What trait do 9/10 billionaires credit for their success? “Agency” Here’s what it is and how you can develop it…

Agency is influencing the external environment to shape it in your favour. It’s moving from passive receiver of circumstances to active shaper of reality. It’s rejecting the world's status quo and making a new world instead. It’s removing the word “No” from your vocabulary.

It’s acting on impulses that hide behind shadows of fear, doubt, and comparison. It’s noticing something that isn’t right and having the courage to make it so. It’s changing history by sheer force of will. Agentic people happen to the world; the world doesn’t happen to them.

History is littered with examples of extreme agency, and they come from names we know well:

Elon Musk: literally extending the surface area of the world by making humans multi-planetary.

Oprah: created the highest-rated talk show in history and inspired women the world over.

Walt Disney: literally created his own world because he didn’t like the one he lived in.

Melanie Perkins: rejected 100 times by VCs before founding a $40bn company.

Agency is rare. Those who exert it do so knowing it’s not a safe harbour. But they do it anyway because agency moves the world forward. And the greatest gift we can give our fellow humans, friends, and families is forward progress. When we think about agency, we can think about levels:

At birth, all of us start at Level 1. Then, the education system perpetuates our status as a passive acceptor of circumstances. Here, the greatest rewards belong to the greatest conformists. Those that escape the firm grip of conformity do so out of necessity.

They can’t bear the circumstances they’ve inherited from the lottery of life. Or, an external force—losing a parent, getting bullied from locker to locker, a life-threatening illness—turns their world upside-down. The only hope is the hope of a better tomorrow. When you look at the most agentic people in the world, it’s uncommon to find one who has not endured extreme hardship.

They’re moving from darkness to lightness. The size of their struggle is the force of their strength. Suffering creates character and raw activation energy. And there is no agency without character or activation energy.

@wolfejosh likes to say, “Chips on shoulders put chips in pockets.” And in the words of NVIDIA CEO, Jensen Huang, “I hope suffering happens to you.”

Without the gift of hardship, how does one cultivate agency?

1) Start with the belief that your actions have impact 

2) Collect evidence that your actions have impact

3) Take evermore challenging quests

This is a game of positive reinforcement on increasingly complex quests. How would we measure the agency of a given action? Agency should not reward mere ‘action,’ but rather effective action towards a goal. Agency is relative to your own baseline—what’s familiar to you. Agency = Intentionality / Familiarity

Intentionality: How likely the action is to achieve a desired goal

Familiarity: How familiar you are with the action (# of reps)

The higher the intentionality, the higher the agency.

The lower the familiarity, the higher the agency.

Examples of agentic actions:

Agentic behaviour doesn’t come naturally. Uncommon actions require uncommon, blue-sky thinking. Here are questions you can ask to illuminate agentic actions in a given situation:

The world needs more agentic people, it’s time to act.