Locus of Control

I bought another book about running a marathon. This one is written by two professors who taught a class in university on how to run a marathon for beginner runners. They taught the class over 16 weeks and in the last week all the students participated in an official Marathon. In an interesting twist one professor is from the phys. ed. department and the other is from the psych. department. In addition to running 4 times a week, they held 2 lectures a week, one on the physical requirements for running a marathon and one on the psychological requirements. I'm hooked already.

They break the book into 17 chapters, one for each of 16 weeks leading up to the marathon and one for the weeks following. In each chapter they talk about what physical training you should be doing and what psychological training. Honestly, this book was written for me. Since I completed the Emotional Intelligence training here at Google a couple of years ago, I've been really interested in self awareness and self control.

In the first chapter, they bring up the topic of locus of control. Wikipedia defines it as "a person's belief about what causes the good or bad results in his life... Individuals with a high internal locus of control believe that events result primarily from their own behavior and actions. Those with a high external locus of control believe that powerful others, fate, or chance primarily determine events." The book makes the point that in order to get through the ridiculous amount of running, which is new for most of their students, you need to cultivate an internal locus of control. You need to have the ability to say, "It's raining out and I'm really busy in work. But the choice of whether I will run is in my control and I will go anyway," rather than, "It's raining out and I'm really busy in work. I won't have a good / successful run in those conditions. It sucks that the world is conspiring against me and I can't run." There's something really terrifying about describing this as a point of view. The intimidated girl inside who's still not sure she'll be able for this has just had all her excuses stripped away. There's really no reason good enough to give up. I'm the only one who can stop me from making it to the end and I have to take responsibility for that. Yikes!

Although, in reality, this is less scary today than it would have been several years ago. Working at Google has taught me that I'm responsible for any and all success in my life. There is no hand holding here. The lack of structure / increased freedom (depending on how you look at it) cultivates an environment where each engineer is expected to find their own place and shine on their own. It was really hard on me at first, and when I started at Google I spent the first few months asking my manager, "No, but what do you WANT me to do?" After a while I realized that I had to own the choices I was going to make. I couldn't rely on external forces of control to make anything happen for me. It has really changed my outlook on life in general. Reading the description on Wikipedia I believe that I have slowly grown into an internal locus of control viewpoint. And now I'm hoping that will get me to the finish line in Seattle.