Agency

Agency can be formally defined as the subjective feeling of having control over one’s actions and their consequences…Put differently, you don’t feel as though life is just happening to you, with your only choice being to sit back and accept it all. Instead, you feel as though you are an active participant in your life; you are making things happen.

The power of agency is, in practice, the power to build: to direct our intelligence toward the work of understanding the world and adapting it to our needs. It’s how we impose a purposeful order on nature’s chaos.  

Agency is the capacity to act. Gaining agency is gaining the capacity to do something different from the rigid path of events that simply happen to you. Remarkable people typically go off-script early, usually in more than one way. Carnegie becoming a telegraph message boy is one opportunity; asking how to operate the telegraph is another. He was

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