Learning to cultivate agency has been one of the most useful ways I've grown over the last few years. It enabled me to step off the default path, look past my constraints, and be more ambitious and creative about how I achieved my goals. It started with the realisation that I could take agency with my career and life path.

In my final year of university, I realised that despite completing a legal degree, I could step away from the default of pursuing a career as an attorney. I spent the next three years learning to code, working as a software engineer building ML systems for global water utilities, and now co-founding a company trying to connect the next billion people to the internet.

I think of agency as the ability to get what you want -- the general skill of coming up with ambitious goals and achieving them, whatever they are. Learning to cultivate agency has led to me becoming less risk-averse, a better engineer and thinker, and having a clearer idea of how I might have a significant positive impact on the world.

2.

Almost all of the best things happen as a result of actively seeking and asking for those things. Biographies are a wonderful example of this because they show that people who've successfully changed the world usually had boat loads of agency.

Our lives are full of defaults. Schools you should attend, careers you should pursue, things you're allowed to do. Peer pressure makes it easy to fall into following defaults without questioning them.

Agency is about noticing when these defaults constrain you and being willing to break them. It's being able to think for yourself.

The key is to start small. Take one area where you've been following a default path and question it. Ask yourself: is this what I actually want, or is this just what I think I'm supposed to do?

Then act on the answer. That's how you build the high-agency habit.

This is part 3 in the high-agency series. Part 1 looks at what agency is. Part 2 explores examples of agency in action.