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The Stoics put this idea in a much kinder way: control the controllable (specifically our actions and attitudes), accept the uncontrollable. 
The problem is, people's could's are broken. I have managed to make myself much unhappier by thinking I can control my actions until I read Nate Soares' post I linked above. You can't, even in the everyday definition of control, forgetting about paradoxes of "free will".

Mentioned in another comment, but not explicitly: this falls under the general optimisation mindset. Not just blindly repeating the set of actions that once led to a positive outcome, but experimenting further to find the sweet spot/area - be it the optimal amount of More Dakka or Less Dakka. For example, in "The How of Happiness", the author explicitly advises doing the gratitude journal once a week rather than every day, to make it a ritual of actually feeling and expressing gratitude, rather than quickly writing down 3 relatively positive things as quickly as possible; not that the latter isn't effective, but it's less effective than savouring the gratitude. (I think thit pitfall is easy to avoid, but it's a good example) Another example could be sleep: suppose you've tried cutting back on sleep and found that 30 minutes a day for a week didn't affect your cognition. You could try both cutting back another 30 minutes or going the other way and trying to get an extra hour's sleep - what if increasing your sleep time actually gave you benefits that outweighed the extra hour in the evening?