These are strange times.

On one level, everything is wonderful–better than it ever has been. On another level, almost nobody feels that way. The world seems like it’s falling apart. It does not seem like there is much anyone can do about it. Most of us don’t feel like we’re in much of a position to do much about anything.

Sociologists and historians speak of something called “moral luck.”

It’s sort of a confusing term but basically, it refers to being in the right place at the right time for heroics, for activism, for impact. Not everyone finds themselves in a position to reveal some world-changing government secret. Not everyone is there when somebody falls into the water and can’t swim. Not everyone was born emperor in a time of crisis (Marcus Aurelius) or an elected official in a moment of great consequence (Cato), not everyone was thrust into the presidency as Truman was in 1945 or into activism as Martin Luther King Jr and Rosa Parks were in 1955.

This is what Churchill was referring to when he noted, sadly, of the Earl of Rosebery, that the man lived in “an age of great men and small events.” We don’t all have the chance to be heroes on a grand scale. We don’t all get tapped on the shoulder by destiny (as Churchill was).

Or so we think.

We could also say that there is no such thing as ‘small’ events, that we all have a chance–indeed, an obligation–to get involved in the issues of our time and to try to make a positive difference wherever it is in our control.

Besides, Churchill’s assessment of that period was laughably inaccurate. Rosebery lived from 1847 to 1929–slavery was still rampant around the world. For the entirety of Rosebery’s life, working conditions in England’s factories were heinous and awful. Britain’s colonial system and all its abuses carried on with few objections. The Irish question loomed over British politics and most leaders believed it hopeless. Countries regularly went to war for little reason and with little thought for the people affected. Millions starved. Millions were abused. Countless things went uninvented, unreformed, unchampioned.

And at a smaller level, surely, there were so many things that Rosebery could have done–that anyone could have done–that would not have felt small to the people who were on the other end of that kindness or sacrifice or service.

And the same is true for the moment we are in right now. Depending on where you live or what you do, things may seem relatively calm or even sunny. But the world was also just rocked by a pandemic that killed millions–what did you do to help? Income inequality. Climate change. Disruptive technologies like AI loom before us. Fascism is on the rise globally. More locally, there are people who are hungry, people who need a second chance, people who could use a friend, kids who need to be adopted, students who need mentorship, local offices that could be filled, abuses that could be called out.

Of course, we all have opinions about these big sweeping issues. The question is: Are you doing anything about them?

It doesn’t matter whether the events are big or small, what matters is if you are a big or small person, a ​brave​ and ​just​ person, or a cowardly and selfish person. How are you helping? What are you doing?

We like to let ourselves off the hook by assuring that if we were in charge, we would do things differently. If we were a multi­national conglomerate, we wouldn’t use chemicals that harm the environment. If we were the decision-makers, we’d have a diverse workforce, we’d be family-friendly employers, we’d speak out on political issues. We would pay a living wage. We wouldn’t do business with an overseas company that uses child labor. But then the order for company T-shirts comes across your desk and you suddenly have to choose between the $9 option from China and the $19 one manufactured in the U.S. The right thing is still obvious. It’s just harder.

And I mean it when I say it’s harder. I struggle with this with my own company, with my own decisions. I’m a very small fish and it’s exhausting and expensive to act as if your decisions matter. It’s harder to find suppliers, it takes longer to get things, your pricing is worse. But I try to remind myself: I don’t control what other people do. I don’t control the trends of the world or the market, but I do control the decisions I make. I control how I run my affairs.

I don’t always make the right choices. I look back and see the opportunities I’ve missed. People might not agree with all the decisions I make now. I may come to regret not going far enough on some…or too far on others. But I am doing my best not to think of any of these as small. This is my opportunity right now. I’ll take it.

Maybe it will inspire someone else, maybe it will be the first drip that starts the overflow. In the future, maybe I’ll get luckier–in the moral sense. Maybe I’ll find myself in some big, high-stakes situation. The decisions I’m making now will prepare me to meet that moment.

At the very least, it will make a difference for the laborers, the vendors, the customers touched by my business.

An example I love: Pete Frates was just a guy who got hit by a baseball in an amateur league game. It was his good luck that it happened, and his bad luck because the trip to the doctor revealed he had ALS. It was his choice to decide to do something with this, to change the trajectory of the fight against that disease. Certainly, no one expected him to do anything. He had no duty, no obligation to do anything but live out the rest of his life and to struggle to stay alive. Instead, his fund-raising efforts would not just contribute awareness and $200 million to researchers but spark significant progress in a field that had seemed stalled for so long. Even when he was paralyzed, wheelchair-bound, without the ability to talk, and having to be fed through a tube, he never stopped. To the very end, he was not resigned. He fought. He helped. He made a difference. He did not give in to despair. He adapted and transformed his fate into something that mattered, something that will make the future better, even if he’s not around to enjoy it himself.

There is that expression about how the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. I don’t think that’s really the right wording. It’s that the moral arc of the universe is bent toward justice. It’s bent that way by people who reach up and grab it, people with the ​courage​ to stand against the norms of what was and a steadfast commitment to what they knew was the ​right thing​. It was people who ignored the cynics, the people who told them it was hopeless, told them that one person could not make a difference.

As Marcus Aurelius writes, “True good fortune is what you make for yourself. Good fortune: good character, good intentions, and good actions.”

Just because we don’t hear a voice, just because an election hasn’t thrown us into office, doesn’t mean we aren’t called to something, locally or globally.

Curse the darkness or light a candle? Bemoan the calm seas or build a motor?

You can make your own moral luck. In fact, you must.

And it’s not that hard.

You just have to do good.

For a stranger. For a cause.

We choose to be heroes, big or small. We choose to be a part of the problem or part of the solution.

And if we don’t, it’s on us.

The thing about success is that it messes with your brain. It messes with other people’s brains, too.

I’m not saying that it gives you amnesia, but it does change how you see yourself and the events that lead you to where you are. Basically, we start to tell ourselves stories about how it happened and why it happened–specifically, why it happened for us. And if what you did was public, then other people start to do the very same thing.

I’ll give you a story from my own life.

In 2012, I made an abrupt and dramatic turn in my life. I walked away from the marketing world and wrote a book about Stoicism called ​The Obstacle Is The Way​. A book that, against all odds, hit the bestseller list and went on to sell millions of copies. It’s landed in the hands of CEOs, athletes, entrepreneurs, musicians, and so many others. Since then, I’ve written 13 more books, 10 of which are about Stoicism. I spotted a nascent trend and turned it into an international phenomenon, reaching people all over the planet and bringing this obscure, ancient philosophy into the halls of power, boardrooms, Hollywood and professional locker rooms.

It’s a nice thought and it certainly doesn’t hurt my feelings that people are inclined to give me credit for planning and orchestrating the whole thing.

The problem is that it’s not true! No matter how many trend pieces or fans repeat it.

In fact, if I had even once expressed the slightest notion that Stoicism–or ​Daily Stoic​–was going to be this popular, I should have been legally banned from writing ​Ego Is The Enemy​.

The reality is much simpler: I was excited about Stoicism. There was a book I wanted to write. I hoped it would do well, but I didn’t know. Neither did my publisher, although I’m sure the industry is inclined to give them credit too because my editor would tell me later that they were hoping I’d get over Stoicism and go back to marketing books. I found out later that someone I thought was a friend in the industry was privately predicting Obstacle would sell maybe 5,000 copies.

It was nowhere near a sure thing.

It’s funny how a success story can warp something as objective as the order of the books I’ve published. The great David Maraniss would write “myth becomes myth not in the living but in the retelling.” The actual order is that I wrote one marketing book (​Trust Me I’m Lying​) and very shortly after that came out–before we even knew how well ​Trust Me I’m Lying​ would sell–I sold the proposal for ​The Obstacle Is The Way​. Then, while I was working on Obstacle, I wrote an ebook called ​Growth Hacker Marketing​, which came out before Obstacle. But on paper, it looks like I did two successful marketing books and then gambled it all to write about Stoicism. Again, this is not true!

It wasn’t even a gamble! I kept my day job at American Apparel the whole time.

Nor was Obstacle some overnight hit. It came out in 2014 and did OK. It took five years to hit a national bestseller list. Shortly after the release, Tim Ferriss published the audiobook and told his audience about me (something I couldn’t have predicted until after I wrote it). We did a discounted promotion on the ebook during its first year out and Amazon kept the discounted price for something like the next 11 months. It was from this that it slowly, steadily acquired its audience.

Did I sense a huge trend? Or did I write a good book and catch a couple of lucky breaks?

What story I tell myself doesn’t change what happened in the past, but it does change how I regard myself now–it has the potential to change how I’ll act in the future.

The lesson I take from the success of my books is not that I’m a genius. It’s not that I can predict trends. It’s that following what you’re excited about is the best strategy (because I would have enjoyed the experience even if the book didn’t sell). It’s that trying experimental marketing ideas, like doing a BookBub and Amazon Goldbox deal (as unglamorous as that may sound) can pay off big-time. It’s that success usually takes longer than you expect, but after it happens, all that time disappears. It’s that by writing multiple books, instead of resting on my laurels, I put myself in a position to get lucky and stay busy.

Again, if I had known that this obscure school of ancient philosophy had the potential to sell so many copies, I would have self-published ​The Obstacle Is The Way​. I would have fought for a much bigger advance on ​The Daily Stoic​. I wasn’t thinking about the upside at the time…I was just happy to get paid at all!

Stories aren’t just dishonest. They can be dangerously misleading.

In ​Ego Is The Enemy​, I write about a talk I had seen where one of Google’s founders explained, inspiringly to a crowd, that the way he judges prospective compa­nies and entrepreneurs is by asking them “if they’re going to change the world.”

Which is fine, except that’s not how Google started. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were two Stan­ford PhDs working on their dissertations. It’s also not how You­Tube started, whose founders weren’t trying to reinvent TV; they were trying to share funny video clips. Among their earliest ideas for the platform was to treat it like a dating site. Not to mention that Google didn’t even start YouTube, one of their most valuable properties. They bought it.

What followed in the mid-to-late aughts was Google repeatedly overreaching on a bunch of bold ‘disruptive’ product ideas that went nowhere. Google Pages was a flop. Google Glass was a flop. Google Plus was a flop. These were huge bets that were actually largely outside Google’s core competence but fit nicely with the ‘change the world’ narrative they had convinced themselves of.

The investor Paul Graham (who funded Airbnb, Reddit, Drop­box, and others) explicitly warns startups against having bold, sweeping visions early on. Of course, as a capitalist, he wants to fund companies that massively disrupt industries and change the world—that’s where the money is. He wants them to have “frighteningly ambitious” ideas, but explains: “The way to do really big things seems to be to start with decep­tively small things.” He’s saying you don’t make a frontal attack out of ego; instead, you start with a small bet and itera­tively scale your ambitions as you go.

His other famous piece of advice: “Keep your identity small,” fits well here. Make it about the work and the principles behind it—not about a glorious, aggrandizing vision.

Resisting the urge to tell yourself stories, to stay focused on what’s in front of you, not to be distracted by the glimmer of that glowing future you’ve painted in your mind–this is a difficult discipline. We want so desperately to believe that those who have great empires set out to build one. Why? So we can indulge in the pleasurable planning of our own. So we can take full credit for the good that happens and the riches and respect that come our way.

Narrative is when you look back at an improbable or unlikely path to your success and say: I knew it all along. Instead of: I hoped. I worked. I got some good breaks. Or even: I thought this could happen. Of course, you didn’t really know all along—or if you did, it was more faith than knowledge.

But who wants to remember all the times you doubted yourself?

The twentieth­ century financier Bernard Baruch had a great line: “Don’t try to buy at the bottom and sell at the top. This can’t be done—except by liars.” That is, people’s claims about what they’re doing in the market are rarely to be trusted.

Most stories are lies.

Most narratives leave the important things out.

I’m probably even getting some stuff wrong in this post! (It’s a story isn’t it?)

Most labels obscure too–filmmaker, writer, investor, entrepreneur, executive. These are nouns. But what gets someone to that position? Verbs.

We must resist the impulse to reverse engineer success from our understanding of other people’s stories. When we achieve our own, we must resist the desire to pretend that everything unfolded exactly as we’d planned. There was no grand narrative. You should remember—you were there when it happened.

Instead of pre­tending that we are living some great story, we must remain focused on the execution—and on executing with excellence. We must defer the credit or crown and continue work­ing on what got us here. Because that’s the only thing that will keep us here.

And whenever we can, we should acknowledge our lucky breaks. There were always more of them than we are inclined to admit.