How to Cultivate 10X Agency.

Getting What you Want

The word agency has been on my mind a lot lately. There are a few definitions floating around out there, but for some starting orientation, let's look at this one from Google: “Action or intervention, especially such as to produce a particular effect.”

I like this definition, but I’d add some flavor to it: Agency is a quality of being, and it drives the majority of the outcomes in your life. Agency is the quality of action for intended effect. You can have a lot or a little of it.

And you should want to have a lot.

Because broadly speaking having low agency = bad outcomes, and being high agency = good outcomes.

Why is this so?

Being low agency prevents you from getting what you want, while being high agency makes it more likely you’ll get exactly what you want.

I was scrolling X like a low-agency degenerate when I found this post:

Like many doom scrollers that day, my eyes had absorbed gallons and gallons of digital swill before reaching this post. But this one remained with me for days (11 now, to be exact). It’s a very sticky question.

In any case, I tried it, and he was right. It did work.

Why did this message stick so well?

Because building agency depends on two key ingredients, in the below order:

1. Imagination: Imagine yourself with 10x your current agency. How do you move and speak and look in this scenario? What clothes are you wearing? Where do you live? What do you smell? What are you eating? What does a day look like in this scenario? Feel it in your gut, and let your senses do the driving. Make it as visceral as possible. Write all this stuff down and see what comes out. Most likely you’ll start painting a vibrant picture of what you want. This step is critical, because the only way to realize your dreams is to have dreams in the first place.

2. Will: If you ask yourself this question consistently enough (if I had 10x agency what would I do?), you eventually won’t have to think about what you want anymore. You’ll just know on such a deep enough level that the will carries out the program automatically. You don’t despair that you want to be jacked, you just go to the gym and get jacked. Despairing is not what you want, being jacked is. You don’t say I want to read more, you just read more. You skip the step of longing and aching and go straight to doing the thing - because the thing itself is what you want, not the stuff that it isn’t.

Eventually you know what you want deeply enough that any path that leads you away from what you want becomes unbearable.

Be warned, there's layers to this rodeo. If you’re buckin’ and weavin’ it really well, you’ll lose friends and people will probably judge you. This is because agency really, really depends on not giving a fuck, about almost anything, but the thing you want, and acting accordingly nearly at all times.

In general just keep it within the law, don’t gamble like a fool, and you’ll probably win.

More next.

LH

PS Being generally dangerous is a high agency skillset. Join our Discord.