The mindset that's changing my life

I feel like everybody at some point in their life has met somebody who was truly inspiring. You know, they seem to have their life figured out. They are determined; they can carve out their own destiny. They create their own luck.

On the flip side, a lot of us have met people who seem to just bury themselves in a hole and are unable to get out of it. You know, they're unable to recognize the opportunities in front of them. They harbor a lot of negativity towards life, and they seem perpetually stuck, helpless against seemingly endless negative external forces.

I feel like a lot of people talk about these two types of people and try to distill one single belief or concept that separates the two of them. If you just adopt this belief, then you'll be like the successful person and not like the unsuccessful person. But I feel like it's a little foolish to do so because everybody's life is so wildly different. You know, people had different upbringings; people have such different instilled beliefs about the world, or religion, or whatever.

It's hard to just say that one single belief will change someone's life for the better for eternity and they'll never experience hardship again. But I have noticed one trait that successful people seem to share more often than unsuccessful people. I can't help but think that there is a strong correlation between having that belief and having success in life.

That is that successful people tend to have an internal locus of control, and less successful people tend to have an external one. So, what is locus of control? Locus of control is the degree to which people believe that they, as opposed to external forces, have control over the outcome of events in their lives.

So you, watching this right now, either have an external locus of control or an internal locus of control. I think the severity of either of these extremes was formed through your childhood, your development, and your transition into adulthood. Because children, very young children especially, have an external locus of control.

External forces have control over the outcomes of events in their lives. When you're a kid, you're pretty much absolutely helpless, especially when you're a very young kid. You know, you can't really feed yourself or clothe yourself. You're so dependent on a parental figure to provide you with all of your needs that you basically have no choice but to develop a very external locus of control.

The situations of your life are entirely out of your control, and you're entirely dependent on some sort of third party to provide you with what you need to survive. There's nothing wrong with that; kids don't really have a choice in the matter. That is their world; that's a factual and realistic belief to have as a kid.

But hopefully, you had a competent parental figure or leader as you were growing up that kind of taught you the ropes: how to cook, how to clean, how to make money, how to fend for yourself in the world. I've always thought that if a parent does their job right, they basically phase themselves out.

Hopefully, by the time you're an adult, you still want your parents around, but you don't need them around. You know, if they were to die, you'd be okay; you could fend for yourself. You can figure stuff out. But unfortunately, for a lot of us, we bring a lot of the helplessness of childhood into adulthood.

We never shake the idea that we need to be provided for somehow. We remain dependent on some sort of external system to provide us with the necessary materials to survive and thrive. A lot of the time, this is really hard to spot from an occupational standpoint. Sometimes this can look like being unsatisfied with your job, and you're working so hard but getting paid so little.

So you externalize this struggle onto your boss or your provider and you blame him for your life's problems. You know, my life sucks because my boss doesn't see how much I'm worth and he's not paying me enough money. Or you might look at the government and say, "The government's not giving me the proper tax breaks that I need in my societal class, and it's making it really hard for me."

The tricky thing is that a lot of the time these are valid complaints; there's a certain amount of logic to them. But the default shouldn't be to place all the blame and place all of the responsibility for changing the outcome of your life onto these external forces. Otherwise, we will just be imprisoned by them for our entire lives.

Our default should be to look at the cards that we are given and take full responsibility for how we play those cards. I feel like having this internal locus of control is extremely important in today's day and age because, obviously, in 2020 we were just hit with a global pandemic.

So much of that felt so far out of our control that it was very tempting. I know for me personally, it was to develop a feeling of helplessness — almost that childlike helplessness started to blossom again. I felt like I had to put my entire life on hold, put all my habits on hold, until this whole pandemic blew over.

Sometime halfway through, I realized that I can work within this system. There are things that I can do to improve my life despite the crappy situation, and it is my sole responsibility to figure out how to thrive within the environment that I've been placed. It's nobody's responsibility to come be your knight in shining armor and fight the dragons in your life; it's only your responsibility.

I don't want this to come across like I'm scolding you, like the father you never had. No, I'm just kidding. But hopefully to empower you. Once you start adopting more of an internal locus of control, it'll start to feel a lot less like life is happening to you, but it'll start to feel a lot more like life is happening due to you.

That's a very empowering belief to have. In fact, I would say it's a prerequisite to making any sort of substantial change in your life. Your positive actions to work your way out of a bad situation do have an impact. Your efforts are not in vain because not only do you have the power to change your life, you're the only one who does.

Videos like these are made possible thanks to amazing sponsors like Skillshare. I actually recently just bought a kind of expensive piano, and I did this so that I would have no excuse not to get better at jazz improv. Probably not the best use of my money, but I couldn't resist.

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You know, just like hit the bell icon if you really want to get notified, but hell, get off the notification train! Free yourself from this algorithmic living and don't hit the bell icon. If you've hit the bell icon, unhit it. You know, that's a bold move, but I don't know, I feel like the algorithm probably will still serve you the video.

Anyways, I'm not going crazy; you're going crazy. Catch you in the next video. It's going to be really, really quick within the next few days actually, and it's going to feature a special guest that you guys already know. You all know him, and he'll be in the video, so see ya.