Summary: The author shares her experience with developing agency, which she defines as “manifest determination to make things happen,” and outlines several strategies for cultivating it. These include seeking out real edges, asking for things that feel unreasonable, seeking real feedback, increasing one’s surface area for luck, assuming that everything is learnable, learning to love the moat of low status, and avoiding burnout by not working too hard. The author argues that agency is a skill that can be learned by anyone and is essential for building the life you want.
agency, which I think of as something like “manifest determination to make things happen.” (View Highlight)
In my way of thinking, radical agency is about finding real edges: things you are willing to do that others aren’t, often because they’re annoying or unpleasant. These don’t always surface in awareness to the point one is actually choosing — often they live in a cloud of aversion that strategically obscures the tradeoff. (View Highlight)
Court rejection
Ask for things. Ask for things that feel unreasonable, to make sure your intuitions about what’s reasonable are accurate (of course, try not to be a jerk in the process). If you’re only asking for things you get, you’re not aiming high enough. Jobs are a great example: Particularly if you’re early in your career, you should aim to get rejected from most things you apply for. If you have not yet learned the skill of absorbing rejection, court it deliberately: Apply for some jobs you really don’t think you’ll get so you can learn to decouple “no” from surprise and dejection. (View Highlight)
Seek real feedback
It’s hard to overstate how overpowered this one is. If you aren’t trying to get real feedback from people who know you, you’re cooking without tasting. This is, like, the lowest hanging fruit for self-improvement, but few people really try to pick it. (View Highlight)
Nearly all of my most fruitful collaborations over the last 3 years have come out of meetings I booked almost at random. My best conversation last week was with someone where the introducer told me “this person asked for an introduction but I’m not sure it’s a good use of your time.” (View Highlight)
Assume everything is learnable
Most subject matter is learnable, even stuff that seems really hard. But beyond that, many (most?) traits that people treat as fixed are actually quite malleable if you (1) believe they are and (2) put the same kind of work into learning them as you would anything else. (View Highlight)
Many other supposedly fixed traits can likewise be altered. Some other things you can learn: confidence, charisma, warmth, tranquility, optimism. Someone recently asked me how one might go about learning charisma, and the answer was really boring: by reading a few books, watching many hours of charismatic people interacting with others, and adopting a few of their habits. This is surely a plan of action most people could come up with if they didn’t have the notion that charisma is innate lodged in their heads. (View Highlight)
The idea is that making changes in your life, especially when learning new skill sets, requires you to cross a moat of low status, a period of time where you are actually bad at the thing or fail to know things that are obvious to other people. (View Highlight)
It’s called a moat both because you can’t just leap to the other side and because it gives anyone who can cross it a real advantage. It’s possible to cross the moat quietly, by not asking questions and not collaborating, but those tradeoffs really nerf learning. “Learn by doing” is standard advice, but you can’t do that unless you splash around in the moat for a bit. (View Highlight)
The reality is that grinding, even if it temporarily increases output, kills creativity and big picture thinking. (View Highlight)
Burnout is the ultimate agency-killer. This is so true that I’ve learned to identify a reduction in agency as one of the first signs of burnout, one that shows up even before I consciously realize what’s happening. A switch flips and I start looking for ways to rule out ideas and actions, to conclude they won’t work or aren’t necessary, rather than chasing better versions. (View Highlight)
These days I set boundaries that would have made me ashamed at earlier points in my life: I’m offline at 6 p.m. almost every night, and rigorously observe a Sunday Sabbath where nothing with the flavor of effort is tolerated. These will seem like small things to some people, but like a mortal sin to others in the communities I run in. (View Highlight)
Agency is the skill that built the world around you, an all-purpose life intensifier that lets you make your corner of it more like what you want it to be, whether that’s professional, relational, aesthetic, whatever. Build a better mousetrap. Have an enviable marriage. Start a country. No one is born with it, everyone can learn it, and it’s never too late. (View Highlight)
