Maybe you’ll see the humor in this blog by the end, maybe not. I sure did as I was writing it.
Around this time in 2021, I wrote a blog titled “A Managerial vs. Entrepreneurial Approach to Leadership.” At the end of the piece, I mentioned how future blogs would deliver more nuggets of wisdom. My assumption at the time was that I’d pump out a blog a month and become a prolific content creator. But, as I’m sure many of you can relate to, distractions from this blogging effort consistently found a way to prevent me from writing as I’ve tried to guide our small business through many trials and tribulations over the last few years.
In that last blog, I laid out the difference between a managerial and entrepreneurial approach to leadership. I did this through an example involving a cyber-attack on a K-12 school system. As that example showed, developing entrepreneurial skills and not just managerial skills is critical for effective leadership today. But which entrepreneurial skills can make the most difference in our daily lives? Let’s dig into one of them: the development of an internal locus of control.
Stick with me, psychobabble commencing…
What is Your Locus of Control?
Psychologists define locus of control (LOC) as “a construct that is used to categorize people’s basic motivational orientations and perceptions of how much control they have over the conditions of their lives.” They go on to describe how people with an external LOC tend to respond to external stimuli. These folks generally perceive their life outcomes as outside of their control. In contrast, those with an internal LOC find motivation through their own intentions and perceive their life outcomes as a product of their own abilities and agency.
A quick aside – as a proud Gen Xer, I fondly remember my first days in the workforce in the early 90s. I was so astounded by how email had changed my work environment in such a short time. Prior to its launch in my workplace, we received all the information we needed in four ways. And amazingly, we still effectively designed and installed satellite communication equipment around the world. Back then, we only had the options of calling someone, walking to their office to talk, discussing it in a meeting, or getting a written memo/piece of mail/fax. I vividly remember describing to my wife that now, with email, I felt like a lab rat waiting for a piece of cheese to fall in my lap so that I’d have a task to complete. I also noticed that the distraction that came from a rapidly expanding number of emails was taking me away from making progress on other projects that previously seemed easy to accomplish.
Constant Distraction and its Effects
Now, let’s reflect on our own lives each day in 2024. During your workday, how many times are you distracted by external sources? If you’re like me, the day is an endless barrage of incoming emails and text messages from everyone I’ve ever known, the desire to see what my friends in Italy had for dinner last night on Facebook, checking news sites for the latest in world events, and any number of other distractions so generously provided by our constantly connected world.
But what is all this constant distraction doing to us? This article gives a nice summary of the book Dopamine Nation by Dr. Anna Lembke, where she says, “The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation.” Those distractions that we all feed on every day, just like the rat with that cheese, give us dopamine hit after hit and make us feel good for a short moment. But as Dr. Lembke describes, with every high, there needs to be a low. It’s no surprise that we fall into a “joy-seeking abyss.”
An Antidote to Distraction: Entrepreneurial Thinking
Here’s where an entrepreneurial mindset can play an important role. If I’m effectively building my business right now, I’m so motivated by my chosen end goals that I can’t let constant distractions drag me into that joy-seeking abyss. I concentrate on turning off the external stimuli and focusing only on what I can control. In this way, entrepreneurial people develop an internal LOC and become less distracted by all those external stimuli.
The good news is that today, we are starting to come up with ways to limit distractions (for instance, I’m using Apple’s Focus feature right now). But it’s a hard slog, and overcoming this problem takes quite a bit of effort. I like the ideas provided by Nir Ayal in his book Indistractable to attack this problem. In it, he describes how we can “hack back our external triggers” through a variety of habits. The articles on his blog, and this one in particular, provide some great guidance on taking control of your time and attention.
At ELI, our work centers on helping others understand and apply the entrepreneurial mindset to achieve the life that they imagine. I hope that this short read gave you the dopamine hit that you needed to make it through the day. Maybe it also gave you a couple of ideas on how to practice a more entrepreneurial life. Keep an eye out because in the coming months I’ll keep the blogs coming about other entrepreneurial mindset concepts. Just some more distractions for you to try and avoid!