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I thought the mini-piece from the end of my GP Atlanta report was worth publishing as a stand-alone!

Focus on what you can control, focus on what matters.

I had this Jon Finkel quote on my phone as a daily reminder from freshman year of college, because I thought it was applicable to life as well as a good way to think about what matters.

To an outside observer, it sounds so simple, so tautological, that it’s really not that insightful. Of course that’s all we should focus on, why would you think about something else?

But of course, if you’ve actually played the game, you know how many things in magic that we can’t control are incredibly hard NOT to focus on. The game is impeccably designed to get us to care about these things. Topdecks. Mulligans. Mana screw. Mana flood.

It’s easy to sell psychological tricks that promise to protect us from the whims of these gods: Broken decks. Winning mindset. Jedi mind tricks.

Except that some things are genuinely not in our control. It doesn’t matter how much you want to win a match, how much you’ve prepared, how much more you “deserve” it than your opponent — they could be the worst player in the room, woefully underprepared, have made all the wrong calls, and they might still get there instead of you. There are significant parts of the outcome that are outside of your control.

You cannot focus on them.

Try. Not. To. Focus. On. Them.

It’s. Impossible.

Literally no one has ever done so completely successfully.

Different people have gotten closer than others, but magic players all care about results, and the results of magic tournaments are not perfectly predicted by skill. It’s why we play the game. And yet the desire to both pursue this enticing dynamic and to escape it is the thing that holds every single one of us back.

It’s easier for me to say this because I’ve gotten incredibly lucky this year, and so I have the results to fall back on to prove I’m “good enough to deserve success”, but in truth there is no such thing, or at least no one has or will ever reach it. Everyone who has ever succeeded in this game has gotten lucky to do it, and fully deserves their success, but strictly in a past tense - never a future one.

The past is not a thing we can control (at least by current understandings of time).

Magic is a game where it is nearly impossible to separate the things you can control from the things you can’t. And the interplay between the two is the most psychologically engaging thing in the world. We love them to be mixed together, it’s what makes games fun.

But you have to focus only on what you can control, if you want to win. That’s the devil’s bargain. To do so, you must overcome your desire to focus on anything else. You must escape from the wheel of suffering.

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I don’t know how many people understand how much genuinely brilliant wisdom and intelligence it takes to be jovial and friendly with your opponent after you lose a win-and-in for the Pro Tour, something many players work their entire careers for. Doing this requires razor sharp discernment between controllables and uncontrollables.

No, it’s not enough to be able to determine whether you could have played better to win. That is not a now-controllable, it’s a past controllable that could be used to help with future controllables. Slim margins, but doesn’t cut it as a thing to focus on here, now.

What is needed instead is a recognition of the only actual controllable in this moment where a dream that was so close has just rapidly retreated to the distance. The experience you, your opponent, and anyone else present is going to have in this moment is the only thing you get to control.

This moment, despite the pain you feel at the uncertainly weighted coin falling the wrong way, is a net-positive — someone else has just achieved something to be proud of, and they deserve to feel that joy, and you deserve to feel proud of how far you came to get here. Did the coin fall the wrong way, or did it just fall?

I know there have been plenty of moments where I’ve failed to live up to this mindset, and I’m very sure we all have, because it’s an impossible standard to hold anyone to. We are all fallible humans, tied to our own self worth as a comparative, competitive one as opposed to a relational one, and it’s impossible to be rid of the comparative self entirely - that’s literally one of the major ways humans conceive of spiritual enlightenment.

It’s impossible to play perfect magic, but it's sure as hell fun to try.

Are you focusing on what you can control? Are you focusing on what matters? Are you, like Simon Nielsen, happy that someone won the match? It might take some learning to get there, and what could be more beautiful?

Anyways, I have a new daily reminder on my phone in place of the Finkelism.

It says “Love you regardless”.

A message from my past self to the self in this moment. A bridging of time and identity sure to cause tension when I fall short of the person I strive to be… until the day it doesn’t, and I can focus on the things I can control.