What life lesson did you learn too late?
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RISE & INSPIRE · DAILY PROMPTS · 10 NOVEMBER 2026
For years I treated outcomes as my responsibility and my reactions as something that simply happened to me. Life taught me the reverse, and showed me where faith begins.
John Britto Kurusumuthu · Founder, Rise & Inspire · About 8 minutes’ reading
WordPress Daily Writing Prompt: What life lesson did you learn too late?
I had heard this lesson many times before I learned it. Some truths arrive early as information and late as understanding, and the distance between the two can take decades to cross.
Put simply, the lesson about control and faith that I learned too late is this: I cannot control everything, and I do not need all the answers to live by faith. What took me years to see was not the truth of it, but how completely I had been living against it.
Last month, answering a related prompt, I wrote that hindsight is a teacher, not a judge. Today’s question asks for something more personal: not what I would tell a younger self, but what I myself understood only late.
THE SHORT ANSWER
I had control the wrong way round. I spent years trying to manage outcomes that were never mine, and too little effort governing the responses that always were. Faith begins where control ends: it means doing my part fully and trusting God with the rest, even when no explanation is given.
1. I had the map upside down
For much of my life, I treated outcomes as my responsibility and my reactions as something that simply happened to me. I lost sleep over decisions that rested with other people: a promotion, a result, an opinion someone else would form. Yet when someone spoke harshly to me, I would say, “He made me angry,” as though my response were his to command.
Life taught me the reverse. Outcomes are seldom entirely mine. My choices, my attitude, my words and my response to difficulty always are. I had been guarding territory I did not own and neglecting the one place where I truly governed.
Psychologists have a name for the first half of this mistake. The psychologist Ellen Langer named it the illusion of control: the tendency to expect more influence over events than the facts allow.1 It is a flattering illusion. If everything depends on me, then every good outcome is my achievement and every bad one my failure. Both conclusions are usually wrong.
2. Worry is not the same as responsibility
I assumed that a person who cared would worry, and that a person who stopped worrying had stopped caring. Worry felt like conscientiousness. In practice, it mostly rehearsed futures that never arrived.
Research bears this out. In a study published in Behavior Therapy in 2020, Lucas LaFreniere and Michelle Newman of Penn State asked twenty-nine people with generalised anxiety disorder to record their worries over ten days and then track what actually happened. About 91 per cent of the worries did not come true, and the most common result for an individual participant was that none of them did.2 The sample was small and clinical, so it should not be stretched too far, but its direction matches what most of us discover by middle age.
Epictetus understood this without a study. Born a slave at Hierapolis in Phrygia and lame for much of his life, he controlled almost nothing about his circumstances. Yet the handbook his student Arrian compiled from his teaching opens with one plain sentence: “Some things are in our control and others not.”3 If a man with so little control could build a philosophy on that distinction, I had little excuse for confusing the two.
Today, when a worry arrives, I ask one question before any other: is this mine to act on? If it is, I act. If it is not, I pray, and I set it down. I have described the small, practical ways I set worries down elsewhere; the point here is simpler. Worry is not a duty I owe to the people I love.
3. Letting go of control is not giving up
This is where the lesson is most easily misread, and where I misread it longest. Giving up abandons the effort. Letting go releases my claim on the result.
The Bhagavad Gita draws the line with precision. Krishna tells Arjuna that his right is to the work alone, never to its fruits, and in the same verse warns him against clinging to inaction.4 Acceptance, then, is not permission to stop trying. It is permission to stop pretending that the harvest is mine to decree.
Nor is acceptance a reason to tolerate what I can and should change: an unfair arrangement, a neglected duty, a habit that harms. Letting go applies to outcomes, not to responsibilities. So I still plan, still work hard and still hope, and I try to commit the work to God rather than carry it alone. I simply no longer measure my worth by results that were never wholly in my hands.
4. Faith does not wait for explanations
Some questions stay unanswered. Why do sincere prayers sometimes seem unheard? Why do careful plans collapse? I once thought faith meant having answers to such questions. I now see it as the willingness to trust God when answers are unavailable.
“Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.”
Proverbs 3:5 (NIV)5
Notice what the verse does not say. It does not ask me to discard my understanding. It asks me not to lean on it, not to rest my whole weight on it as though it could bear everything. Elsewhere the same book admits that we cannot fully understand our own ways (Proverbs 20:24). Faith is what lets us keep walking anyway.
Faith, in this sense, is not passive resignation. It is doing my part sincerely, praying for guidance, and leaving the outcome in God’s hands. It also means making peace with the words “I don’t know”, which I now count as a mark of honesty rather than a failure of faith.
5. What I would tell my younger self
I once wrote that I would hand my younger self a compass rather than a map and say as little as possible. On this lesson I would make an exception and speak plainly:
Do your best, but do not assume that everything depends on you. Plan carefully, but remain flexible. Work sincerely, but do not measure your worth only by results. Care for people, but do not try to run their lives. And when circumstances move beyond your understanding, do not let uncertainty take away your faith.
The face that did not change
In the Kamba Ramayanam, the classical Tamil retelling of the Ramayana, the poet Kamban describes Sita, held captive in Lanka, remembering her husband’s face.6 When Rama was told he would be crowned, and when he was told to give up the kingdom and leave for the forest, his face looked the same: like a red lotus in a painting. A living lotus closes at dusk. A painted one stays open whatever the hour.
That is the composure I have come to admire. Not a life spared from reversal, but a spirit that reversal cannot fold shut. It does not come from controlling events. It comes from no longer staking one’s peace on them.
Too late, or just in time?
Did I learn this lesson too late? Late, certainly. But a lesson comes too late only if it changes nothing. Learned today, it still governs every day that remains.
Life is not always about finding answers. Sometimes it is about learning to live peacefully with unanswered questions. I cannot control every chapter of my life, nor understand every turn in its story. But I can live responsibly, respond with patience, treat others with kindness, and trust God with the pages I have not yet read.
A question for you, dear reader
Which lesson about control, acceptance or trust reached you later than you wish it had, and what changed once it arrived?
Share your thoughts in the comments. Your experience may offer someone else the wisdom they need today.
Frequently asked questions
What does it mean to let go without giving up?
Giving up abandons the effort; letting go releases your claim on the outcome. You keep doing your part fully, but you stop treating results that depend on other people, on timing or on chance as your personal responsibility.
What is the dichotomy of control?
It is the Stoic principle, set out at the start of Epictetus’s Handbook, that separates what is within our power (our judgements, intentions and actions) from what is not (other people, reputation, circumstances and outcomes). The Stoics held that peace comes from attending to the first and accepting the second.
Do most of our worries actually come true?
The evidence suggests not. In a small 2020 study of people with generalised anxiety disorder, about 91 per cent of recorded worries did not come true, and participants who saw more of their worries prove false improved more in treatment.
Does faith require having all the answers?
No. Proverbs 3:5 asks the believer to trust God rather than lean on their own understanding. Faith in this sense is not certainty; it is trust that continues when explanations are unavailable, alongside sincere effort and prayer.
Notes and references
- Ellen J. Langer, “The Illusion of Control,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32, no. 2 (1975): 311–328, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.32.2.311. The general tendency to overestimate one’s influence over events is cited here. One well-known demonstration, that simply choosing a lottery ticket raises confidence of winning, was not supported by seventeen later experiments: Joowon Klusowski, Deborah A. Small and Joseph P. Simmons, “Does Choice Cause an Illusion of Control?” Psychological Science 32, no. 2 (2021): 159–172, https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620958009. That experiment is therefore not relied on.
- Lucas S. LaFreniere and Michelle G. Newman, “Exposing Worry’s Deceit: Percentage of Untrue Worries in Generalized Anxiety Disorder Treatment,” Behavior Therapy 51, no. 3 (2020): 413–423, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beth.2019.07.003. Participants recorded worries for ten days and tracked their outcomes over thirty days.
- Epictetus, Enchiridion 1, trans. Elizabeth Carter (1758), MIT Internet Classics Archive. Epictetus (c. 50–c. 135 CE) was born a slave at Hierapolis in Phrygia, in present-day Türkiye. He wrote nothing himself; his teaching was recorded by his student Arrian in the Discourses and the Enchiridion (Handbook), both of which open with the distinction between what is and is not in our power.
- Bhagavad Gita 2.47, paraphrased. The Gita is a 700-verse dialogue between Krishna and the warrior prince Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, and forms part of the Mahabharata. Sanskrit text and translation: shlokam.org.
- Proverbs 3:5, New International Version. Scripture quotation taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version, copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. Proverbs 20:24 is cited by reference only.
- Kamban, Kamba Ramayanam (Iramavataram), Sundara Kandam, Kaatchi Padalam. Kamban, usually dated to the twelfth century, wrote the best-known Tamil version of the Ramayana. In this verse Sita, in the Ashoka grove, recalls that Rama’s face was like a red lotus in a painting both when he was told to take the throne and when he was told to renounce it: ‘மெய்த் திருப்பதம் மேவு’ என்ற போதினும், ‘இத் திருத் துறந்து ஏகு’ என்ற போதினும், சித்திரத்தின் அலர்ந்த செந்தாமரை ஒத்திருக்கும் முகத்தினை உன்னுவாள். Verse numbers differ between editions; the English rendering here is a paraphrase. Tamil text as reproduced by the Tamil Virtual Academy.
Strive to Elevate in Life.
John Britto Kurusumuthu
Rise & Inspire · riseandinspire.co.in
In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt, 10 November 2026: What life lesson did you learn too late?
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