What Can You Do When You Can’t Fix It?
When a problem feels too big to fix, it’s easy to assume nothing you do will matter. But having no control isn’t the same as having no agency. Dr. J.J. Peterson reflects on a question he has carried since September 11, 2001—and why meaningful action sometimes begins by asking something much smaller: What can I do?
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Leadership often comes with the expectation that problems can be solved. A campaign underperforms, so the strategy changes. A team gets stuck, so someone makes a decision and clears the path. A customer has a problem, and the goal is to make it right.
That instinct is useful. Leaders need to act. But some problems do not offer a solution, at least not one available to you.
Something terrible has already happened. The outcome is beyond your control. The scale of the situation is so much larger than anything you could personally change that even trying to help can feel insignificant.
Those are the moments when the difference between control and agency matters most.
When the Problem Is Bigger Than You
On September 11, 2001, Dr. J.J. Peterson was thousands of miles from home, volunteering with a medical clinic in a rural village near the Haitian border in the Dominican Republic.
News of the attacks reached the group hours after they had happened. They had little information, no way to contact the people they loved and certainly no ability to affect what was unfolding back home.
Eventually, someone asked a different question: “What can we do?”
The answer was to return to the work in front of them. People in the village still needed medicine. A local family needed help. Others needed access to safe drinking water.
Against the scale of what was happening in the United States, filling pill bottles seemed impossibly small. But those bottles still mattered to the people who needed the medicine inside them.
That experience points to a trap people can fall into when a problem becomes enormous: assuming the response must be enormous too.
Sometimes it should be. There are problems that require people to organize, speak up, fight for change or confront something that should not be accepted.
But there are also circumstances we cannot control. In those moments, what remains within our reach may look ordinary by comparison.
Ordinary and insignificant are not the same thing.
Having No Control Doesn't Mean Having No Agency
The language of leadership often revolves around control: set the strategy, make the decision, own the outcome, solve the problem.
Real life is less cooperative. Markets move. People make choices you cannot make for them. Businesses fail. Illness and loss enter people's lives without permission. Events unfold across the world that no individual leader, business owner or citizen has the power to stop.
When control disappears, it is easy to assume agency disappeared with it.
But as J.J. puts it, “Those aren't the same things.”
Agency asks a different question. Instead of measuring your response by whether you can control the larger outcome, you can ask what is actually available to you now.
There may be someone who needs help, work that still matters or a choice about how you will respond. None of those things fixes the whole situation. But fixing the whole situation was never the only measure of whether an action mattered.
Finding Meaning Isn't the Same as Finding a Reason
Researchers studying how Americans processed September 11 found that meaning played an important role in what happened afterward.
About two months after the attacks, more than two-thirds of the people studied were still trying to make sense of what had happened, and roughly 60% had been unable to find meaning in it. People who remained caught in that search tended to experience more post-traumatic stress symptoms over the following two years. Those who found some sense of meaning reported fewer symptoms and less fear.
But finding meaning is not the same as finding a reason.
There is no need to suggest that September 11 happened so something could be learned from it or that something good could somehow justify what was lost. Some events deserve to be called terrible without qualification.
The distinction is between explaining suffering and deciding how to live in response to it.
Asking why did this happen? can be important, particularly when understanding the answer could prevent future harm. But sometimes there is no answer that will make what happened feel acceptable.
When “why?” has taken you as far as it can, another question becomes possible:
What am I going to do now?
Viktor Frankl and Tragic Optimism
Psychiatrist and neurologist Viktor Frankl spent much of his work wrestling with that question. Frankl survived Nazi concentration camps while losing much of his family, including his parents, brother and pregnant wife.
His thinking is sometimes reduced to the idea that you cannot control what happens to you, but you can control your attitude. His argument was more complicated than that.
Frankl did not advocate simply accepting unnecessary suffering. If something harmful can be changed, there is every reason to change it.
The harder question is what happens when suffering cannot be removed, repaired or reversed.
Frankl eventually used the phrase “tragic optimism” to describe the possibility that life can still hold meaning in the presence of pain and loss.
That is not the same as saying everything happens for a reason. It does not require finding a silver lining, becoming grateful for tragedy or deciding that suffering itself was somehow good.
Instead, meaning may be found in how someone chooses to live in response to something they never would have chosen.
The painful thing does not become good. But it also does not have to make every decision about who you become afterward.
Hardship Doesn't Automatically Make Better Leaders
That distinction matters for leadership because leaders are inevitably shaped by experiences they did not choose.
Someone who has failed publicly may remember what that felt like when a member of the team makes a costly mistake. Someone who has experienced grief may notice pain in another person that would once have gone unseen. A difficult season can become a source of patience, humility or compassion.
But suffering does not automatically make anyone wiser. Pain can harden people just as easily as it can soften them.
The agency lies in what happens next.
Leaders cannot choose everything that happens to them. They can pay attention to what those experiences teach them about other people, how tightly they hold control and who they choose to become in response.
The hardship itself does not need to be redeemed for something redemptive to grow alongside it.
Start With a Smaller Question
Twenty-five years after September 11, there is still no reason to turn what happened into a tidy lesson. Remembering the people who died, the families whose lives changed and the first responders and ordinary people who ran toward danger does not require making any of it okay.
But remembering can affect the way we live now.
When the world feels overwhelming, the size of the suffering can make anything within our own reach seem too small to matter. J.J.'s experience, the research on meaning and Frankl's work suggest another way forward.
Fight to change what can be changed. Pay attention instead of looking away. And when something truly is outside your control, resist confusing that lack of control with having no agency at all.
The next step may not be dramatic. It may be helping one person, doing the work that still matters or deciding how you will show up in the aftermath.
The question does not have to be, “How do I fix all of this?”
Sometimes a better place to begin is simply: What can I do?
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BASPOD-EP055-Sept11_Solo-v01
Dr. JJ Peterson: As I was preparing for this episode, why I didn't even know if I was gonna s- do something on 9/11. It, it feels a little tricky to talk about. And as I was thinking about this episode, I start looking into some research, and I got curious about what researchers learn about the way people process 9/11.
Dr. JJ Peterson: Welcome to Badass Softie, a podcast for leaders who are unapologetically ambitious and want to lead with heart because you're allowed to chase big goals without losing what makes you human. I'm your host, Dr. JJ Peterson, and we recently marked 25 years since September 11th, since 9/11, and I've been seeing a lot of documentaries on the different streaming apps and articles about it, and I've watched a few things and read a few things, and it has really taken me back to that time.
Dr. JJ Peterson: And like most people, I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news that our country had been attacked. Uh, I was in a small village with a group of friends i- in a very rural village. It, it was right near the Haitian border in the Dominican Republic And we were sitting on these tables. I mean, I remember the exact spot, sitting on these tables outside of a mud brick church.
Dr. JJ Peterson: We were laughing and joking around as we filled these pill bottles with prenatal vitamins and anti-worm medication for the next phase of the medical clinic that we were doing. And it had already been hours since the first plane had gone into the towers, and the news of the attack had been spreading through the lis- little village, 'cause they had these battery-powered radios.
Dr. JJ Peterson: But nobody wanted to tell the Americans that something had happened to their country. And we, we felt it. We kind of felt something in the air. Everything in the village was just a little bit off that day, and people were keeping their distance, which had never happened. I mean, the people were always around us all the time.
Dr. JJ Peterson: And we had heard that there was this young girl who had been sick that had passed away that morning, and we figured people were keeping to themselves because of that. And I, I'm sure that was a part of it, but what we didn't realize was nobody knew how to break the news to us. So around 3:00 that afternoon, uh, somebody had gone into town and found an ex-pat priest from nearby and asked him to come tell us.
Dr. JJ Peterson: So he drove up the mountain to see us, and he had printed out these news stories he had from the internet to tell us that two planes had flown into the towers, and they had collapsed and killed thousands of people. And he had them with us, he, with him, the pictures and the printed out news stories to prove that it was real.
Dr. JJ Peterson: Because we're looking at it, and obviously as he's telling us, we couldn't really understand what we were looking at, which I'm sure so many people were experiencing that day, too. And I remember thinking, "This, this has got to be some kind of hoax that, on the internet. Some evil, crazy hoax," and it obviously wasn't.
Dr. JJ Peterson: And so we kind of sat there for a while trying to wrap our brains around what had happened, and mostly in silence. And every once in a while, someone would ask a question, you know, "Why?" or, "How?" or, "Is this real?" You know, "What, what's next? Can we even get home?" And even one of the guys who was with us, Dan, uh, he had a sister who had worked in the towers.
Dr. JJ Peterson: And so he wanted to get to town so he could try to make a phone call 'cause we had no service where we were. 'Cause remember, this is 2001. We're in this really little rural village up in the mountains in Dominican Republic, and nobody had any smartphones on them. And we couldn't text anybody we loved or open up Twitter or pull up a live stream.
Dr. JJ Peterson: We just sat there with little information and absolutely no control over what was happening thousands of miles away And eventually somebody asked a different question: "Well, what can we do?" And weirdly enough, that question had an answer. And in the moment, the first thing we did, this group of people specifically, 'cause we came from a religious space, we, we decided to pray.
Dr. JJ Peterson: And then after we prayed, we went back to filling pill bottles, which sounds almost ridiculous when I say it. I mean, our country had been attacked. Thousands of lives were still in danger. We didn't know what was going on and what else was gonna happen, and we filled pill bottles because that was the work that was in front of us.
Dr. JJ Peterson: W- we, we couldn't save anybody in New York and, but there were people in this village who needed medicine, and we couldn't comfort families who were waiting to hear whether someone they loved had been, made it out of the tower or not. But a family a few houses down from the church was mourning the death of their daughter that day, and we knew they couldn't afford a casket, so we wanted to help provide money for her casket.
Dr. JJ Peterson: We couldn't make the world safe again, but we could teach someone how to purify their drinking water that afternoon, and so that's what we did. And I, I guess we could have gone into town so we could be closer to the news or tried to figure out how we were going to get home, but all the flights were shut down.
Dr. JJ Peterson: Nobody was coming in or out of the country, and nobody had any answers anyway. So we sent Dan i- into town to see if he could learn anything new and maybe form a plan about how we were gonna get home, and the rest of us kept filling the pill bottles. And, you know, in the end, we ended up being able to fly back on our original flight.
Dr. JJ Peterson: We were the first international flight from the DR let back in the country But we just filled the pill bottles. And I've thought about that moment sitting outside that church a lot over the years. I'm sure a lot of people think back to that time. But for me, you know, there are and have been and continue to be moments when the scale of the problem makes everything we're doing feel insignificant.
Dr. JJ Peterson: I mean, what good is filling a pill bottle when buildings are falling? What good is helping one family when thousands are grieving, maybe even our own? It felt weird to just keep working, and it felt like we should stop, and maybe we should do nothing, you know? But we couldn't, and, and we, and we didn't. One of the things that can happen when a problem gets that big is we start to believe that our response has to somehow be equally big.
Dr. JJ Peterson: I was in the Dominican Republic. There was literally nothing I could do about what was happening in New York or Washington or Pennsylvania, and filling pill bottles certainly wasn't going to change any of that. But the pill bottles still needed to be filled. The people who were going to show up at our clinics still needed medicine.
Dr. JJ Peterson: The family down the streets had still lost their daughter. Their suffering didn't become less important because something much bigger was happening somewhere else. A- and I've been thinking about that as I was preparing for this episode. Well, I didn't even know if I was gonna s- do something on 9/11. It, it feels a little tricky to talk about.
Dr. JJ Peterson: B- but I do believe that even 25 years later, I'm confronted with some version of this bigness, f- badness feeling a lot of the time. You know, we have so much access to information now. We know about wars happening around the world, about genocide. We see violence and political unrest. We hear about another shooting, another tragedy And sometimes it feels like we haven't even had time to process one terrible thing before being shown another one.
Dr. JJ Peterson: And I genuinely sometimes don't know what to do with all of it because I care and I, I want to know what's happening, and I don't think the answer is to ignore suffering just because it isn't happening to me or close to me, but I'm only one person. So w- what am I supposed to do with all of that? And as I was thinking about this episode, you know, as I do, I start looking into some research 'cause I wanna learn and I wanna find out more, and I got curious about what researchers learned about the way people processed 9/11.
Dr. JJ Peterson: And there was this fascinating study that followed a nationally representative group of Americans after the attacks, and the researchers were looking at meaning. About two months after September 11th, more than two-thirds of the people they studied were still trying to make sense of what had happened, which isn't terribly surprising.
Dr. JJ Peterson: And what's even less surprising is about 60% of the people said they couldn't find any meaning in it at all, and even a year later, that number had barely changed. Time wasn't necessarily solving this for people. But here's where things get a little more interesting to me. The researchers found a difference between people who were still searching for meaning and people who felt like they had found some sense of meaning after the attack The people who remained caught in the search for meaning tended to experience more post-traumatic stress symptoms over the next two years.
Dr. JJ Peterson: So if they were still searching, more PTSD. However, finding some sense of meaning that was associated with the attack led to fewer symptoms and less fear about future attacks. Now, I, I wanna be careful here because I don't think this recha- research says that you need to figure out why September 11 happened.
Dr. JJ Peterson: I don't know that there's a satisfying answer to that question, and I'm certainly not interested in saying something like, "Well, this terrible thing happened so that we could learn something from it." No. Nope. No. That... Un- we're not playing that game. Thousands of people died. People lost their spouses, parents, children.
Dr. JJ Peterson: First responders ran into buildings while everybody else was trying to get out. There are people who are still living with the physical and emotional effects of what happened that day. It was evil. We need to call it evil, and I believe the world would be a better place if it never happened, period. I am not interested in trying to put a little nice bow on any of that.
Dr. JJ Peterson: What we are talking about is, uh, uh, is something that, uh, Victor Frankl often talks about, and I've, I've talked about Victor Frankl on this podcast before. He was a psychiatrist and a neurologist who survived the Nazi concentration camps. His, his parents and his brother were killed. Even his pregnant wife was killed.
Dr. JJ Peterson: So when Frankl writes about suffering, and, uh, uh, he's not approaching it from come, some high-level disconnected place. It's not a philosophical exercise. He lived it. And one of the central ideas that came out of his experience and his research was that human beings have this deep need for meaning And sometimes I think when it comes to suffering and meaning, I think Frankl is reduced to something like, well, you can't control what happens to you, but you can control your attitude.
Dr. JJ Peterson: That is a part of it, but I think what he was saying was more interesting than that. Frankl wasn't saying we should just accept terrible things that we have the power to change. In fact, he's pretty clear about it. If suffering is unnecessary and you can do something about it, do something about it. He was more interested in a harder question.
Dr. JJ Peterson: What happens when you can't control it, when you can't do something about the suffering that's taking place? What happens when something has happened that can't be undone? You can't fix it. You can't go back and prevent it. You may not even able to make sense of why it happened. Frankl believed that even there, meaning was still possible, not because the suffering itself was somehow good and not because you had to find some silver lining and be grateful that it happened.
Dr. JJ Peterson: The possibility and the meaning was what you did with it. He believed human beings have this remarkable capacity to take sufferings we did not choose and somehow transform it through the way that we live in response to it. Later in his work, Frankl talked about something called tragic optimism. It, it's not optimism because everything works out.
Dr. JJ Peterson: It is the belief that even when life includes pain and loss, life can still have meaning. And Frankl talked about the possibility of turning suffering into human achievement, which is a pretty audacious idea when you think about the circumstances that he survived. And I do think that's different from saying focus on what you can control.
Dr. JJ Peterson: It's asking whether something redemptive can come from the way I respond to something I never would've chosen to have happen in the first place. That doesn't redeem the terrible thing, but it maybe keeps the terrible thing from getting the final word And here's what I found really interesting when I was researching this, is the study I was telling you about the meaning found after 9/11 actually points back to Frankl's work.
Dr. JJ Peterson: The researchers were testing, in some ways, an idea Frankl had been writing about really decades earlier. Can finding meaning help us live through something that shakes our assumptions about the world? And their answer seems to be yes. B- but again, I, I think we have to be careful about what we mean by finding meaning.
Dr. JJ Peterson: This is a very interesting area to kind of walk through. It's not necessarily answering the question, why did this happen, right? Again, sometimes I wonder if that question keeps us stuck. Why did this happen? Why did they do this? Why did this happen to me? Wh- why didn't somebody stop it? And I do think those may be important questions because sometimes there are answers, and sometimes we absolutely should go looking for them because we can learn how to prevent it from happening again.
Dr. JJ Peterson: But sometimes there isn't an answer that will satisfy us. And maybe another way of finding meaning is to ask a different question. What am I going to do now? What can we do? We can fill pill bottles. I don't think any of us standing there thought we were making some grand philosophical statement about the human condition.
Dr. JJ Peterson: We were doing what needed to be done. And, and looking back now, I, I think there was something deeply meaningful about that. Something horrible had happened, and our response in that tiny corner of the world was to take care of somebody. A- and I don't wanna overstate that. We weren't heroes. We weren't doing anything remotely comparable to the firefighters and police officers and just the ordinary people that were helping each other in New York and Washington.
Dr. JJ Peterson: We were filling pill bottles, but those pill bottles mattered to the people who needed what was inside of them. There are going to be moments when I cannot fix the things that scare me, and I hate that. I honestly hate that. We don't get to control everything as much as we'd like. And when we don't have control, I think it's easy to confuse that having no control equals having no agency at all.
Dr. JJ Peterson: Those aren't the same things. Sometimes there is still something we can do. There is someone we can help. There is work that still matters. And yes, sometimes the response should be big. Sometimes we should organize. Sometimes we need to speak up and fight and change things that we shouldn't be, that shouldn't be accepted.
Dr. JJ Peterson: Frankl would agree with that. But sometimes the meaningful thing isn't particularly dramatic. Sometimes you just fill pill bottles
Dr. JJ Peterson: And I, I also want to say something important here about redemption 'cause, uh, uh, that word that I've been using, this redemptive piece, it, it's a word that has a lot of religious connotation around it, and given my background, I certainly understand it that way as well. But I think redemption can also describe this deeply human impulse to take something painful and refuse to let pain be the only thing that comes from it.
Dr. JJ Peterson: It doesn't erase what happened. It doesn't justify it. It doesn't make the loss worth it. It just means that loss doesn't get to decide everything that comes next And I've seen people do this. I've watched people experience, you know, something that they never would've chosen, and then become extraordinarily compassionate towards somebody else going through the same thing.
Dr. JJ Peterson: I've watched people lose someone they love and find ways to honor that person through the way they live their life. I've watched people go through enormous failures and become much kinder leaders because they remember what it feels like to fail. None of these things make the original suffering good, but something good can still grow beside it and because of it, and that's my favorite part about Frankl's work.
Dr. JJ Peterson: He doesn't promise us a life without suffering. He asks us what kind of life we're going to create even though suffering is a part of being human. And 25 years later, I still don't know exactly what to do with 9/11. I, I... and I don't know that I'm supposed to, to be honest. I, I, I don't ever want to be okay with what happened, but I do want to remember the people who died that day.
Dr. JJ Peterson: I do want to remember the families who lost someone, and the people whose lives were permanently changed, and I wanna live differently because of it. I wanna remember the first responders and ordinary people who ran towards somebody who needed help, and I wanna live differently because of it, and I wanna remember that little village in Dominican Republic, and I wanna live differently because of it.
Dr. JJ Peterson: I want to remember sitting there scared and confused with no idea what was gonna happen back home. I want to remember somebody asking, "What can we do?" Because I think that's still a pretty good question. When something terrible happens, what can I do? When someone is hurting, what can I do? When I can't change what happens, is there still a way I can bring something good into what happens next?
Dr. JJ Peterson: I don't think these questions make suffering meaningful in and of themselves, but I think they give us somewhere to begin because pain and suffering does not deserve the final word. So let me leave you with this. May you have the courage to face the things in this world that break your heart without looking away.
Dr. JJ Peterson: May you fight to change the things that can be changed, and find meaning even when there are things you cannot. And when you find yourself in one of those moments where the problem feels so big that nothing you could possibly do seems like enough, may you look around you and ask, "What can I do?" And may the things that hurt us never get the final word on who we become.
Dr. JJ Peterson: Because we believe you can be both ambitious and kind, fun and driven, powerful and deeply human. Your leadership can inspire, your success can have soul, and your ambition can make space for everyone. That's why you're a Badass Softie. We'll see you next week. Thanks for listening. Follow and subscribe so you don't miss an episode.
Dr. JJ Peterson: Badasssoftie.com is crafted by Fruitful Design and Strategy.