Agency

Learned helplessness, the failure to escape shock induced by uncontrollable aversive events, was discovered half a century ago. Seligman and Maier (1967) theorized that animals learned that outcomes were independent of their responses—that nothing they did mattered – and that this learning undermined trying to escape. The mechanism of learned... 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 losing a game you don’t even want to play, or forcing a fit into a form you don’t want to be in, the best thing to do is to stop playing and go find your shape.

How can I thrive while operating contrary to dominant social and cultural trends?

The experts all agree: the trend, they say, is your friend.

All you need to do is identify it, and then you ride it out. And, true enough, I’ve watched thousands of people make a buck doing just that. If you are active in the arts, that may be the single most obvious... See more

Marc Andreessen, who wrote: “The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think.”