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
Anxiety can also significantly impair agency - it’s much harder to act when you’re worried that everything is going to go terribly, horribly, wrong, if you do, so anxiety in a specific area will often reduce your agency in that area (e.g. anxiety about your technical skills will make you less willing to try things at work, social anxiety will make
... See moreDavid R. MacIver • Learning to exercise agency
Nobody wakes up feeling great and ready to get after it every day. The work is accepting your feelings and taking them along for the ride. It requires equal parts grace and grit, self-discipline and self-compassion.
Keep showing up.
@HunterGlenn @visakanv @goblinodds That is literally the first question you need to answer for yourself if you want to train agency. What do I want?
amidst interesting comment thread
So this is what I’ll call a “failure of agency” - a case where there is a clear preference, and a clear ability to act on that preference, but no action occurs (and possibly the idea that you could act never even occurs to you).
David R. MacIver • Learning to exercise agency
Frequent lamenting about how bad things are (in politics or relationships or other culture gripes) is mostly a way for people to avoid responsibility for what they can change. If you constantly repeat that everything is bad, it lets your ego off the hook for doing nothing.
Great thing about starting your own company that you can design the way you want it.
Too many founders or companies fall in this trap following established playbooks or bring processes from other places. People also say that “it doesn’t work” or “it won’t scale”, which my response is well have you tried it? Have you tried to make it work?
At @l... See more
you can just do things
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.
The first step towards being “high agency” is always the same. You cannot take effective action towards bending the world to your desire until you know, in detail, what it is that you desire.
sari and
spent the weekend with a bunch of highly agentic people and now i've got a bunch of thoughts about agency