More Agency Now

A lot of recent Moontower writing has been reflecting a top-of-mind interest: increasing my own agency as well as those around me. The word cloud that hovers over the topic of agency includes: ”autonomy”, “creativity”, “competence”, “self-determination”. While fantastic, learning about agency is neither agentic itself nor a prerequisite for taking more control of your life. Some people are naturally “doers”.

I too often get lost in my own shoegazing. This lends itself to a form of doing (writing) but personally still feels inadequate. I feel a wide gap between my ideas and what physically appears in the world for which I only have myself to blame.

I curated the below readings and excerpts for anyone else who might benefit from the right words to unchain their inner spirit. It progresses from the meta to the practical.

🔗Orienting Towards Agency by Matt Bateman

Being high agency is possessing high intentionality about what to do, high willingness to do it, and a high degree of ability to succeed at it.

Seeing this mixture of will and skill all together—seeing them all as one really huge, really important thing: agency—is not the most natural perspective. Potential confusions abound, and so do alternate, more simplistic understandings of agency:

Agency is more often thought of merely as choice, as what you consciously choose to do. Someone who is “high agency” might be pictured as a rebel, a loner, someone with a high degree of independence from common standards. And agency is not commonly seen as something that develops; some people just seem naturally higher agency than others.

Some months ago, when delivering a teacher training on agency, I wrote out 20 short bullet points meant to clarify what agency is, in light of what I regard as common confusions. These aren’t arguments, they are just a blast of perspectives, an enumeration of facets, meant to ease one’s orientation to this idea of agency. My students found them helpful, and so I offer them to you here.

The list of 20 items that follow is outstanding. Tattoo it in your eyelids.

🔗How To Be More Agentic by Cate Hall

• In my way of thinking, radical agency is about finding real edges: things you are willing to do that others aren’t, often because they’re annoying or unpleasant.
• The idea of finding real edges, as contrasted with “eking out wins by grinding harder than everyone,” first clicked for me when I started playing poker….All of my agency hacks are kind of like this (poker tells), in my opinion — big, glaring edges that people might rather ignore.

  [Kris: edge as something true that others don’t think is true. But since conventional wisdom is often valid, this kind of edge requires being willing to not only question lots of stuff but accept that many of your divergences will be blind alleys. This take a special fortitude because it’s tempting to question things and then become pot committed to your rogue status and forget to find the truth. The attention economy enables this type of grift. One of my favorite examples of such a divergence was Ed Thorp being encouraged by Feynman thinking blackjack couldn’t be beaten.]

• If you’re only asking for things you get, you’re not aiming high enough. Jobs are a great example: Particularly if you’re early in your career, you should aim to get rejected from most things you apply for. If you have not yet learned the skill of absorbing rejection, court it deliberately: Apply for some jobs you really don’t think you’ll get so you can learn to decouple “no” from surprise and dejection.
• If you aren’t trying to get real feedback from people who know you, you’re cooking without tasting. This is, like, the lowest hanging fruit for self-improvement, but few people really try to pick it. In many contexts, the way to get good feedback is to give people a way to provide it anonymously. Anything else creates friction by layering on social dynamics. To get honest feedback, you want to make it as comfortable as possible for people to give it. [Kris: This echoes a common theme with regard to agency: get comfortable being uncomfortable]
• Assume most things are learnable: how one might go about learning charisma, and the answer was really boring: by reading a few books, watching many hours of charismatic people interacting with others, and adopting a few of their habits. This is surely a plan of action most people could come up with if they didn’t have the notion that charisma is innate lodged in their heads.
• Don’t work too hard. [Kris: mixed feelings on this since the people whose work i admire tend to be prolific and work hard — I think the paradox is mostly reconciled here.] Burnout is the ultimate agency-killer. This is so true that I’ve learned to identify a reduction in agency as one of the first signs of burnout, one that shows up even before I consciously realize what’s happening. A switch flips and I start looking for ways to rule out ideas and actions, to conclude they won’t work or aren’t necessary, rather than chasing better versions.
• [Kris: do a small task to increase your sense of agency. Getting better at delegation is a way to increase agency. Learning to hire freelancers or building a stable of trusted vendors because you have flipped some properties. The thing is you need to realize that you are going to kiss a few frogs in the process and not to let that get you down. The mistakes you learn from should be framed as investments in future achievements. The type of achievements you could never pull off without the levers in the first place. That’s how you widen your aperture of what’s possible. Building a ladder to what you see in your imagination happens one rung at a time. But before you know it you’ll have a ladder to reach many high places that you could never reach on your own.].

🔗What to do when you don’t know what to do by Peter Fuller

📁This essay got filed in Moontower’s Favorite Posts By Others

Excerpts:

It’s hard to know what to do with your life. At the beginning, everything ahead of you is blank. You can do anything — but often, it’s hard to find one thing you really want to do. Later on, when you’ve travelled a path for long enough, it can feel like there is only one future available; your past has cornered you and all your tomorrows look like yesterdays.

Lots of useful stuff has been written about this, like Paul Graham’s How to do Great Work, and Peter Thiel’s Zero to One. But they clearly haven’t solved the problem, because I meet just as many people now who don’t know what to do with themselves as before. One issue, I think, is that these essays are written only for people who self-identify as extremely ambitious. Maybe you do think of yourself as the next Elon Musk, or Picasso, but probably you don’t. And if you don’t, you likely appreciate Thiel and Paul Graham more like a museum-goer than a chef with a cookbook.

This essay is my attempt to help anyone who wants to create value to make career choices.

…

Let’s briefly reason from the patterns of people who have done valuable things in the past. Almost by definition, these people have done something new. Sorry for the trite observation — but if you want to add value to the world, you’re probably going to have to do something new too.

Using the ants-following-trails metaphor:

• To do something valuable you’ll have to do your own wandering loop, or more likely many wandering loops onto new terrain. But you can only initiate a loop from the edge of the column. So, a good question to ask yourself is: what part of the ant column are you currently in? Are you in mid-stream, or are you near the fresh air of the frontier?
  

  Your life choices put you in certain information flows; you should analyse these for how unique they are. How many other people are getting the same or similar information to you? If the answer is a lot, then you are in the middle of the column. If the answer is not many, you are near the frontier; if you are alone, you are looping.
  

  If you think that your moment of originality will hit you one day like a lightning bolt, you won’t think this is an important question. Your revealed belief is that you don’t need specialist knowledge or skills to be original; you can comfortably do what many other people are doing, and so long as you’re smart and think hard enough, you will have a valuable idea. I profoundly disagree with you. If you accept [my disagreement] the implications for your career choices are surprisingly actionable:
  

  1. Get to the the outer edges of the columns! (The essay explains exactly what that looks like and crucially what it doesn’t look like)
  2. Get away from the abstractions and into the raw info

  Once you understand this, you still haven’t narrowed down your choices:

  You need to push your way to the edge of the crowd. That still leaves you an overwhelming 360 degrees of freedom. A handful of people — you see it sometimes in mathematicians, or writers, or designers — instinctively know which way to go. From an early age their mind settles into habits of thought that lead them inexorably to a specific frontier — and the way our economy is set up, they can usually make a living doing it. Other special people just have rocket fuel; they are the intense, competitive, deeply self-believing or self-hating folks who clock that newness is a good strategy for winning the game. These people are usually more flexible about what form that newness takes. 200 years ago, they would have been military commanders; today, they are CEOs.

For the rest of us, a path isn’t so easy to find.

• the problem with the ‘just try things’ strategy if you want to do something really good is that, by definition, most of the opportunities you see will be the common things. Worse, those common paths are powerfully self-reinforcing. We love to copy one another.
• The beautiful thing is that the solution to this problem — the signposts to the paths that you could take — are already within you. But people underestimate this.

[Cal Newport: 2 pragmatic ways to explore new paths are experimentation or developing refined taste in what’s actually interesting]

Addresses how people fail at this point and how a simple Socratic conversation can help the striver guide themselves to a course of action:

Realise quickly that there are many frontiers you could push to. It’s not a deterministic process; there isn’t just one authentic future version of yourself, there are a lot. When I understood this, my mindset reversed from “how will I be true to myself and find the one way to be fulfilled?” to “which of these many fulfilling paths should I take first?”. This was a really important moment in my life, and I hope that more people can experience it. When you take a path, you think you will feel FOMO for the ones you’re not doing, but that has not been my experience! That, too, is very liberating.

Finally, the frontiers are much closer than you think. I’ve watched 21 year-olds go from zero to world-leading in small but important niches in three months of sustained work. This would be the case for you too. Your valuable, fulfilling life is within reach.

For a more biting angle to this conversation here’s a Nassim Taleb treatment:

How To Legally Own Another Person