30. Would It Help?

There’s a scene in the film Bridge of Spies where a captured Soviet spy is facing interrogation, prison, maybe execution, and his lawyer keeps asking why he isn’t panicking. “Aren’t you worried?” the lawyer says. Every time, the spy answers with the same three words: “Would it help?”

I think about that line constantly.

It’s the cleanest tool I know for one specific kind of suffering: gripping the wheel of something you aren’t actually driving. The flight you can’t make leave sooner. The launch you can’t unlaunch. The person who’ll reply whenever they reply. The decision that already left your hands. Worry doesn’t move any of it an inch. It just runs you down before the thing you’re worried about even arrives.

The trap is that worry feels like work. It has the shape of work. You concentrate, your chest tightens, you feel like you’re handling something. You’re not. There’s an old line that worry is like a rocking chair: it gives you something to do but never gets you anywhere. I built a lot of my twenties out of that rocking chair, pre-paying a tax on disasters that mostly never came.

What finally moved me was watching how the calm people operate, the founders I respect who run real companies without living in permanent panic. They don’t control the thousand things they can’t. They guide the few they can, set the direction, and let the rest happen. The ones who try to grip everything aren’t more in control. They’re just more tired, and usually slower.

So I started sorting. What am I actually holding the wheel of, and what am I only holding the rocking chair of? The wheel is small and it’s always the same: the next thing I say, the next thing I make, how I respond, whether I sleep, what I eat, what I practice, what I refuse. The rocking chair is nearly everything else: other people’s opinions, how the post performs, whether the client says yes, whether the algorithm cooperates. The wheel is yours. Let the chair go.

This is the emotional version of every other move in this book. You’re not summoning the willpower to “stop worrying.” You’re asking one honest question, would it help, and when the answer is no, which it usually is, you put the worry down and get back to the small set of things you can actually move.

What are you gripping right now that you were never really holding? Ask the three words. If the answer is no, let it go.