What is high agency?
I believe high agency might be the most important idea of the 21st century. When I first learned of high agency, it felt like a secret that had been hidden from me.
So, what is it?
In a 1964 public inquiry into whether the film The Lovers should be banned for its adult content, Supreme Court judge Justice Potter Stewart was asked to define pornography. He replied with the ultimate non-definition:
“I know it when I see it”.
High agency is one of those “I know it when I see it” ideas. And once you see it – you can’t unsee it. Before I explain it, let’s see it.
High Agency in a Question
You wake up in a 3rd world jail cell. You’re only allowed to call one person you know to get you out of there. Who do you call?
Why did you choose this person? What is it about them that made you pick up the phone?
This person you picked has something. A spark. A je ne sais quoi. That ‘something' is high agency.
High Agency in a Moment
August Landmesser refusing to salute at a Nazi Rally in Hamburg.
We put a man on the moon (peak high agency) before anyone put wheels on suitcases. Everyone carried their suitcases — because everyone else carried their suitcases.
Via Nassim Taleb
How To Spot High Agency People
- Weird teenage hobbies - Teenage years are the hardest time to go against social pressures. If they can go against the crowd as a teenager, they can go against the crowd as an adult.
- Treadmill energy If you meet with them when you're tired and defeated, you leave the room ready to run a marathon on a treadmill with max incline.
- You can never guess their opinion The boxer who writes poetry. The advertiser obsessed with the history of war. The beauty queen who reads Nietzsche. If their beliefs don't line up with their stereotypes, they've exercised agency.
- Immigrant mentality If they've moved from their hometown, that's a good sign. If they've moved from their home country, that's an even greater sign. It takes agency to spot you're in the wrong place, resourcefulness to operationalize a move and a growth mindset to start from zero in a new location.
- Sends you niche content A low agency trap is to look at the social engagement of content before deeming its quality. High agency people just look at the content. They spot upcoming trends very early.
- Mean to your face, nice behind your back The social incentives are to be nice to people's faces and gossip behind their backs. To do the opposite requires agency because they're swimming against the social tide.
- Quit something of prestige - The miserable management consultant who breaks free from their golden handcuffs to become a stand-up comedian has to overcome momentum, social shame and sunk cost fallacy. The high agency person lives many lives and isn’t afraid to reinvent themselves — regardless of the perceived social cost.
- They don’t trust. They verify - A low agency trap is to be hypnotized by groupthink. High agency people refuse to passively download the current thing without first verifying it for themselves:“They say” —> Who is they?"Science says” —> What is the science? Can I see the primary sources?”Misinformation —> What is your theory of knowledge? Can you show me the first principles?
- Self-taught learning machines Whether it’s learning to play their favourite song on the Saxophone or deconstructing how 3D printers work — they start from zero and use agency to climb up the knowledge ladder. Tesla, Da Vinci and Darwin didn’t ask for permission from institutions to just do things.
- They question the question Before rushing to answer your question, they question whether it’s the right question to answer. They know the right answer to the wrong question is worse than no answer to the right question.
Now you’ve seen it — let’s try to explain it...
The person you'd call stuck in a 3rd world jail cell represents the most high agency person you know because it's the ultimate live problem -- on steroids.
You’re giving the person you would call a seemingly impossible problem alone in the real world with no guidebook and still betting on them finding a solution.
If you created a room with everyone you'd call when stuck in a 3rd world jail cell, what would that high agency room have in common?
It's not age, gender, race, education, job titles or politics. It’s not optimism or pessimism either.
Optimism states the glass is half full. Pessimism states the glass is half empty.
High agency states you’re a tap. You look in the mirror and see a giant tap staring back at you.
The one big thing everyone in that high agency room has in common: They are happening to life. They don’t view the future as a static entity. They view it as something to be shaped by human action.
"When you're told that something is impossible, is that the end of the conversation, or does that start a second dialogue in your mind? How to get around whoever it is that's just told you that you can't do something" - Eric Weinstein on high agency.
High agency is such an important idea because the more agency an individual or society has -- the more problems they can solve.
High agency can be a confusing idea to understand because it’s not just one idea. It’s a combination of three distinct skills rarely found together:
- Clear thinking
- Bias to action
- Disagreeability
High agency is like a tricycle. If you remove one of the wheels, it stops working.
It's impossible to imagine someone breaking you out of a 3rd world jail cell without all three.
If they can't think clearly, they will charge ahead with the first bad plan that pops into their head.
If they lack a bias for action, they'll never move their ideas from theory into the real world.
If they aren't disagreeable, they'll quit and conform when someone in authority tells them "No".
You might be wondering as I did: Do I have agency? Would my friends call me when stuck in a 3rd world jail?
The bad news: Low agency is the default setting for most of us.
You inherited a brain evolved for the scarcity of hunter-gatherer tribes. And then went through an education system designed to output factory workers for the industrial revolution. Are you expecting your default settings to be high agency?
The good news: You have agency over your agency.
As countless historical examples show, moving up the high agency spectrum is possible. The goal of this essay is to do just that. Nudge you nearer towards a problem solving machine a friend might call when stuck in a 3rd world jail cell.
The essay is split into four parts:
1. High Agency Software - Five simple lines of high agency code.
2. The Highest Agency Human Ever? - The story of possibly the highest agency person ever to live.
3. Escaping Low Agency Traps - The 5 most common low agency traps people find themselves stuck in and potential escape routes.
4. Turning Bullshit into Reality - A practical technique to start using agency today.
This essay is what I wish I read at 18 — rather than writing at 30.
Let’s go down the high agency rabbit hole.
People on the high agency spectrum don't passively download their worldview from others.
However, many have independently installed five similar lines of software in their heads:
The human brain is a question-answering machine. If you ask it: “What’s good in my life?” — it will find answers. If you ask it: “What’s bad in my life?” — it will find answers.
When faced with a problem, ask your brain, “Does this defy the laws of physics?” — it will reply with “No” — and begin generating ludicrous ways this could be possible. Asking your brain this question wipes your mental whiteboard around the problem and knocks on the door of your sleeping creativity.
If your problem doesn’t defy the laws of physics, it’s not an unsolvable problem — regardless of what other people say.
Imagine you’re in a casino staring at a Roulette wheel.
And you’re presented with this problem: You must beat the house.
You could reply: “Well that’s impossible. Roulette is a game of luck — not a game of skill”
But does the problem defy the laws of physics? Do you need to defy the laws of thermodynamics? Or break Newton’s laws of motion?
In 1961, Claude Shannon and Ed Thorp decided hacking roulette didn’t defy the laws of physics — therefore it was a solvable problem.
To hack roulette, they built the first-ever wearable computer. The device transmitted information about roulette wheels via a cigarette packet-sized box that they placed in their shoe. Shannon and Thorp would use a toe-operating switch to input data on the ball’s speed and wheel rotation to predict a landing zone. They improved their odds by 44% and outsmarted the house.
If it doesn't defy the laws of physics - you can't give fixed odds on whether a human will solve the problem because of human agency.
David Deutsch uses the example of an asteroid about to hit Earth one year from now. If penguins were in charge of the response, you could calculate fixed odds based on the physics of the asteroid what will happen to the earth. With humans in charge, it’s impossible to calculate fixed odds.
If we choose the low agency route of passively accepting the Earth will be wiped out, the odds of annihilation increase. If we choose the high agency route of building laser beams that blow the asteroids out of the sky, the probability of annihilation decreases.
There was a special moment in tennis history: The three greatest of all time -- competed at the exact same time. Nadal. Djokovic. Federer.
Matthew Syed tells a wonderful story of watching them warm up before Wimbledon.
When Nadal warmed up, it was sheer aggression. He sprinted up and down like a man possessed with his shirt dripping in sweat.
When Djokovic warmed up, it was pure emotionless calibration. He was measured and scientific with every shot.
When Federer warmed up, you could hear him giggling before he arrived. He was doing trick shots, caressing the ball and exploring his own creativity.
There was no 'way' of doing things they all repeated -- except doing what worked for them.
In a similar story, legendary musicians Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan were sitting in a cafe in Paris:
Bob Dylan asks Cohen: "How long did it take you to write Hallelujah?”
“A couple of years” - Cohen replied.
It was a lie — it took him 7 years but he wanted to play it down
Cohen then asked Bob Dylan: “How long did it take you to write Just Like a Woman?”
Dylan replied: “Fifteen minutes”
If you dig deep enough under low agency thinking, you often discover a belief in a god-like adult class that is superior to them. There’s a Peter Pan perception of reality that has been frozen in time from childhood. The fictional beliefs of Santa and the Tooth Fairy were debugged – but a belief in a perfect group of adults who run the world still remains.
A low agency trap is to put these "adults" on pedestals. To turn flawed humans into a superior god class.
If you meet your heroes or read their biographies, you discover Superman is often Clark Kent. The movie studio of your mind placed this imperfect human on a flawless pedastal.
Even the greats were deeply human:
Steve Jobs delayed nine months of medical treatment of pancreatic cancer for a carrot juice diet and acupuncture.
Steve Jobs: Biography, Apple Cofounder, Entrepreneur
Mozart overspent his income, lived miserably in mountains of debt and regularly wrote letters to friends begging for money.
Mozart's Late-Life Debt Prompts a Theory - The New York Times
Isaac Newton spent thirty years of his life writing 1 million words on alchemy. (Hidden for years by his heirs because they were too embarrassed to publish it.)
Isaac Newton - Wikipedia
Napoleon's severe haemorrhoids (swollen ass) may have cost him the battle of Waterloo because he was in such severe pain he couldn't sit on his horse to survey the battlefield. He also instructed his first wife: "I will be home in three days. Don't wash."
Napoleon Bonaparte: Biography, Military General, French Emperor
Friedrich Nietzsche proposed to a girl he was obsessed with, got rejected and spent the rest of his life bitter and alone. He also only saw his work sell three hundred copies in his lifetime.
Friedrich Nietzsche - Wikipedia
Henry Ford purchased the newspaper The Dearborn Independent and posted a 91-week campaign of: "The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem".
The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem by Henry Ford - Audiobooks on Google Play
Martin Luther King had extra-marital affairs with many different women. The FBI alleges he spent his last night alive with two women and physically attacking another.
Celebrate Boston's Greatest Love Story: A Look Back at Coretta Scott King '51, '71 Hon. DM and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Historic First Meeting - NECMusic
Nikola Tesla allegedly fell in love with a Pigeon: "I love that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loves me"
Nikola Tesla and Pigeons
Fyodor Dostoevsky gambled away everything he owned. To fund his habit, he signed away predatory publishing contracts and agreed to impossible deadlines. His wife had to pawn her wedding ring and personal belongings to feed their children.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky | Biography, Books, Philosophy, & Facts | Britannica
Don’t put any adult on a pedestal. Kill your gurus. A more useful belief: The 'adults' aren’t going to save you — they don’t even exist.
One of the biggest killers of high agency is a desire to be normal: To fit in and be liked by others.
The normal paradox: We hide our weirdness and act out “normal” behaviour to be liked by the tribe — but the tribe forgets the normal behaviour.
Normal behaviour costs nothing in the short term but disappears into the memory abyss. Unconventional weird behaviour costs a price in the short term — but the actions live on as story assets in the future.
- If you pay the bill for everyone at the table - the short-term reaction is shock and confusion. In the long term, it’s everyone’s favourite memory of you.
- If you travel across the world for a friend's birthday, the friend’s initial reaction is: “You don’t have to do that” — but it’s the story they tell at your wedding.
- If you’re 100% honest with your feedback on people’s business ideas, the short-term reaction is anger. In the long term, you become one of the few people they trust.
Go to the funerals of the people you care about and the normal rational behaviour is never mentioned. It’s filled with weird and hilarious stories of the individual — the times they broke out of the median distribution of human behaviour and displayed their uniqueness.
If you’re hiding your weird individualism to make the tribe like you, remember: They’ll soon forget everything you did or said.
Normal is forgotten. Only weird survives.
The past no longer exists — it’s just a memory appearing in the now. The future does not yet exist — it’s a dream of a future now appearing in the now. Life is just a series of nows.
Tick tock. Tick tock. Hear the clock? Another now has just gone by. And another one.
There is only now - Meme by RoboticCrab :) Memedroid
You have a finite number of nows. Film director Kevin Smith tells a story of his father who lived his life playing by the rules:
"My father was a good guy. Not many good men in the world, but this was a good guy. He worked at a post office, canceling your stamps - what a soul-killing, horrible job that is - for years, just to pay for a family. Who knew if he had dreams?...
I get a phone call at 6am from my brother. He tells me to get down to the hospital on Walnut Street… I get to the emergency room, open the door, and the first thing I see is my mother, who looks more scared than I've ever seen a human being in my life. There was terror on her face. I've seen my mother cry in my lifetime…This was different. This was like terror, fear, almost like there was a gun to her head. I looked to my brother, and he just had this expression where he gave me the slow nod, which meant my father was gone.
Then my brother says something that probably defined my life: "He died screaming."
I couldn't believe it. I asked if it was a figure of speech, and he said no, he literally died screaming. You could see my brother was haunted by it. My father wasn't a soft man by any stretch of the imagination, and I'd never heard him get really loud. The notion of my father dying screaming changed my life. I realized that even a good man in this world, who played the game straight, played by the rules, did everything he was supposed to do, could end up dying screaming. At that point, I decided there's no point in not trying to accomplish every stupid dream I've got, even if it's dumb stuff….Chase it all and do it all because we're all going to die screaming, and you might as well enjoy it here."
There’s not even a guarantee you won’t die screaming.
There’s only now.
One person who installed high agency software: The highest agency human ever...
Meet Wilbur.
It’s 1885. He's 18 years old, had a fantastic childhood raised by loving parents and has a bright future ahead at Yale University.
Then on a crisp winter afternoon, a local psychopath who was on a doctor’s prescription of cocaine (a common medical practice at the time) decided to do what psychopaths do: smash Wilbur’s face in with a hockey stick.
The local cocaine-rattled psychopath who smashed his face in didn’t come around and apologize — he instead became a serial killer and murdered his own family.
Wilbur spent multiple years bedbound with nervous system problems, depression and heart palpitations. His dreams of attending Yale were cancelled.
Life was happening to Wilbur.
Wilbur’s mother was also terminally ill. When he wasn’t bedbound being cared for by his dying mother, he was watching helplessly as the disease slowly killed her.
If you visited Wilbur at this point, you’d likely conclude: “Wilbur has lost his mind”.
Wilbur wasn’t doing normal things like young men his age: trying to date girls or watch local sports games.
Instead, Wilbur was obsessed with... birds.
Was it brain trauma from the accident? Or a defence mechanism against his mother's illness?
No. Wilbur was fascinated with a big high agency question: If birds can fly, why can’t humans?
Try to delete your historian’s mindset and get into Wilbur’s present moment. At the time, flying was seen as an act for the mentally insane who had a death wish.
The New York Times even published a headline: “Man won’t fly for a million years”.
Flying was seen as an unsolvable problem. The cynics would point to the 0% success rate to date. Anyone who tried long enough — died.
From his sickbed, Wilbur was relentlessly resourceful. Remember, this was the 1890s. There was no Google, no YouTube tutorials, no aeronautical engineering textbooks. He wrote letters to libraries across the country, requesting every book about birds, physics, and mechanics they could send.
Wilbur concluded:
- Birds can fly
- So flying doesn’t defy the laws of physics
- So humans can fly
- So Wilbur can fly
Wilbur was moving up the high agency spectrum.
Wilbur shared this idea with his brother Orville. Rather than live in hypothetical theory land, Wilbur and Orville had a bias for action: “Let’s start building full-sized gliders in our garage.”
Endless problems society deemed unsolvable awaited them -- but Wilbur and Orville discovered none of them defied the laws of physics:
Through reverse-engineering, they calculated the need for winds of 15 miles per hour and sand hills for a soft landing, which they couldn’t find in Ohio. Again — This is pre-internet. They couldn’t just use Google Maps to find this location.
Solution: Contacted the Weather Bureau for the data and ran through the metrics of every location in the United States and identified from first principles: Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, had the best weather for flying.
Your Outer Banks Off-Season Guide - Kitty Hawk Kites Blog
Wilbur and Orville had never left their hometown before. And there were no American Airlines 10am flight just yet to pop across the country.
Solution: No rumination. Just a bias for action. They packed up the gliders, spent days on a train and set up tents on the sand dunes.
Picture this. You’re a local farmer in Kitty Hawk called John. You’re on your usual walk around the fields with your dog when you see this sight: Two brothers from a city far, far away, living in a tent, spending their entire day pretending to be Seagulls doing this:
The locals gave Wilbur and Orville the nickname of "the two poor nuts”.
Solution: They stole the warped-wing system from birds to change shape mid-flight and rebuilt aerodynamic knowledge through testing 200 wing shapes in their homemade wind tunnel (below).
Problem 4 - Every existing engine was too heavy to take off the ground.
Solution: They calculated the exact type of engine they needed and built it: A custom aluminium engine weighing just 180lbs.
Wilbur was blitzing along the high agency spectrum solving unsolvable problems.
The 4-year path was brutal: Experimental gliders crashed. Calculations failed. Materials broke. Weather often didn’t cooperate. Locals watched from a distance, shaking their heads at these weirdos pretending to be birds and attempting suicide.
Wilbur hit rock bottom one day. He looked across to Orville and said: “Not in a thousand years will man fly”
The morning after making this statement, he was back sketching another new design.
And then one day on December 17, 1903… Wilbur and Orville were the first non-birds ever to fly.
Wilbur’s flight was the longest that day: 59 seconds covering 582 feet.
Wilbur was so high agency — he flew outside the quadrant of happening to life.
From his face smashed in by a local psychopath bed-bound caring for his dying mother — to creating and flying the first-ever airplane — just months after the New York Times headlines declared, “Man wouldn’t fly for over a million years”.
Last year, 5.58 billion passenger seats were flown on airplanes. And it all started from “two nuts” pretending to be birds on a beach.
Wilbur Wright might be the highest agency human ever to live.
If you were stuck in a 3rd world jail, you’d contact Wilbur:
How do we get more Wilbur Wrights in the world and fewer cynical New York Times headlines?
By escaping low agency traps...
The root causes of low agency are found by flipping the high agency tricycle around:
And it's everywhere.
Low agency is being stuck for years on a problem without realising it could’ve been solved by one hour of searching YouTube.
Low agency is being “too busy” to reach out to your childhood friend, and getting the phone call that they’ve suddenly passed away.
Low agency is outsourcing your sense of self in social situations to the average opinion of the room.
Low agency has a series of traps that act like a prison of the mind. Unlike a 3rd world prison, there are no physical guards or walls. They don’t even exist in physical reality.
Fear: A Self Imposed Prison And How To Overcome It | Silver Girl
If you’re stuck in a low agency trap, you’re both the guard and the prisoner of the jail cell. The self-imposed prison exists purely in how your imagination frames reality.
Countless low agency traps can occur. I’ve listed the five most common ones and potential escape plans.
1. The Vague Trap
If you were in a 3rd world jail cell and texted someone in the vague trap for help -- here's how they'd reply:
The vague trap hides from agency by never defining the problem, let alone a solution. It lives on vague fluffy thoughts.
The person in the vague trap often spends countless hours thinking — without once thinking clearly. The average person has 10-60,000 thoughts per day. Can you remember any specific thoughts from yesterday?
Thoughts feel so real in the moment and then disappear into the memory abyss. Most thoughts aren’t even clear sentences. It’s a series of emotional GIFs, JPEGs and prompts bouncing around consciousness like a random Tumblr page.
Vague Trap Escape Route: Define the problem in simple words out of your head
Write your thoughts down. Draw the problem. Use a whiteboard. Create a spreadsheet. Talk out loud to a smart person. Go for a walk or run with a specific question.
The act of transforming out of your head to another medium acts like a filtration system, removing the vague mud from your thinking.
Each time you transform your thoughts out of your head, keep trying to refine problems and solutions in the simplest, clearest, most specific language possible.
As you transform out of your head, remember: The vague trap is often downstream from vague questions.
Vague question: What career should I choose?
Specific question: What does my dream week look like hour by hour? What does my nightmare week look like hour by hour? What’s the gap between my current week and the dream/nightmare week?
Walt Disney transforming his thoughts out of his head – creating the Disney empire map:
Walt Disney's Strategy in 1957 Drawing - Business Insider
Christopher Nolan’s drawing of the plot of Inception:
2. The Midwit Trap
The midwit trap overcomplicates agency. It comes from the midwit meme: The dreaded midwit in the middle.
The guy on the left isn’t smart enough to overcomplicate the simple actions. The guy on the right is smart enough to reduce complexity and focus on the simple actions. The midwit in the middle lives in the danger zone and mistakes simplicity for stupidity.
The less intelligent guy on the left often has more agency than the midwit because he didn’t have the cognitive horsepower to bullshit himself.
Midwit Trap Escape Route: What would the guy on the left do? Find it via inversion.
Step 1 - Stop trying to be the guy on the right - The midwit mistake is to try and be the smart guy on the right.
Step 2 - Become the guy on the left - Find the simple ideas via inversion. Flip the problem around. And take them seriously before adding any complexity.
E.g. "I want to become a better writer”
The midwit will start learning about writers' coffee-drinking routines or researching the perfect keyboard to enhance their word count. Instead, how would you ensure you become a worse writer?
- Do not write
- Write inconsistently
- Write about things you find boring
Flip them around and you've found the simple ideas the guy on the left will come up with:
- Write
- Write consistently
- Write about things that excite you
3. The Attachment Trap
The attachment trap is too attached to past assumptions to see new high agency options. You become the man with a hammer who can only see a nail.
The three most powerful mind-altering drugs: DMT, meth, and momentum.
The root cause of the attachment prison is last principles thinking -- the opposite of first principles thinking. This is where your mind has assumptions about reality, treats these assumptions as unquestionable facts — and then starts looking for evidence to support it without once questioning the assumptions.
Attachment Trap Escape Route: What would I do if I had 10x the agency?
This question from Nick throws a first principles grenade into your mind. It forces you to start the problem again from a fresh perspective free of past assumptions. You often realise the real problem wasn’t the problem itself. It was the assumptions you were viewing it through.
The bouncer may have said you can’t get in tonight. You can accept this social statement as gospel — or you can ask: What would I do if I had 10x the agency? And watch creative ideas pop into your head. You could bribe the bouncer, get in through the back door, contact the owner of the venue, disguise yourself in a new outfit, get your friends to bring a full camera studio and pretend it’s TMZ capturing the club denying entry to an A-list celebrity.
Imagine you have an evil identical twin whose sole job is to have 10x the agency of you. What ideas would they have? This thought experiment allows the mind to explore creative ideas you'd never think of.
Pro tip: It helps if your 10x agency twin has glasses and a moustache
4. The Rumination Trap
The rumination trap freezes agency. It’s being stuck in never-ending ‘what if it goes wrong?’ loops.
It’s spending your entire life scrolling the metaphorical Netflix homescreen unable to find the perfect film. The ruminating perfectionist keeps kicking cans down the road because they can’t find a perfect option with zero perceived risk — only to end up with lots of cans and no more road to kick them down.
Thomas Leroy - The Weight of Thought. What the Rumination Trap feels like.
The rumination trap sounds like this: "I’ve spent the last 5 years thinking about leaving my hometown of Doncaster and going to New York — but there’s no perfect option. When my mind thinks of going to New York, it plays a horror film of the expensive rent draining my bank account and me losing contact with my home friends. When my mind thinks of staying in Doncaster, it plays a horror film of me as an old man wondering what could’ve been if I moved to New York.” — When faced with those horror films, they opt for more ruminating time.
Rumination Trap Escape Route: How can I take action on this now?
Rumination can be reframed as a smoke alarm for action. If you catch yourself ruminating, reply with How can I take action on this?
"Stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over” - Jeff Bezos
One tool to make this easier is to reframe decisions as experiments. You’re no longer a perfectionist frozen on stage with everyone watching your every move, you’re a curious scientist in a lab trying to test a hypothesis. E.g. “I’m 60% certain that moving to New York is better than 40% of staying in Doncaster…Ok. It’s time to Blitzkrieg.” Book the tickets to New York and run the experiment. Success isn’t whether your forecast is correct and New York is perfect, it’s that you tested the hypothesis.
In the 5 years spent ruminating on the theoretical decision to move from Doncaster to New York, you could’ve collected practical living data on New York, Los Angeles, Rio De Janeiro, Tokyo, Sydney, London and Reykjavík.
The overwhelm trap paralyses agency. The task is so daunting you don’t know where to begin. You drown in the sheer potential number of actions ahead of you.
Learn quantum mechanics? Where do I begin?!Black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu? Where do I begin?!Build an airplane? Where do I begin?!
The overwhelm trap turns the problem into a badly designed video game. It looks at where you are now — level 0 — and contrasts that with the ideal — level 100 — feels overwhelmed and runs away.
A good rule of thumb: Video game designers know more about human psychology than 99% of psychologists.
Chart: Are You Not Entertained? | Statista
Video games break us out of the overwhelm trap by chunking everything down into small enough chunks to create momentum — Level 1, Level 2, Level 3 etc. Each level is small enough to not be overwhelming, but big enough to be addicted to the progress.
Overwhelm Trap Escape Route: What’s the smallest first step I can take?
What is level 1?
Let's pick something absurd people think is impossible: Teaching yourself Quantum Mechanics. That's level 100. What are the first 5 levels of that video game?
Level 1 - Write down everything I could possibly do to start learning quantum mechanics
Level 2 - Use notes from level 1 to create the next 3 levels
Level 3 - Search “Quantum Mechanics” on Amazon and buy the top 5 rated books.
Level 4 - Read the first 10 pages of the first book.
Level 5 - Put anything I don’t understand into Chat-GPT and get it to explain it to me like I’m a smart 12 year old
Etc
Level 1 is always an easy enough action to not feel overwhelmed. Level 2 builds out the rest of the video game. And boom, you’re already on level 3. Snort in that dopamine and watch the overwhelm fade away.
Now let's start interacting with reality...
Part 4 - Turning Bullshit Into Reality
This is the shortest section because it's now time for you to move up the high agency spectrum.
Remember: Don't put me on a pedestal.
I'm just a sperm cell that fertilised an egg, came into this world screaming with no sense of self, downloaded patterns of mimetic information from those around me, got jacked up on teenage hormones — and now I'm pushing buttons on a keyboard pretending to be an adult.
Remember: The adults don't exist. Nobody is going to do agency for you.
The Turning Bullshit Into Reality Exercise
Try this simple exercise:
Step 1 - Open up a blank page. Write down esoteric things you value. E.g. Value 1 - High Agency.
Step 2 - Write down 10 specific ways you can display that vague value in reality with specific action. Don’t think. Just dump.
Step 3 - Pick one. If you want to play hardcore mode: Pick the one that gives you the strongest sense of fear. E.g. Write thank you letter to teacher who stopped me being bullied when I was 15 years old.
Step 4 - Write down every micro step you need to take.
- Find the teacher's email
- Write the letter
- Hit send
Step 5 - Do each micro step now.
Step 6 - Feel the emotion of being a live player. The goosebumps on your arms, the tears running down your face, the dry mouth. Those are high agency side effects: You’re alive.
Step 7 - Come back tomorrow and repeat. Keep stacking evidence of turning bullshit into reality.
Most people operate on a to-do list model of the world. The problem with this is you end up often doing low agency things in short term memory.
The turning bullshit into reality exercise shifts you to a creative model of the world. You pick things you value and let your creativity work its magic by aiming towards a value. Your self identity will begin to shift by doing high agency things that come up.
Think deeply about the things you value (gratitude, love, romance, loyalty, ambition etc) -- channel your creativity and then operationalize them.
If your turning bullshit into reality session creates problems you get stuck on, try using these tools:
Tool 1 - The High Agency Flow Chart
A simple flow chart that makes sure you escape potential low agency traps:
Tool 2 - The Swedish House Mafia Technique
Step 1 - Collect the smartest people you know.
Step 2 - Tell them about your 3rd world jail cell. (Problem you're stuck on)
Step 3 - Lock the door. Block out the outside world.
Step 4 - Keep rallying ideas back and forth like a tennis game. Take immediate action on the best ideas.
It will look like this:
Tool 3 - The Story Razor
If stuck between two potential options, ask: What is the best story?
"Life is a form of self storytelling. We're continually retelling ourselves our life story, but very few people think of themselves as authors of their story, not mere subjects. People with extraordinary high-agency realize this early in life and start maximizing the interestingness of their life story.
Having a fascinating life story is not just an exercise in vanity -- it has a real impact on your success in life. You'll have an easier time attracting friends as well as life and business partners. It'll also make it much easier to sell yourself or your products. It has a kind of compounding halo effect
So next time you're faced with a tough decision, consider the path that makes a more interesting story. If it turned out to be the wrong decision to have made, you'd at least be fun at dinner parties.” - Amjad Masad
Do it for the plot. And most importantly — don’t go back to the carpet store.
Tool 4 -
"I have three mentors.
When I’m stuck on a problem and need their help, I take the time to write a good description of my dilemma, before reaching out to them. I summarize the context, the problem, my options, and my thoughts on each. I make it as succinct as possible so as not to waste their time.
Before sending it, I try to predict what they’ll say. Then I go back and update what I wrote to address these obvious points in advance.
Finally, I try again to predict what they’ll say to this, based on what they’ve said in the past and what I know of their philosophy. Then, after this whole process, I realize I don’t need to bother them because the answer is now clear… None of them know they are my mentors.” - Derek Sivers
Tool 5 - A Change of Perspective is Worth 50 IQ Points
A wealthy man walks into a bank in New York.
"I’m going away to Europe on business for two weeks and need to borrow $5000”
The bank officer says the bank will need some security for the loan.
The man hands over the keys to a new Rolls Royce, which costs $250,000.
The bank officer is shocked but agrees to accept the car as collateral for the loan.
After the man leaves, the loan officer, the bank's president and all their colleagues enjoy a good laugh at the man for using a $250,000 Rolls Royce as collateral against a $5,000 loan.
One of the employees drives the Rolls into the bank's underground garage and parks it there.
Two weeks later, the wealthy man returns, repays the $5000 and the interest, which comes to $15.41.
The loan officer says, "Sir, I must tell you, we’re all a little puzzled. You’re a multi millionaire — why would you need a $5,000 loan?”
The man replies, "Where else in New York City can I park my car for two weeks for only $15.41?"
A change of perspective is worth 50 IQ points.
Don't worry... There's more. There's an encore about to happen: The High Agency Library.
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Bonus Material: The High Agency Library
Here's a working list of high agency stories and tools. If there's any I should add, please send them to me.
1. A Truck Driver and a Photocopying Machine
A 20-year-old truck driver dreamed of making films, but he couldn’t afford film school.
When done with his trucking shift, he'd go to USC library. He’d find dissertations from film students, remove the staples and photocopy hundreds of pages. For six months, he gave himself a world-class education in visual effects and cinematography from the top film school in the country — whilst driving his truck.
This truck driver was James Cameron, who is now the second-highest grossing movie director of all time — creating films such as Titanic and Avatar.
I was working as a Truck driver": The Only Director With Three $2 Billion Movies, James
2. A Curious 6-Year Old Watching Warren Buffett Videos
Cole Summers was a curious 6-year old.
He was being homeschooled by his Dad.
At the start of his homeschooling, his dad needed medical care – requiring 9 surgeries in 18 months.
This meant Cole’s teacher was no longer fully able to build his curriculum.
Cole asked: “Daddy, how do people get rich?”
His Dad replied: “I wouldn’t know. Go watch videos on YouTube about Warren Buffett or something”
And so it began. The 6-year old started watching Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger videos on YouTube.
At age 7, he set up an LLC and created his first company breeding rabbits and selling them to local restaurants — making $1,000 per month.
At age 8, he bought his first truck via a trade with a neighbour — and resourcefully figured out an 8 year old can get a vehicle titled in their name.
At age 9, he learnt about Amazon’s $0 tax bill, so he taught himself corporate tax law so he could pay a $0 tax bill.
At age 10, he bought a house for $10K — which he renovated and sold for a profit. He taught himself flooring, roofing, painting and electrical work all from YouTube.
“On the ride to Cub Scouts one time, my friends started talking about what they were doing in school. They were all joking around about having to memorize the names of all the planets in order. [My friend] Michael said “it’s stupid. Like, when will I ever need to know that?”
Then they asked me what I was studying. I started talking about how companies can pay certain expenses, like payroll, in stock, creating paper losses that reduce their taxes and maybe even create net loss carry forward. Wow, the looks I got from everyone. They told me they had no clue what I was talking about. I just shrugged it off and said “Yeah, I’m weird,” but I was confused. I still thought back then that they did all the same stuff I did.”
Thought experiment: If the reward for solving the problem was a trillion dollars, and the consequence for not solving the problem was the death penalty -- would you find a way to solve the problem?
There's few great men of history with more bias to action than a crack cocaine addict sourcing their next hit. Well meaning intentions unfortunately do not create action. E.g. New Year's resolutions, the Mecca of well meaning intentions, have a reported ∼91% failure rate. If you contrast this with publicly announcing you’re going to run a marathon for charity, the failure rates reverse.
The person announcing publicly they're going to run a marathon for charity puts the gun behind their head. They’ve burnt the boats.
Here's some iconic incentive schemes to burn the boats and embrace the crack addict mindset:
A. The Ticking Clock
Elon Musk proposed to George Hotz the following to build vision system for Tesla autopilot:
$12 million payment if it was delivered the next day. For every month that passes where it's not delivered, the payment would be reduced by $1 million.
If you had an incentive scheme where dollars disappear like a ticking clock each minute, would you need motivation to take action?
B. The Tattoo
Mr. Beast and his friend were regularly skipping workouts so they created a bet:
If one of them skipped a workout -- they had to get a tattoo of the other person.
Guess how many workouts they skipped that year? Zero.
Discipline is a candle flame to action. Incentives and consequences are a nuclear reactor to action.
Have agency over your action and design incentives and consequences for not taking action: Set a public deadline. Invite people to the diary event. Bet on yourself.
4. The Most High Agency Person You've Never Heard Of
Who is the most high-agency person you've never heard of?Rudolf Vrba.
He escaped Auschwitz by soaking himself in gasoline -- to give a memo to Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Pope.
Meet the man who saved 200,000 lives from the Nazis: pic.twitter.com/jciFu8s7OE
5. Renaming The Universe From Staring At Your Child's Poster
Last January, I noticed something peculiar in my 2yo’s bedroom that – after a year of obsessive reporting – led me to a profound cosmic revelation about what’s even possible in our universe. A 🧵. pic.twitter.com/pHFStIdawh
6. Dropped In The Sahara Desert To Die To UFC Champion
Francis Ngannou is fighting for the UFC heavyweight belt this weekend.His life story >>> Any movie that exists
It's criminally overlooked.
THREAD...
Something Big Is Coming...
Do you want more? If you want content on high agency I've not shared with anyone -- put your email address in and I'll send it to you:
This was supposed to take a few weeks to write — and took 7 months.
There was no financial incentive. The goal was just to create great art that I would like to consume.
There’s lots of people to thank:
Eric Weinstein and Tim Ferriss for first putting the idea in my head.
Harry Dry for always making me increase my quality bar with this piece.
Eric Jorgenson made me re-think this multiple times.
The following incredible friends gave valuable feedback and helped shape it into something worth reading: Valerie (Vals Pals), Sky King, Yusef Smith, Giacamo, Alessio Esposito, Billy Oppenheimer, Paul Millerd, Christian Dean, Reece Best, Phil Daneshyar and my Dad!
Special shout out to Chris Williamson, Jim O'Shaughnessy, Shaan Puri, Jimmy Carr and David Senra for being a sparring partner on the ideas over the years too.