Name: Stop Giving People Control Over Your Life | The Philosophy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Uploaded: 2025-07-17T08:56:26.000Z
Duration: 6 min 22 s
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Your locus of control is simply the belief about where control over your life comes from.

Do you ever feel like you're not in control of your life?

Like you're just a pawn in a game that's being played by someone else?

That if it weren't for a bad decision that someone else made, you would be happier, wealthier, and better off?

You have what we can call an external locus of control.

A person with an external locus of control believes that their life is largely out of their control and that they are simply at the mercy of other people, luck, or fate.

And if you have this type of mindset, I have some bad news for you.

If you want strength, you have to shift your locus of control.

People with an internal locus of control believe that they are in control of their lives.

They believe that they can make things happen.

If you take on an external locus of control, you give up responsibility for the outcomes of your own life and become a victim.

And as a victim, you become powerless to change your own fate.

But if you take on an internal locus of control, you take responsibility for the outcomes of your life and become a creative agent.

And as a creative agent, you become empowered to control your own destiny.

A great example of someone with a strong internal locus of control is Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

In 1945, after writing a letter criticizing Joseph Stalin, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and spent 8 years in Russian prison and labor camps.

And after that, he was forced to spend 3 more years in exile.

And amazingly, instead of blaming others for his situation, he took responsibility for it himself.

In the Gulag Archipelago, he said that, no matter what situation you were in, it was possible to go over your past with a fine-toothed comb and determine an error that you made that landed you in your current situation.

You can always find the mistake that caused you to suffer.

Solzhenitsyn even said as much in his book.

This isn't an idea that everyone can accept, but for those who do, they free themselves completely of the victim mindset, they adopt an internal locus of control, and they take complete responsibility for the outcomes of their lives.

So Solzhenitsyn took complete responsibility for ending up in prison.

Even when it would have been easy to play the victim and blame the government, the police, the country, the community, or the people, he didn't blame anyone but himself.

He wrote, All the writers who wrote about prison, but who did not themselves serve time there, considered it their duty to express sympathy for prisoners and to curse prison.

I nourished my soul there, and I say without hesitation, bless you, prison, for having been in my life.

Because he took total responsibility for the outcomes of his life, he grew in prison.

He adopted an internal locus of control and took complete responsibility for his life.

He took what could have been one of the worst situations in his life and made it the best.

And in 1956, eleven years after imprisonment and exile, he moved to central Russia where he began his writing career.

He dedicated his life to communicating the wisdom he had gained in prison.

And in the year 1970, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Would Solzhenitsyn have been as great of a literary figure if he had an external locus of control?

A great literary figure needs insight, and insight comes from knowing yourself.

There is nothing that so aids and assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one's own transgressions, errors, and mistakes.

And so if Solzhenitsyn had an external locus of control, he would have never gotten to know himself in prison.

He would be too busy blaming others for the outcomes of his life.

And as a result, he would never learn the relationship between his actions and their outcomes.

And all great writers must know the relationship between actions and their outcomes.

And without insight, Solzhenitsyn would not have been a great literary figure.

So in my estimation, the adoption of an internal locus of control played a significant role in Solzhenitsyn's greatness.

Will you have an internal or an external locus of control?

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As always, thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time.