High Agency

Most people are waiting.

Waiting for clarity. Waiting for permission. Waiting for someone to tell them what to do next. But there’s a different kind of person—the one who doesn’t wait. The one who moves. The one who doesn’t just accept life as it is but believes, deeply and viscerally, that they can shape it. That’s high agency.

High agency isn’t about being the smartest in the room. It’s not about status or confidence. It’s about ownership—the belief that you are responsible for your outcomes and can do something about them, even when the odds are stacked. These people don’t just see obstacles—they metabolize them into possibilities. They don’t wait for instructions; they figure it out. They don’t seek permission; they take action and adjust on the way.

It’s the difference between asking, “Why is this happening to me?” and asking, “What can I do about this?” That simple shift in framing changes everything. You see it in people who build rockets, reimagine broken systems, teach themselves new skills, or walk away from outdated playbooks to write their own. These are people who operate on first principles. Who act first and learn as they go. Who don’t care if they’re the only one thinking differently in a room full of agreement.

But here’s the thing—we’re all born with high agency. You can see it in toddlers who climb, stack, and solve endlessly. But somewhere along the way, we’re taught to wait. School teaches us to raise our hands. Work teaches us to follow processes. Society teaches us not to rock the boat. Slowly, high agency turns into compliance. Into waiting. Into asking someone else to decide what’s possible for us.

Reclaiming agency is a choice. One you make every single day. It begins with the question: Am I happening to life, or is life happening to me? Then it demands action. Even small actions—trying something new, solving your own problems, asking a better question—compound over time. You don’t need confidence. You need momentum. You don’t need to know everything. You need to start.

We live in a world where information is abundant, but initiative is rare. Institutions are slow. Systems are strained. But the tools to learn, build, and change things are right in front of us. The real scarcity today isn’t resources—it’s people who believe they can make a difference, and act like it.

High agency is a posture. A mindset. A quiet defiance. It’s the refusal to be a spectator in your own life. It’s raising your hand when others look away. It’s taking ownership when the path is unclear. The people who build the future are not the most credentialed or the most confident. They’re the ones who keep asking, “What can I do next?”—and then actually do it.

If there is one skill you need in the AI era it is high agency. Agency is one of those you can’t define but you know it when you see it.