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
I think that talking about agency and introspection separately is misguided. People who emphasize how to get things done, and move faster, and reach higher levels of mastery—agency without introspection—tend to get pulled into fierce yet boring status competitions. People who emphasize introspection and emotions but without a problem solving... See more
Spot on thought via Henrik Karlsson
It’s not that entrepreneurs are natural rule-breakers. Rather … they want self-direction. They aren’t going to take the world at face value. They have to figure it out for themselves.
Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.... See more
David Foster Wallace,
Nix 🕊 • carry yourself lightly
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
our ability to bind our future selves to a future is what makes us agentic, rather than just moment-to-moment responders. Maybe the total inability to commit is a deeper kind of temporal fragmentation—the self splintering into a thousand disconnected moments instead of flowing through time as a continuous “I”. It’s fascinating to turn this idea... See more
Sindhu Shivaprasad • commitment is an act of agency
Because I don't want to be a monk. I don't want to go live in a cabin. I'm not gonna swear off Netflix or podcasts or whatever. I like this stuff. It's just a problem of excess and moderation, and I'm trying to figure out how to live my life in a way that is more deliberate, and less passive. I don’t want to just follow compulsive desire, which is... See more
J.E. Petersen • Uncomfortable on Purpose
The opposite to reflexive agency is prompted agency - agency which only becomes available given some prompt to action. “That does seem like a problem. Have you tried solving it?” is my only-half-joking prompt I use with people: It’s something that highlights the failure of agency, in a way that makes people aware that action is an option available
... See moreDavid R. MacIver • Learning to exercise agency
What idea changed how you view the world?
Here's mine: High Agency.
The high agency library: (19 best examples I've found in 4 years) https://t.co/IOttWTOC5u
“the high agency library” - great examples of agency