Inquiry · “You Are Not Your Thoughts”
The Trichotomy of Control
To sort concerns into three bins — full control, partial control, no control — and, for the partial-control middle, to set internal goals so that tranquility no longer rides on outcomes you cannot command.
Sort each concern into three bins: full control, no control, or partial control. Ignore the no-control bin, invest fully in the full-control bin. For the large partial-control middle, internalize the goal — swap the outcome you can’t command (“win the match”) for the effort you can (“play my best”). Now your peace rides on something you actually control.
What it is
William B. Irvine’s refinement of Epictetus’s famous dichotomy of control. Epictetus sorts everything into two bins: up to us (our judgments, desires, actions) and not up to us (everything else).
Irvine argues this binary has an awkward gap: many of the things we care about most — winning a match, getting the job, raising a good child — are neither fully ours nor fully outside us. They are partly up to us. So he proposes a trichotomy:
(1) things over which we have complete control, (2) things over which we have no control, and (3) things over which we have some but not complete control. The practical payoff lives in that third, middle bin.
For partial-control concerns, Irvine prescribes internalizing the goal: convert the external outcome you cannot command into an internal goal you can. It operationalises the truth that meaning is assigned by the mind (Only Love Is Real), that the inner self precedes circumstance (The Inner Creates the Outer), and that peace comes from releasing the grip on what was never fully ours (The Inner Creates the Outer).
The Method
Irvine’s procedure, from A Guide to the Good Life:
- Name the concern. Whatever you want or fear right now.
- Sort it into one of three bins. - Full control: your own values, judgments, intentions, the goals you set. (Irvine narrows this to things “completely” up to us.) - No control: whether the sun rises, what others ultimately decide, last week’s events. - Partial control: the large middle — outcomes you influence but cannot guarantee (winning, being chosen, an illness’s course).
- For the no-control bin: spend no anxiety on it. It is settled or beyond reach.
- For the full-control bin: invest fully — this is where your effort belongs.
- For the partial-control bin — internalize the goal. Replace the external goal (which you don’t control) with an internal one (which you do). Irvine’s own example: a tennis player’s goal should not be to win the match but to play to the best of his ability. The external result is then left to fortune; the internal goal is fully achievable, so tranquility survives the scoreboard.
“His goal in playing tennis [is] not to win a match. but to play to the best of his ability.” (Irvine’s framing of the internalized goal) (Sourcing: the trichotomy, the partial-control category, and the “internalize your goals” move are Irvine’s distinctive contributions in A Guide to the Good Life; the tennis illustration is his. Protocol faithfully described, not reproduced verbatim.)
Source & Lineage
Irvine builds directly on Epictetus’s dichotomy (Enchiridion 1) and on the Stoic distinction between things “up to us” and “not up to us.” His refinement — adding the explicit partial-control category and the discipline of internalizing goals — is one of the most cited and most debated moves in the modern Stoicism revival.
(Some scholars argue Epictetus already accounts for the middle case via acting “with reservation,” the reserve clause; Irvine’s contribution is making the partial case a first-class, named category with its own technique.) → For the ancient dichotomy he refines, see the cross-links.
Common refinements
Collapsing the middle bin. The whole point of the trichotomy is the partial-control category — if you sort everything back into “mine / not mine,” you’ve reverted to the dichotomy and lost the internalized-goal move.
- Sliding into fatalism. Internalizing the goal does not mean trying less. It means trying fully on the part you control (your performance) and releasing the part you don’t (the result).
- Setting a fake “internal” goal. “My goal is to win, internally” isn’t internalizing — it’s relabeling. The internal goal must be something entirely within your power (e.g., “prepare thoroughly,” “play my best”).
- Weaponizing it against others. “That’s only partially in your control” is for governing your response, never for minimizing someone else’s pain.