Article
How to Be More Agentic
Cate Hall
- In my way of thinking, radical agency involves finding real edges: things you are willing to do that others aren’t, often because they’re annoying, unpleasant, or obscured in a cloud of aversion.
- Ask for things. Ask for things that feel unreasonable, to make sure your intuitions about what’s reasonable are accurate (try not to be a jerk in the process). If you’re only asking for things you get, you’re not aiming high enough. Jobs are a great example: Especially if you’re early in your career, you should aim to get rejected from most things you apply for. If you have not yet learned the skill of absorbing rejection, court it deliberately.
- It’s hard to overstate how overpowered feedback is. If you aren’t trying to get real feedback from people who know you, you’re cooking without tasting. This is among the lowest-hanging fruit for self-improvement, but few people really try to pick it. In many contexts, the way to get good feedback is to give people a way to provide it anonymously.
- The last couple of times I was looking for a project to work on, I made a point of meeting as many people doing related work as I could, even if there was no obvious benefit to doing so. At first, I did this just to advertise my existence to people as I entered a new field because someone is always hiring or looking for a cofounder.
- Most subject matter is learnable, even stuff that seems hard. However, beyond that, many (most?) traits that people treat as fixed are actually quite malleable if you believe they are and put the same kind of work into learning them as you would anything else.
- Many other supposedly fixed traits can likewise be altered: confidence, charisma, warmth, tranquility, optimism. Someone recently asked how one might go about learning charisma, and my answer was boring. Read a few books, watch many hours of charismatic people interacting with others, and adopt a few of their habits. This is surely a plan of action most people could come up with if they didn’t have the notion that charisma is innate lodged in their heads.
- Whatever it is, assume it can be learned, and that the challenge is to figure out the best way to do it.
- When you make changes in your life, especially when learning new skill sets, you’ll have to cross a moat of low status—a period where you are bad at the thing or fail to know things that are obvious to other people.
It’s called a moat both because you can’t just leap to the other side and because anyone who can cross it has a real advantage. It’s possible to cross the moat quietly, by not asking questions and not collaborating, but those tradeoffs nerf learning. “Learn by doing” is standard advice, but you can’t do that unless you splash around in the moat for a bit.
- Note:
- think more hours mean more productivity—that’s just multiplication, right? No. The reality is that grinding kills creativity and big-picture thinking, even if it temporarily increases output. Burnout is the ultimate agency-killer.