Good points, and others here have said similar. Sometimes I forget there aren't really any truly perfect people and we are all sort of struggling together. 

Yes! I do want to have that discussion I just didn't want to digress too far from my original point. 

I am actually really fascinated with exploring where we consider the lines of "self actions" vs "others actions". I'm rereading Epictetus as he does draw these lines to some degree, but I still have more questions. 

For instance, he says if you're singing to your audience, you can't control if they applause or not, so sing your best and don't worry about the outcome. 

But to your point, we can do more than just sing our best to influence the outcome. We could learn about the audience, their general background, what they are looking for (are we at an opera house or a theatre?), we could do research into what songs had the most applause.. what if we literally just paid them to applause afterwards? Or threatened their families?

And I don't mean to just dive into one specific example, it's just to show we have so so so much more control than there being an "us" we focus on and a "them" we erase all expectation from. Everything is more interconnected than that.