Meanwhile, the list of things you actually can control sits there untouched.

The other list:

Your numbers. Do you know your COGS, your wage percentage (V Budget), and your net operating profit this month? Not last quarter.

Your systems. If you took two weeks off tomorrow, would the business run? Would your team know what “great” looks like without you standing there?

Your standards. What gets measured, what gets corrected, and what gets let slide.

How you lead. Whether you and your managers give team members a one-on-one every fortnight, or a rushed chat in the coolroom when something’s already gone wrong.

How you show up. Rested and thinking, or fried and reacting.

That’s it. That’s a list. It’s short, and it’s the only one that moves your profit and gives you your life back.

Why we get it backwards:

I think worrying about the uncontrollables feels like work. It feels responsible. You’re “across everything”. But it’s the business equivalent of pacing the kitchen. Lots of movement, nothing changes.

I’ve seen many new clients feel this way when I’ve started with them. They could tell me what every competitor in town was doing but couldn’t tell me last week’s wage percentage V budget. Many owners work sixty-hour weeks and call it passion. The Stoics would have called it something else.

Marcus had a good line on this. When something external gets under your skin, the pain isn’t from the thing itself. It’s from your judgement of it. And that judgement you can change any time you like.

The review isn’t the challenge. Your reaction to it, and whether it stops you from doing the one thing on the controllable list today, is the challenge.

A simple exercise:

Grab a piece of paper. Two columns.

Left side: everything that’s bothering you about the business right now. Be honest. Get it all out.

Right side: next to each one, write either “mine” or “not mine”.

Now cross out every “not mine”. Yes, all of them. You can’t change them, so stop investing energy there.

What’s left is your job. Pick the top three. Put them in your diary this week, with real time attached.

That’s the whole thing. Not complicated, but it takes a decision, and you have to make it more than once.

Work smarter, not harder”

A hospitality business is one of the most complex models there is; therefore, you can’t afford to waste a single hour on stuff you can’t move.

Marcus ran an empire on that principle. You can run a hospo business on it.

Control what’s yours. Let the rest go. Then go and be great at business.