How to make peace with the things we cannot change.
Written by Maxx Burman | Illustrations by Érik Guarisco
Those of us who pursue ambitious goals have a habit of refusing to accept things as they are. We see problems and imagine solutions, question why things are done a certain way, and believe that with enough creativity, determination, and hard work, we can make something better. That belief is often what allows us to accomplish the impossible.
I've spent most of my career approaching challenges this way. When something isn't working, my instinct is to push harder, find another solution, and keep going until I get the result I'm looking for. That mentality has served me well, but it's also made it incredibly difficult to recognize when something is beyond my control.
For a long time, I associated acceptance with giving up. I thought that making peace with something I didn't like meant I was apathetic about the result. What I've come to understand is that acceptance has nothing to do with how much we care.
We can fight tirelessly to change an outcome, exhaust every option available to us, and still find ourselves facing a reality we don't like. Learning to accept that reality doesn't mean we stop caring about what happened. It means we can stop fighting what we cannot change and direct our efforts toward what we can.
A few years ago, we found ourselves in a situation that forced me to confront the limits of what I could control. We had just completed a 24-month project for a client, and over the course of those two years, we had grown a team of talented artists to deliver the work. As the project came to an end, we didn't have enough new work to sustain the team we had built.
For months, we pursued new clients, explored different kinds of services, and searched for opportunities that could carry the team forward. But despite our efforts, the work wasn't materializing quickly enough, and eventually the financial reality became impossible to ignore.
We were going to have to lay off a significant number of our artists. These were people who had done everything we asked, produced incredible work, and contributed enormously to the company. Now they were facing an uncertain future in a difficult job market, through no fault of their own.
The stress followed me everywhere. I couldn't stop thinking about the people who would be affected, the conversations I would have to have, and whether there was something more I could do. It all came to a head one evening when I was celebrating my birthday with my family. I was distracted, barely participating in the conversation, and eventually broke down crying at the dinner table. I couldn't hold it together and had to excuse myself and go home early.
What made that experience so difficult was that I knew we'd exhausted our options, but I couldn't bring myself to stop searching for another way. Part of me felt that making peace with the decision would mean giving up on people who deserved better.
Even after the layoffs were over, I continued wrestling with what had happened. Intellectually, I understood why the decision was unavoidable, but emotionally, I couldn't stop fighting it. I had spent my career believing that determination could overcome almost any obstacle, and now I was struggling to accept that there were circumstances it couldn't change.
Determination is one of the most valuable qualities we can develop. It helps us overcome obstacles, push through setbacks, and accomplish things that once seemed impossible. But the same determination that makes us capable of extraordinary things can become one of our greatest weaknesses when we're fighting something we cannot change.
We're used to effort producing results. When something doesn't work, we try something else. When we run into an obstacle, we find a way around it. Every challenge we overcome reinforces our belief that there's always another solution, as long as we're willing to keep looking. But when we reach the limits of our control, that instinct starts working against us.
We replay decisions, imagine how things could have turned out differently, and search for solutions to problems that can no longer be solved. Nothing changes, so we try harder. The lack of progress leaves us increasingly frustrated and powerless, but we continue pouring time and energy into the same struggle.
That frustration doesn't stay contained. When we feel powerless over something important, we start looking for control elsewhere. We become less patient with people, more frustrated by unexpected problems, and more rigid about how things should be done. The stress from one situation begins affecting our relationships, our work, and the rest of our lives.
The original circumstances were already painful, but now we're creating additional suffering through our own resistance. Worse, we're exhausting ourselves fighting something beyond our control while neglecting the people, opportunities, and challenges where our efforts could actually make a difference.
For those of us who have built our lives around overcoming obstacles, learning to stop fighting feels completely unnatural. But sometimes the way forward isn't to find another solution or push a little harder. It's to develop a skill that many of us have spent far less time practicing: acceptance.
For most of my life, I confused acceptance with apathy. I believed that accepting something I didn't like meant I didn't care about it. If an outcome was painful, disappointing, or unfair, I felt that making peace with it would somehow diminish how much it mattered to me.
I had connected two things that I've since learned are entirely independent of one another. The first is how we feel about something. We can love an outcome or hate it, care deeply about what happened or hardly care at all. The second is whether we're willing to accept it. We can continue fighting against what happened, or we can find a way to be at peace with it.
The problem is that we often assume those two things have to move together. If we're angry about something, we feel compelled to do something about it. If we're disappointed, we keep looking for ways to make things turn out differently. And if we stop fighting, we worry that we're giving up on something that deserved our effort.
But our feelings don't have to dictate our response. We can accept losing a job while still believing the decision was unfair. We can make peace with the end of a relationship while still missing the person we shared it with. We can accept that a business failed while still wishing we'd found a way to make it work. None of those experiences require us to change our opinion about what happened.
This is the distinction that changed my understanding of acceptance. We don't have to convince ourselves that things worked out for the best, find a silver lining, or stop feeling upset. We can dislike an outcome just as much as we did before, without continuing to fight the reality of it.
Acceptance isn't about approving of what happened. It's about finding peace with what happened, whether we like it or not.
No matter how talented, determined, or capable we become, there will always be limits to what we can control. We will encounter circumstances that don't go our way, opportunities that disappear, and outcomes that no amount of effort can change. Those experiences can be incredibly painful, especially when we've spent so much of our lives believing we can overcome anything.
The answer isn't to become less determined. We should fight for the things we care about, challenge circumstances we have the power to change, and put everything we have into pursuing the future we want. Some of the most extraordinary things we'll accomplish will come from refusing to give up when the odds are against us.
But we also need to recognize when our determination has reached its limits. We can still dislike an outcome, feel disappointed by what happened, and wish things were different without continuing to fight something we cannot change. Learning acceptance allows us to make peace with those circumstances without having to change how we feel about them.
The goal isn't to stop fighting for what matters to us. It's to learn when to fight and when to accept, so we can find peace with what is and put our energy toward what can be.