Ambassador Jett was on campus last week. However, he did not come alone. He brought a guest with an amazing and inspiring past to share his story: one of the lost boys of Sudan. From being a boy 7-years old walking for weeks through jungles to escape war to being an American diplomat about to embark in his first assignment, Gai Nyok has definitely seen the two sides of the coin in life.
It would be hard to summarize his story in just one post and I will probably fail to transmit such story to you, so I’ll avoid that bit (however, if you are interested there’s a great movie/documentary title The Lost Boys of Sudan that will give you a great insight of his early life). Instead, I want to focus in something that got me thinking throughout the talk.
Nyok narrated how when he left the Kenyan refugee camp he had done 6 years of school at the camp. He then came to the US and was hosted by an American family. As a teenager, he now had to go to school here in the US. He, however, mentioned how back in the camp he took his school work seriously and was able to immediately start in 9th grade and then graduate in his junior year. Not only this, but he was able to seize every opportunity that came his way by putting his best effort and working hard –passing the interview to come to the US, becoming a Pickering fellow, and obtaining a job with the Department of State.
Do you believe that you are in charge of your own destiny?
It’s a really important question to ask. The answer to that question, can reveal a lot more about you than you think. In Psychology, there’s the concept of a person’s locus of control. There are people that have a perceived internal locus of control and others that perceive it as something external (Weiner’s attribution theory).
A person with an internal locus of control believes in their actions and its consequences. Believing in your ability to shape your future indicates that you possess this trait. You like keeping control of things and you can constantly envision your how things are going to turn out. On the other hand, a person with an external locus of control will tell you that luck is what makes things possible. Bad things happen, you can’t do anything about it. If you missed that job opportunity, it’s probably because your planets were not aligned on that day.
Well, you might be thinking, “isn’t that just how people think, I mean, some people just think differently than others.” Well, yeah, but it turns out that one can be more beneficial than the other.
People with an external locus of control are more prone to clinical depression and higher stress levels (Benassi). It is no surprise too that people with internal loci of control (who think that hard work will lead them to their goals) tend to perform better (i.e. academically), because, well, they believe in hard work. On the other hand, people who rely on fate and luck, tend to perform worse (see works by Cassandra Whyte).
Hard work can say a lot about you. I’ve no doubt that most of the people that will end up reading this blog have an internally driven locus of control. It’s what got you here and it’s what will continue driving you forward. However, as you go through life you will undoubtedly come across people who think (as with many other things) the other way. If anything, when you get that leadership position that you are aiming for, I just gave you one more thing to keep in mind when you deal with other people.
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