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
scene-making > sensemaking
Have faith: whatever the goal, the universe will provide lessons. Those lessons will either contain the growth to make you strong enough to accomplish the goal, or the wisdom to see a better goal.
Emmett Shear • Tweet
Different academic disciplines have different takes on the word “agency”:
- Philosophy sees agency as the capacity to act intentionally and rationally to bring about change in the world.
- Psychology views agency as a person’s capacity to exert control over their environment and experience a sense of ownership over their actions.
- Sociology understands
Peter Limberg • High Agency to Wise Agency
Be optimistic, you only stand to gain. You are as good as you believe you are, your beliefs will shape what you do and, ultimately, who you become. Pay attention to your thoughts, they are the First Movers of your journey through this path called ‘life’. You are not a helpless bystander, you have control. You are the main character of your story.
Sherry Ning • Optimism Is Always the Best Strategy
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
Sindhu Shivaprasad • commitment is an act of agency
So, if you want to increase your agency: Have conversations with others, or do journaling, about what you can do to improve your circumstances, and then act on the conclusions from that.
David R. MacIver • Learning to exercise agency
you can be high agency without being highly ambitious. That might describe somebody who is highly agentic in shaping the kind of personal, emotional, or spiritual life they want, but who is not especially motivated to succeed financially or professionally.
Can You Just Do Things?—Asterisk
