0.1% Ideas: 13 Ways To Spot High Agency People
Hello,
I've put my master list together of how to spot high agency people.
As you read this list, there's people you know or admire -- and you'll be thinking: "Oh, that's so Mike" or "That reminds me of Sarah".
Feel free to forward it to them.
13 ways to spot high agency people:
1. Weird teenage hobbies - Teenage years are the hardest time to go against social pressures. If they can go against the crowd as a teenager, they can go against the crowd as an adult.
2. High bias for action - High agency people think problems through carefully, but it’s solution focused with a high bias for action. The low agency person spends years ruminating on a decision that was a reversible door. Rumination is like inverse masterbation — it’s self inflicted pain that never ends.
3. Golden question - If you're in a 3rd world prison cell and had to call someone to get you out, who would you call? That's the highest agency person you know.
4. View the present with a historians frame - A common low agency trap throughout history is to think we’re at the end of history. The high agency person gets clarity on the present moment by taking the historians perspective of the present day: What ideas are sound weird today but will be normal 10 years from now? What ideas sound respected today but will be mocked 10 years from now?
5. Energy distortion field - If you meet with them when you're tired and defeated, you leave the room ready to run a marathon on a treadmill with max incline. Low agency people do the opposite.
6. You can never guess their opinions - The boxer that writes poetry. The advertiser obsessed with the history of war. The beauty queen who reads Nietzsche. If their beliefs don't line up with their stereotypes, they've exercised agency.
7. Immigrant mentality - If they've moved from their hometown, that's a good sign. If they've moved from their home country, that's an even greater sign. It takes agency to spot you're in the wrong place, resourcefulness to operationalise a move and a growth mindset to start from zero in a new location.
8. They send you niche content - Low agency people look at the social engagement of content before deeming its quality. High agency people just look at the content. They spot upcoming trends very early.
9. Mean to your face but nice behind your back - The social incentives are to be nice to people's faces and gossip behind their backs. To do the opposite requires agency because they're swimming against the social tide.
10. Adults do not exist - A low agency fallacy to fall into is to see your backstage (inner dialogue, emotions, messy life) and contrast it with other adults stage performance (words, social media, job title). The high agency person sees through the facade. Every adult is just a grown up child figuring life out. They started off as a sperm cell, fertilized an egg, came into this world screaming in a hospital bed with no sense of self, downloaded patterns of information from those around them that seemed certain — and now we call them “adults”.
11. Question assumptions - “When you’re told that something is impossible, is that the end of the conversation, or does that start a second dialogue in your mind, how to get around whoever it is that’s just told you that you can’t do something?” - Eric Weinstein.
If you keep asking why, you realise 95% of people never got past the first why.
12. Unique language - “The limits of the language are the limits of my world” - Wittgenstein.
High agency people tend to have their own unique language. They have isms. Musk-isms. Munger-isms. Churchill-isms. In a pursuit of their own worldview, they end up with their own unique vocabulary and aphorisms.
13. Logic over social proof - Low agency conditioning mechanisms: “Science says” “Experts say” “They say”. High agency people mute the noise of social proof and look for the signal of logic — even if it’s unpopular.
If I've missed any off, share them with me.
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10:4 AM • Nov 19, 2023
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