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.

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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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.

I was sure I knew which problems were solvable and which weren’t—it is almost arrogant if you think about it. I gave up writing essays and instead wrote novels, because that was what publishers seemed to want. But I never cared for novels enough to get good at it. My writing fizzled out.

What made my decision especially unagentic is the fact that... See more

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,... See more

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

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

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.