One of the habits I love most about my faith is that it keeps me a student. Islam has never let me get comfortable in what I already know — it keeps pulling me back toward learning, toward growth, toward staying teachable. That love of learning is exactly why Tuesdays matter to me.
For about five years now, I've spent my Tuesdays with Ramit Sethi's Money for Couples podcast. Ramit introduces a new couple every week, and I've listened to roughly 90% of the episodes. Last Tuesday was no different — until it was.
The Couple Who Chose Blame
This particular couple said something that stopped me in my tracks: "We have ADHD, so we function differently about money." Fair enough — different doesn't mean wrong. But then the husband said, in the feedback portion, that Ramit "should have done his homework" on ADHD.
That's not a diagnosis talking. That's the blame game talking.
According to Verywell Mind, people play the blame game when they try to detach themselves from responsibility as their position feels threatened, shifting fault onto someone or something else instead of owning it. Sometimes it looks like finger-pointing. Sometimes it looks like denial. Sometimes it looks like quietly excluding or scapegoating whoever's easiest to blame. In this couple's case, it looked like handing their financial coach the responsibility for understanding a condition they hadn't even led with — and then holding him accountable for not reading their minds.
Locus of Control: The Real Diagnosis
Ramit noticed something before the feedback even came — this couple has a low locus of control.
Locus of control, a concept developed by psychologist Julian Rotter back in 1954, describes how much a person believes they — versus outside forces — determine the outcomes in their life. Someone with an internal locus believes their choices shape their life. Someone with an external locus believes life happens to them: chance, fate, circumstance, other people.
Here's the part that stayed with me: this couple makes $150,000 a year combined, with two children in the home. I am a single mother making less than a third of that. And yet I carry a far higher locus of control over my money than they do.
Income didn't build that gap. Mindset did.
Victimhood Is a Mindset, Not a Circumstance
Victim mentality is the habit of consistently viewing yourself as the target of forces outside your control — believing your failures and struggles are primarily things that happened to you rather than things you had a hand in. People who internalize victimhood are operating from a low locus of control, whether or not they'd ever use that language for it.
I agree with Ramit on this: people with a low locus of control struggle to do the work required to become wealth builders. Why would you sacrifice, budget, save, and build if you don't believe your effort actually changes the outcome?
Even when I have genuinely been the victim of a circumstance — and I have — I refuse, almost to a fault, to live inside that identity. Because victimhood and wealth building cannot occupy the same space. One believes the outcome is out of your hands. The other believes the outcome is your responsibility. There is no in-between.
How Locus of Control Gets Built
Locus of control isn't something you're born with and stuck with forever — it's built, activity by activity, through experiences of success. That's why the love of learning matters so much in what I call the success matrix.
Here's the shift: even when I don't "win" at something, learning through the failure IS the win. My mindset is simple — I either win by learning, or I win at the activity itself. And in a lot of cases, simply finishing is its own version of success. Learning stacks the odds in my favor of being successful far more than it stacks the odds of failure.
That's the mindset shift — and it's an easy one to make. It quietly and steadily decreases victim mentality, one small win at a time.
Wealth Building Starts in the Mind
Wealth building begins with the mindset. And the fruit of a positive, high-locus-of-control mindset shows up in physical abundance, mental abundance, and spiritual abundance, in sha Allah.
You don't need a $150,000 household income to build wealth. You need to stop handing your outcomes to circumstance and start claiming your role in them.
How are you deciding to be successful today?
For me, the answer Islam has encouraged in me is simple: learn daily, from the cradle to the grave. If I learned something, then the day was a successful day — Alhamdulillah (all praise is due to Allah).