Agency
Low agency is being stuck for years on a problem without realising it could’ve been solved by one hour of searching YouTube.
George Mack • High Agency In 30 Minutes
"When you're told that something is impossible, is that the end of the conversation, or does that start a second dialogue in your mind? How to get around whoever it is that's just told you that you can't do something" - Eric Weinstein on high agency.
George Mack • High Agency In 30 Minutes
Thomas Leroy - The Weight of Thought. What the Rumination Trap feels like.
Getting stuck in the trap of inaction because of all the potential things that could go wrong, there is some satisfaction in feeling like there’s something being done when in reality we’re just frozen by fear.
This question from Nick throws a first principles grenade into your mind. It forces you to start the problem again from a fresh perspective free of past assumptions. You often realise the real problem wasn’t the problem itself. It was the assumptions you were viewing it through.
George Mack • High Agency In 30 Minutes
How To Spot High Agency People
- Weird teenage hobbies - Teenage years are the hardest time to go against social pressures. If they can go against the crowd as a teenager, they can go against the crowd as an adult.
- Treadmill energy - If you meet with them when you're tired and defeated, you leave the room ready to run a marathon on a treadmill
George Mack • High Agency In 30 Minutes
High agency people go against the social tide, made up rules aren’t a barrier to take interest in something and they are truly authentic human beings.
Go to the funerals of the people you care about and the normal rational behaviour is never mentioned. It’s filled with weird and hilarious stories of the individual — the times they broke out of the median distribution of human behaviour and displayed their uniqueness.
If you’re hiding your weird individualism to make the tribe like you, remember:... See more
If you’re hiding your weird individualism to make the tribe like you, remember:... See more
George Mack • High Agency In 30 Minutes
We tend to hide as a society what makes us unique. Sometimes we don’t even know what exactly that is because we’re too focused on being liked that we lose ourselves in trying to please others. There’s no reward for doing things that aren't authentic, just oblivion.
One tool to make this easier is to reframe decisions as experiments . You’re no longer a perfectionist frozen on stage with everyone watching your every move, you’re a curious scientist in a lab trying to test a hypothesis. E.g. “ I’m 60% certain that moving to New York is better than 40% of staying in Doncaster...Ok. It’s time to Blitzkrieg. ”... See more
George Mack • High Agency In 30 Minutes
“Reframe decisions as experiments“ these experiments give us practical data and there’s confidence to be found when applying this principle.
