Taking control of your happiness and productivity

Peter_McIntyre

Here I talk about Julian Rotter's locus of control, and the implications of the research on our health, happiness and productivity.

As per my last article(s), feel free to let me know what you think here, privately, or anonymously.

Link

Here I talk about Julian Rotter's locus of control, and the implications of the research on our health, happiness and productivity.

As per my last article(s), feel free to let me know what you think here, privately, or anonymously.

Link

I've heard this advice before, and on every occasion I've been reluctant to follow it. The thing is, I actually believe that external factors having more influence over one's life than internal ones is the factually accurate thing to believe, and every time I hear someone telling people to shift their locus of control to oneself, I can't help but dismiss it as one of those white lies you're supposed to tell yourself in order to improve your outcomes in life.

I'm not sure I can currently think about the matter clearly enough to tell whether this belief is actually a question of factual accuracy or some sort of choice one makes, but my intuitions lean strongly towards the former.

Work overdetermination into your model. Overdetermination is like execution by a firing squad, getting 12 shots of which there are 6 that would be enough to kill the condemned alone. So you cannot say which shot killed him, because you could take any away and he is still dead, in fact you could take any five of the six away and he is still dead.

Overdetermination means external factors can predict 80% of your success and yet internal factors could also predict 80% of your success.

In an overdetermined system, just because it is factually accurate that exter... (read more)

1Error11y

This, I think. It looks to me like an attempt to deliberately invoke the Fundamental Attribution Error on oneself. That said, I still think there's a core of use here. Picture a game involving a couple of dice -- say one four-sided die and one six-sided die. To win the game you need to roll above, say, 8. The catch is that the d6 is rolled as usual (chance), but the d4 can be influenced -- in the easiest case you can just set it on the table however you like, harder cases require some set of difficult actions to get a particular roll. It's pretty clear that you have some control over this outcome. In fact, it's necessary to exert some control if you want to win, because the chance die can't reach the winning value alone. On the other hand, sometimes chance will screw you sufficiently thoroughly that no amount of effort will suffice. This seems like a pretty good model of how life works, and justifies discarding both the "it's all me, I put all this effort in and failed and that is evidence that I am a Platonic Failure" attitude and the "it's all chance, no point in putting in the effort" attitude.

1Richard_Kennaway11y

I think of internal vs. external locus as more like a decision or a purpose than a belief.