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
A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don’t even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are.
People have an enormous capacity to make things happen. A combination of self-doubt, giving up too early, and not pushing hard enough prevents most people from ever reaching... See more
People have an enormous capacity to make things happen. A combination of self-doubt, giving up too early, and not pushing hard enough prevents most people from ever reaching... See more
Sam Altman • How to Be Successful
You gotta be understanding who you are and where you're at in life right now. You absolutely have to be figuring out how you can increase your capacity to influence your own thoughts and behaviors as well as your faith in your ability to handle a wide range of tasks and situations.
Agencymaxxing happens through doing things. You can think all you... See more
Agencymaxxing happens through doing things. You can think all you... See more
You Need to Be Agencymaxxing
- Strangest Loop (Source)
You will never be fully ready and there will never be a perfect time. It’s genuinely not about waiting for the right time to do something when you’re ready, it’s about doing things before you’re ready just to make them exist. Those quotes that say “make it exist first, you can make it good later” are very true.
Erifili Gounari • literally just do things
A popular narrative now casts all living entities as ‘machines’ built by genes, as Richard Dawkins called them. For Mayr, biology was unique among the sciences precisely because its objects of study possessed a program that encoded apparent purpose, design and agency into what they do. On this view, agency doesn’t actually manifest in the moment of... See more
Philip Ball • Life With Purpose
FOMO is good. Being plugged in is good. There is valuable info at all levels from twitter gossip to philosophy books. You should stay plugged in. You can manage anxiety and beat the House without resorting to shaming social platforms into managing attention for you. That's a terrible yielding of agency.
Venkatesh Rao • Against Waldenponding - by Venkatesh Rao Against Waldenponding
A victim mentality is, in my opinion, one of the biggest threats to cultivating a sense of agency. Perpetual victimhood cannot coexist with agency.