2.5 Take full agency

Agency is the ability to act intentionally, based on your own values.

Every person has agency – what to eat, what to focus on or how to respond to bad news.

But few own it entirely. Most own the action and outsource the rest: reasoning to habit, response to mood, and the outcome to circumstance. Outsourcing creates a life you rarely want. But there’s an alternative.

Every person has capacity for full agency.

Full agency mindset enables you to actually author your life instead of narrating it. You become the first to ask, answer, and act, and the range of what you can think through expands.

Striving for full agency makes you take the maximum responsibility over your day to day and life’s direction in general. Slowly but steadily you rewire the way you look at the world. You naturally shift to:

• Seeing opportunities in problems
• Focusing on your own actions over actions of others
• Admitting your flaws without pressuring or humiliating yourself

This difference is best seen in extreme examples: the brutal reality of a concentration camp, wrongful imprisonment or total financial ruin – breaking one and elevating the other.

The perceived quality of your life largely depends on the quality of story you tell yourself. The pursuit of full agency is guaranteed to produce a story of higher quality.

The pursuit of full agency is a journey that has no destination. The practice never ends, but years-long practice makes you act with a high level of agency by default.

Practice

This is the one principle that is less about how you think, and more about how you live. Living with full agency forces you to think, and think well, because you take full responsibility and nothing runs on autopilot anymore.

Daily exercises:

1. Identify one thing in your life you attribute to external circumstances. Write it down. Then rewrite it from the perspective of someone with full agency.
2. Tell the truth when lying would have been an easier option. Log it.
3. Name 1 thing you could have done better in a specific situation, aspect or life in general. Log it.
4. Say 'no' when you'd normally say 'yes' just to avoid friction. Log it.
5. Start one thing you've been waiting for permission or the right moment to begin. Log it.
6. Ask for help with something you've been struggling with alone. Log it.