Saved by Stuart Evans
Learning to exercise agency
High agency is such an important idea because the more agency an individual or society has -- the more problems they can solve.
High agency can be a confusing idea to understand because it’s not just one idea. It’s a combination of three distinct skills rarely found together:
High agency can be a confusing idea to understand because it’s not just one idea. It’s a combination of three distinct skills rarely found together:
- Clear thinking
- Bias to action
- Disagreeability
George Mack • High Agency In 30 Minutes
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
Henrik Karlsson • On Agency
"Agency, for me, is the ability to know where one is, to understand one’s own position, to have one’s own capabilities, and to have the ability to affect and change one’s own life, in as broad a range of ways of thinking as possible. It’s something that is under huge pressure for most of us. It’s something that is taken away from us actively in
... See moreAt 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
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