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

By taking responsibility for the consequences of their own perceptions, observers can transcend the role of victim to an understanding that “nothing out there has power over you.” It is not life’s events, but how one reacts to them and the attitude that one has about them, which determine whether the events have a positive or negative effect on one... 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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