And though there were moments where I feared that the stress would break me, there was something very profound about experiencing, again and again, that problems that seemed unsolvable and overwhelming to me were solvable, always solvable. It changed my priors.

I had conflated “being a writer” with “having a publisher” and “getting a salary from my writing.” These are not the same thing.

Often, agency is almost gentle—an attunement to the world and the self, a feeling out the details of reality, and a finding of the path of least resistance. There is sometimes considerable force involved, hard work, but it is like the force of a river being pulled toward the sea.

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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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

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

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

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... See more

Often, agency is almost gentle—an attunement to the world and the self, a feeling out the details of reality, and a finding of the path of least resistance. There is sometimes considerable force involved, hard work, but it is like the force of a river being pulled toward the sea.