On agency

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Everything can be learned, everything can be understood and reshaped to fit our values.

Brian Eno (quoted by Henrik Karlsson) • On agency

If I want to explore something, I never think about attending a class; I do the reading on my own or seek out experts for conversations.

Brian Eno (quoted by Henrik Karlsson) • On agency

To be agentic, you have to really look at the problem and at the solution space and accept the responsibility of learning what is necessary to make the problem go away.

Brian Eno (quoted by Henrik Karlsson) • On agency

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.

Brian Eno (quoted by Henrik Karlsson) • On agency

Why didn’t I see that it would be easy to fund essay writing in this way? It was, as I’ve said, partly a lack of imagination, partly a fear of looking stupid. But it was also that my thinking was bundled . I had conflated “being a writer” with “having a publisher” and “getting a salary from my writing.” These are not the same thing.

Brian Eno (quoted by Henrik Karlsson) • On agency

I think the main reason I didn’t realize my problems were solvable was a lack of imagination. I’d never seen anyone solve problems in an agentic way, and I failed to imagine that things I hadn’t seen done could be done by me.

Brian Eno (quoted by Henrik Karlsson) • On agency

Now, 22 years later, I’ve lived long enough to have learned that most things are actually doable if you care enough. I rarely feel blocked in the way I did when I was younger. But it is interesting that it was something I had to learn: that problems are solveable; that if I direct my attention to the problem and learn to understand it, and act on w... See more

Brian Eno (quoted by Henrik Karlsson) • On agency

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