"High Agency in 30 Minutes" by George Mack
Summary
High agency is the ability to shape reality through clear thinking, bias to action, and disagreeability—it's the mindset that there are no unsolvable problems that don't defy the laws of physics, and that you have the power to affect outcomes rather than passively accepting circumstances.
- Vague Trap: Never defining the problem clearly
- Escape: Define problems in simple words outside your head (write, draw, talk)
- Midwit Trap: Overcomplicating simple actions
- Escape: Find simple ideas through inversion (what would make things worse?)
- Attachment Trap: Being too attached to past assumptions
- Escape: Ask "What would I do if I had 10x the agency?"
- Rumination Trap: Endless "what if" loops without action
- Escape: Ask "How can I take action on this now?" and frame decisions as experiments
- Overwhelm Trap: Paralysis from daunting tasks
- Escape: Ask "What's the smallest first step I can take?" and break tasks into levels
The "Story Razor" tool: When stuck between options, ask "What is the best story?"
- High agency people maximize the interestingness of their life story
- An interesting life story attracts opportunities and has compounding effects
Some examples of high agency individuals:
- James Cameron (photocopied film school dissertations while working as a truck driver)
- Cole Summers (started businesses and bought property as a child)
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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?