Agency

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

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

The kind of agency that comes from knowing how to win friends and get things done is important and should be learned. But without aligning it with wisdom—and without fellow travelers on the path toward less foolishness—greater foolishness often follows.

Reminder that a sense of agency means feeling like you have control over your actions and their consequences . I think people tend to forget that second part; owning your mistakes and their consequences is extremely difficult, which might be a motivating factor for some people to adopt victim complexes. (A victim complex is learned!)

This is what nobody tells you: commitment is an act of agency . We often get through life comforted by the thought that we have the ability to make choices, theoretically . But there's a peculiar magic that happens when you actually exercise that choice: the world shifts on its axis. You make active choices about how to use your time, energy, and... See more