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.

The Americans were always nervous, telling me I wasn’t shooting sufficient coverage. I took my assistant aside and asked, “What do they mean by coverage? I have insurance coverage for my car, but coverage when making a film?” They want me to get a range of intermediate shots, close-ups and reverse angles, all for safety’s sake. But I have always fi

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It was there all along, that possibility; I could have reached for it all these years. The thing that kept my hand from rising was in my head. What I needed was to let my care grab hold of me and pull me away like a river—or like a drop of water running down the trunk of a beech tree, feeling out the details of this world, the bark, the lichens, lo... See more

but it is like the force of a river being pulled toward the sea.

I wish I had a book that I could put in her hands, and it helps her learn what many never learn, or learn too late, namely, that the possibilities are much bigger than you think, that you can live more deeply, and truly, and that you can solve almost any problem if you put your mind to it. A book about how to handle being sentenced to freedom, and ... See more

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

1. 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

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People with high agency tend to be obsessed with finding simpler solutions, to the point where normal people think they are idiots.

He did the actual work and got rapid feedback from reality, learning precisely what he needed to solve his current problems. This was faster.

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.