How to Be More Agentic

When you make changes in your life, especially when learning new skill sets, you’ll have to cross a moat of low status—a period where you are bad at the thing or fail to know things that are obvious to other people.

It’s called a moat both because you can’t just leap to the other side and because anyone who can cross it has a real advantage. It’spos... See more

By casting a wide net, I learned that I have very little ability to predict how useful a call will be in advance. There is relevance, when work is closely related to something you’re working on, and usefulness, when work advances something you’re working on. Relevance is easier to predict, but it’s not a very good proxy for usefulness, which is a p... See more

radical agency involves finding real edges: things you are willing to do that others aren’t, often because they’re annoying, unpleasant, or obscured in a cloud of aversion.

Ask for things. Ask for things that feel unreasonable , to make sure your intuitions about what’s reasonable are accurate (try not to be a jerk in the process). If you’re only asking for things you get, you’re not aiming high enough.

Over the years, as I’ve aged and made smarter friends, I’ve gradually grown dumber relative to my peers. I’ve compensated by dialing up my agency, which I think of as “manifest determination to make things happen.”