Control what you can control - Maryse Meinen

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"The only things you can control are the things inside your mind." - Maryse Meinen

In this episode, I talk with Maryse Meinen about stoic thinking for product development and life. We ask what happens if you stop judging success by outcomes and start judging by decision quality. Maryse shares tools you can use today: scenario planning, the 10 10 10 rule, and a simple decision journal. Prepare for failure, accept what you cannot control, and act with courage, justice, and temperance. This fits agile work and the mess we face in tech and society.

Maryse Meinen is a product development coach who uses Agile and Stoicism to make teams and organizations more resilient and sustainable. She espouses the philosophies of degrowth and stoicism, which advocate working more efficiently with fewer resources and valuing what is already there. Her motto is: Achieve more with less!

Highlights:

• Focus on decision quality, not outcomes—you control your choices, not external results or luck.
• Use 10-10-10 rule: evaluate every decision's impact in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years.
• Prepare for failure through scenario planning—bad things will happen, so build negative scenarios upfront.
• Keep a decision journal to improve choice-making process, not just track what happened afterward.
• Practice temperance: resist doing experiments just because you can—ask if it's truly necessary now.