Sometimes we conflate two very different things: our locus of control and our locus of influence.
Your locus of control is the set of things you can fully determine — what time you wake up, whether you hit the gym or hit snooze, whether you send that email or procrastinate. The buck stops with you.
Your locus of influence is the set of things you can affect but not determine. You can’t control whether you get that job, but you can influence it massively. You can’t control whether your startup succeeds, but you can tilt the odds in a hundred small ways. You can’t control how your children turn out, but every conversation, every moment of patience or impatience, ripples through their lives in ways you’ll never fully trace.
There is a trap: we tend to overestimate our locus of control and underestimate our locus of influence. We pour energy into maintaining an illusion of control over things that were never fully ours to command. And when faced with things we clearly can’t control, we throw up our hands and say, “Well, that’s not up to me.” We surrender. This is a massive misallocation of effort.
Holding two ideas at once
The most productive way to move through the world is to hold two beliefs simultaneously. One: I can influence almost everything. Two: I can fully control almost nothing. These are not contradictions. They are complementary truths.
If you only believe the first, you become a control freak who burns out and blames yourself for every bad outcome. If you only believe the second, you become passive and fatalistic. But hold both, and you act with intention and humility. You play your hand as well as it can be played, and you accept that the cards were dealt by forces beyond you.
Why this matters
This isn’t just philosophy. Living this way has tangible advantages.
It dramatically expands your action space. Most people operate within a narrow band of things they believe they “control.” Everything else gets filed under “nothing I can do.” But when you shift from control to influence, the world opens up. You start asking “How can I nudge this?” instead of “Can I control this?” — and your surface area for action turns out to be vastly larger than you thought.
It makes you more resilient. If you believe you control outcomes, every failure is a personal indictment. But if you understand you were always tilting probabilities, not guaranteeing results, then failure is just information. You adjust and roll again.
It reduces anxiety without reducing effort. Much of our anxiety comes from the gap between our desire for control and the reality that we don’t have it. Focus on influence, and the anxiety drops — but the effort often increases, because you’re no longer paralysed by “What if it doesn’t work?” Of course it might not work. That was always the deal.
And it compounds. Each small nudge in probability adds up. Make a hundred decisions a year and shift each by even a few percentage points, and the cumulative effect over a decade is staggering.
The dance floor and the balcony
Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky use a beautiful metaphor in their leadership work: the need to alternate between being on the dance floor and watching from the balcony. On the dance floor, you’re doing, executing, reacting. On the balcony, you step back and observe the patterns you can’t see when you’re in motion.
This is exactly the discipline that a life lived through influence demands. Your ability to influence isn’t static. It changes as you grow, as your circumstances shift. The shy introvert who couldn’t influence a room five years ago might now be a compelling speaker. The junior employee who had no leverage might now be in a position where a well-timed word changes the direction of a project. But you won’t notice any of this if you never step back.
You need the balcony view — regularly, deliberately — to ask: What can I influence now that I couldn’t before? Where has my leverage grown? What old strategies have stopped working? And then you go back to the dance floor and act on what you’ve seen.
Dance, observe, recalibrate, dance again.
Nudging the probability
You are not the author of your outcomes. You are the author of your probabilities. Every action you take, every skill you build, every relationship you invest in — these are all nudges. They don’t guarantee anything. But they shift the probability distribution of your life in a favourable direction.
You can’t control the wind. But you can adjust your sails. And if you keep adjusting — thoughtfully, persistently, with eyes on the horizon — you’ll be surprised at where you end up.