I’ve been thinking about agency recently. I want to be more agentic!
Sometime last year, I read Cultivating And Destroying Agency and Seven ways to become unstoppably agentic. I recently saw How to be More Agentic and it kind of spurred me to write this post (which is actually a form of agency). I credit these posts with expanding what I think is possible. What I found really helpful was the concrete examples of the things they did (you can just buy stuff online, you can cold email people, try to get as many rejections as possible, sign up to take a test w/o taking a class).
These examples felt really helpful because they expanded the domain of things I thought were possible. I want to expand my agency Overton window.
My model is that there are two parts to expanding agency:
Find out or think of things that you can do that you had not thought of before (because they are uncommon / not what society tells us to do / require some staring into the abyss)
Actually do them, get good results, and have a positive feedback loop
If you have examples of things that you have done are just totally orthogonal to what we think of normal, that were ultimately helpful (or not), please put them here. This will hopefully help with step 1. Actually Doing Things and getting a positive feedback loop requires effort (but it hopefully is fun and rewarding).
If what you did ended really badly, please still put it, but just also put that it ended badly. I can reverse advice. If it ended well, say that also! The more examples the better. My main goal is to expand my possibility hull (pictured above). If you are unsure whether the thing you are saying is already known, please say it anyways.
[Question] Concrete examples of doing agentic things?
I’ve been thinking about agency recently. I want to be more agentic!
Sometime last year, I read Cultivating And Destroying Agency and Seven ways to become unstoppably agentic. I recently saw How to be More Agentic and it kind of spurred me to write this post (which is actually a form of agency). I credit these posts with expanding what I think is possible. What I found really helpful was the concrete examples of the things they did (you can just buy stuff online, you can cold email people, try to get as many rejections as possible, sign up to take a test w/o taking a class).
These examples felt really helpful because they expanded the domain of things I thought were possible. I want to expand my agency Overton window.
My model is that there are two parts to expanding agency:
Find out or think of things that you can do that you had not thought of before (because they are uncommon / not what society tells us to do / require some staring into the abyss)
Actually do them, get good results, and have a positive feedback loop
If you have examples of things that you have done are just totally orthogonal to what we think of normal, that were ultimately helpful (or not), please put them here. This will hopefully help with step 1. Actually Doing Things and getting a positive feedback loop requires effort (but it hopefully is fun and rewarding).
If what you did ended really badly, please still put it, but just also put that it ended badly. I can reverse advice. If it ended well, say that also! The more examples the better. My main goal is to expand my possibility hull (pictured above). If you are unsure whether the thing you are saying is already known, please say it anyways.