Agency

You might have independence, and you might be an ambitious person—but if you can’t even begin to fathom creating and playing by your own rules, do you really have agency?

The mismatch between past and present doesn’t seem trivial to me — if the “you” of today can so blithely disregard the “you” of yesterday, then it follows that the “you” I’m talking to now might very well not be the one who shows up for our date tomorrow. There’s a kind of unpredictable change that seems to lie outside of the virtues of growth and... See more

you are a self-modifying machine, a particle with partial control over its own future, and it pays to know what all the buttons do. I’ve heard many people describe to me what sound like levers in their own souls, but I know very few people who realize that they can pull on them deliberately, if they want to.

When you're agencymaxxing, others become more interested in helping

you because you're a good investment. You, the agencymaxxer, apply a

multiplier to others' help so that their help goes further than if

they applied that help to someone who wastes it by not helping

themself. People like when their help makes a meaningful difference

and they don't like... See more

you can be high agency without being highly ambitious. That might describe somebody who is highly agentic in shaping the kind of personal, emotional, or spiritual life they want, but who is not especially motivated to succeed financially or professionally.