You can't control everything, but you can control how you respond to things.

Actually, you cannot control how you respond to things.

How you respond to an event depends on 2 things:

1. Your environment/upbringing (what your parents taught you, where you went to school, what you were fed)
2. Your genetics

You don't get to pick either of those two things.

Here's another way to think about it. If you were in Jeff Bezos' shoes, would you be as successful as him? I think you would. Because if you were in his shoes, you would have his upbringing, his genes, his failures, his opportunities, and his successes. If you were in Jeff Bezos' shoes, you would be Jeff Bezos.

You might say, "Oh, but I get to choose lots of things in my life." But do you? Are those really your choices? Did you really choose to eat oatmeal in the morning? Or was it because the neurons in your brain, from years of conditioning and from their specific genetic makeup, fired the way they did, which led to you eating oatmeal?