The number one indicator of future success: high agency.

It's a simple binary: do you believe you can influence your own outcomes or not.

High-agency: This is an inconvenience. How can I solve this?

Low-agency: This is an inconvenience. This sucks.

There is inherent strength in agency. #MeToo, in a lot of ways, is about agency. It’s not about giving up your agency.

"High agency" means you don’t wait for the perfect instructions before making things better -- but at the same time, if you are receiving perfect instructions, then you shut up and listen. Taking context is often just as important as taking action.

Low-agency: “I don’t have what I need to start.”

High-agency: “I’ll start with what I have and acquire the rest along the way.”

One waits for sufficiency, the other creates it. This is why high-agency people often appear to have more luck: they’ve generated more opportunities for luck to strike.

True agency is when you stop running on autopilot, step outside your own momentum, and intentionally choose your trajectory.

You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance.

Low-agency: “That’s not my job.”

High-agency: “That’s not my job, but it’s blocking my job, so it’s my problem.”

The high-agency person has discovered that organizational charts describe reporting structures, not the actual topology of getting things done. They’ve learned to route around damage.

If you’re high agency type of person who loves high performance, the only thing you can do is entrepreneurship or you’ll lose your mind. Everything else just feels like a joke. It’s the only path that lets you exploit your talents, act like a psychopath, and run things how you want without being told what to do. The more you try to continue being an employee the more depressed you become. You just know. You’ve always known. You have this fire in your eyes no one can put out and every minute you avoid it feels like death. Some of us are born to solve problems and change the world in some small way. And we must take risks to feel alive. Only entrepreneurship can give you that. There are downsides though such as uncertainty, more stress, and inconsistent income. But life is too f*cking short to work a boring job. Stop avoiding the one path that’ll make you come alive.

Organisms are self-causing agencies. Every self is a tautology: self-evident, self-referential, self-centered, and self-created.

loss of agency is more destabilizing than loss of wealth. chaos erupts when people feel powerless. when you can't sleep, can't stop scrolling, and eat junk, you lose self respect. this internal rot is projected outward as rage.

I did whatever was necessary to take control of my life and circumstances because having agency, authority, and control over oneself is the most important thing in all the world. It is the power to say, ‘I will go this far and no farther.

Do not accept the roles that society foists on you.

Re-create yourself by forging a new identity, one that commands attention and never bores the audience.

Be the master of your own image rather than letting others define it for you.

Incorporate dramatic devices into your public gestures and actions—your power will be enhanced and your character will seem larger than life.

The relationship of agency is one of the oldest and commonest codified codes of social interaction. We will say that an agency relationship has arisen between two (or more) parties when one, designated as the agent, acts for the other, designated the principal, in a particular domain of decision problems. Examples of agency are universal.

High agency looks like arrogance to people who have mistaken learned helplessness for maturity.