On agency

Put another way: Herzog mapped the actual landscape and found the shortest path to his specific goals. (And his goals were very specific. He never wanted to be “a filmmaker,” he wanted to make this film and then that film .) Working in a goal-directed way, he gathered the information he needed; he found people who could help him; and he learned the... 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

Last May, when our oldest daughter Maud turned seven, I wrote:

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 i

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Herzog, on the other hand, realized that film school was just one option among many. And the better solution, given his goals, was to take the money he had saved up by working as a welder and fund his own films, then send the films to festivals and use the prize money to fund ever more ambitious projects. He did the actual work and got rapid feedba... See more

Most problems are solvable. But that doesn’t mean the solution will look like you hope it will; there will be trade offs. While Herzog made Signs of Life (1968), Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970), Fata Morgana (1971), Land of Silence and Darkness (1971), and Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), he had to live at home with his mom to afford making the f... See more

Or phrased negatively, the opposite of agency can mean one of two things. Either (1) doing what you are “supposed to do,” playing social games that do not align with what, on reflection, seems valuable to you and/or (2) being passive or ineffective in the face of problems (assuming your problems can’t be solved, that someone else should solve them,... 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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The reason having Maud in my life made me more agentic was that it was the first time I experienced what it means to surrender to my values. I had a lot of idiosyncratic opinions and values when I was younger, too, but I held onto them in a rather flimsy way. Whenever things got too hard or people disapproved of what I was doing, I tended to give u... See more

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.

Or, no, that formulation isn’t deep enough. 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... See more