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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At the heart of agency lies a willingness to question defaults. To be agentic, you have to treat “how things are supposed to be done” as just one option among many.

Or, no, that formulation isn’t deep enough. When I think about friends of mine who struggle to be agentic, the problem isn’t precisely that they do the default thing; it’s that they fail... See more

Agency, as I see it, is an amalgamation of two skills, or mental dispositions: autonomy and efficacy.

Agency requires the capacity to formulate autonomous goals in life—the capacity to dig inside and figure out what wants to happen through you, no matter how strange or wrong it seems to others. In other words, it requires autonomy (which was what I... See more