High Agency

✅ You inherited a brain evolved for the scarcity of hunter-gatherer tribes. And then went through an education system designed to output factory workers for the industrial revolution. Are you expecting your default settings to be high agency? ✅ Don’t put any adult on a pedestal. Kill your gurus. A more useful belief: The 'adults' aren’t going to save you, they don’t even exist. ✅ Normal behavior costs nothing in the short term but disappears into the memory abyss. Unconventional weird behavior costs a price in the short term, but the actions live on as story assets in the future. In other words, "Don't do anything that someone else can do." ✅ Try your best to get your thoughts out of your head. Write them down, use a whiteboard, make a spreadsheet. ✅ Always be thinking, "What would I do in this situation if I have 10x more agency?" You'll likely come up with new ideas you never thought of before. ✅ "Stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over," Jeff Bezos. ✅ If you're stuck between two options, choose the one that will produce a more interesting story. People with extraordinary high-agency realize this early in life and start maximizing the interestingness of their life story. "My father was a good guy. Not many good men in the world, but this was a good guy. He worked at a post office, canceling your stamps, what a soul-killing, horrible job that is, for years, just to pay for a family. Who knew if he had dreams?… I get a phone call at 6 a.m. from my brother. He tells me to get down to the hospital on Walnut Street… I get to the emergency room, open the door, and the first thing I see is my mother, who looks more scared than I've ever seen a human being in my life. There was terror on her face. I've seen my mother cry in my lifetime…This was different. This was like terror, fear, almost like there was a gun to her head. I looked to my brother, and he just had this expression where he gave me the slow nod, which meant my father was gone. Then my brother says something that probably defined my life: "He died screaming." I couldn't believe it. I asked if it was a figure of speech, and he said no, he literally died screaming. You could see my brother was haunted by it. My father wasn't a soft man by any stretch of the imagination, and I'd never heard him get really loud. The notion of my father dying screaming changed my life. I realized that even a good man in this world, who played the game straight, played by the rules, did everything he was supposed to do, could end up dying screaming. At that point, I decided there's no point in not trying to accomplish every stupid dream I've got, even if it's dumb stuff….Chase it all and do it all because we're all going to die screaming, and you might as well enjoy it here." There’s not even a guarantee you won’t die screaming. There’s only now.