Agency
Ideas around agency, aka the sense of control that you feel in your life + your capacity to influence your own thoughts and behavior
unoptimal and
Agency
On the other side of creative aliveness, there is flatness. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, about what happens when our worlds go flat. The dynamism we lose, the emotional urges we suppress, the original impulses we become too afraid to nurture.
On the running path recently, a song came on. It was by Eminem. His music is not my choice for ... See more
On the running path recently, a song came on. It was by Eminem. His music is not my choice for ... See more
Leandra Medine Cohen • Notes from the running path
Leandra on anti-flatness
Frequent lamenting about how bad things are (in politics or relationships or other culture gripes) is mostly a way for people to avoid responsibility for what they can change. If you constantly repeat that everything is bad, it lets your ego off the hook for doing nothing.
“The capacity for growth depends on one’s ability to internalize and to take personal responsibility. If we forever see our life as a problem caused by others, a problem to be "solved," then no change will occur.”
― James Hollis, The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife
there’s no character trait more essential to individual and societal progress than agency. Agency is the embodied conviction that you have the power to create meaningful change in your life and transform your vision into reality. It’s the engine that powers human progress.
Grappling with the big questions
@HunterGlenn @visakanv @goblinodds That is literally the first question you need to answer for yourself if you want to train agency. What do I want?
amidst interesting comment thread
I have been enamored with Samo Burja’s notion of a live player for a while, which he contrasts to a dead player. From his Great Founder Theory:
A live player is a person or well-coordinated group of people that is able to do things they have not done before. A dead player is a person or group of people that is working off a script, incapable of doin... See more
A live player is a person or well-coordinated group of people that is able to do things they have not done before. A dead player is a person or group of people that is working off a script, incapable of doin... See more
Peter Limberg • Becoming a Live Player
In ordinary language, we frequently speak of machinery or ideas ‘doing’ things in our lives. But they do nothing. People – human persons – produce, operate and apply their creations. The problem with assigning agency, even informally, to the nonhuman is that this disguises the strength of human control, limited though it is in other respects. It le... See more
Bennett Gilbert • On hope, philosophical personalism and Martin Luther King Jr | Aeon Essays
spent the weekend with a bunch of highly agentic people and now i've got a bunch of thoughts about agency
A while ago I got interested in being more agentic. Emmett Shear tweeted that it was teachable. He would train people by prompting them with certain questions. I gathered those questions and put them into a flow chart that I go through to problem-solve: https://t.co/kM0MID8bT5... See more