Agency

The most successful entrepreneurs and business people aren’t necessarily the smartest. But the managerial tracks that have fueled the upper-middle class have been fed by a credentialed cognitive elite. I expect those priorities to shift toward agency, adaptability, and demonstrated value creation.

Being agentic is a gritty journey of trial and error, non-glamorous, and does not result in gold stars. The last thing one needs to be agentic is to appear right in contexts where being right cannot be accurately assessed. One needs to risk being wrong, which also means appearing wrong—a prospect that often translates to appearing stupid, one of... See more

the fear of commitment is really a failure of agency, of taking full responsibility for our choices and their consequences. A kind of learned helplessness dressed up as freedom. I think that’s why commitment feels so heavy to some people. You’re accepting full authorship of something, and you can't blame circumstances or timing or compatibility for... See more

The lowest level of choice is not making a conscious choice at all, which happens when you don’t notice that you even could make a choice. In this case there is effectively no space between stimulus and response, so you just act out your habitual behavior unconsciously. If you ever find yourself skimming the news or looking in the fridge without... See more

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