Increasing agency is a classic chicken or egg problem: If you don’t have agency, how will you take control to increase your agency? If you already have the ability to become more agentic, perhaps you were never so bereft of agency in the first place.
So where does one begin?
It could be the case that a lack of agency is a deep problem. Maybe it’s genetic, or maybe agency has to be inculcated in children during their formative years, or maybe people develop engrained mental barriers that limit their agency.
But I don’t really think any of that is true. I think it’s probably more similar to a bad attitude, or is even just a set of wrong beliefs. For example:
If you email an early stage start up with a good pitch for why you should work here, there’s a decent chance they will interview you (And in general, far more people respond to cold emails than you think)
So maybe if people simply knew more bits of useful advice like these they would have more agency. We could just teach people them, as many on Twitter do.
But I still suspect lacking a agency is bit deeper than that. There’s something more that prevents people from simply saying: “Oh, I can just email startups I want to work at? I’ll just do that.” That doesn’t sound like something that someone who was just lacking agency would say.
I think that deeper problem is the Cheems Mindset.
As Jeremy Driver recently wrote:
Broadly, personal cheems mindset is the reflexive decision for an individual to choose inaction over action, in particular finding reasons not to do things which have either high expected value, or a huge upside with very little downside risk.
So how to escape it? Michael Story responded to Jeremy with my favorite piece of advice:
But again, what if you don’t already have the right friends nor do you have the agency to find them? I have a simple proposal: Just ask yourself, what would the anti-cheems thing to do be? Just always do that.
That way, next time you hear about a way to move more adeptly in the world—that you will likely get a response from your cold email —you won’t just think “Someone could do that.” You’ll think: I will do that. Because that’s the anti-cheems thing to do.