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If you worked in the civil service and you had a higher degree of control8 over your work, you were a lot less likely to become depressed or develop severe emotional distress than people working at the same pay level, with the same status, in the same office, as people with a lower degree of control over their work.

Though the intensity may differ from person to person, you can be sure that everyone you meet is driven by two primal urges: the need to feel safe and secure, and the need to feel in control. If you satisfy those drives, you're in the door.

story short) the folks at Google claimed the content violated their terms. My ads were terminated and the revenue stopped. Now imagine if my forum and its Google revenue were responsible for feeding my family. Imagine if I was earning $15,000/month from these ads and in one big swoop, poof! Gone. No control. No say. No power. It took me eight days to fix the problem, but it exposed the hitchhiking dangers as a passenger versus driving it. For those eight days, my income from that activity was zero. In any driver/hitchhiker relationship, the driver always makes more money than the hitchhiker and retains a critical component to Fastlane strategy: control. I can't imagine running a company in which another entity has the power to instantaneously kill your revenue stream. If someone can "flip a switch" and destroy your business, you're playing roulette with your financial plan. The congenital danger of hitchhiking is that you give up the keys to the driver. If the driver crashes into a wall, guess who goes with them.

I learned to concentrate on what I could control rather than on all that I could not. There was little point getting angry at millions of acres of blazing forest and a squillion mosquitoes. All I could do was deal with the situation in front of me and keep moving forwards.

Apparently, gaining control can have a positive impact on one's health and well-being, but losing control can be worse than never having had any at all.

The fact is that human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the world the same way, and research suggests that if they lose their ability to control things at any point between their entrance and their exit, they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless and depressed.