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 what I learn, the... See more

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 to understand their problems and the solution space. They act in incoherent or ineffective ways because their mental model of the situation is too limited to show them a way out. They are not attuned enough... See more

If you have a clear understanding of the goal, there are often paths that lead there that are much shorter than the default path. A good question to ask is: what is the simplest solution that could possibly work?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.