The piece treats high agency as a trait you can cultivate to win, and survivorship is the easy objection to that. The harder one is that the visionary and the fool make the identical move. Same conviction, same refusal to wait for permission. At the decision point they are indistinguishable.
The outcome sorts them afterward, and then we go back and award the winner the word "agency." Butterfield ignored a rule and got Slack, so we call it vision. The ones who ignored a rule that was actually holding something up, we call reckless, if we name them at all. The trait got assigned by the result, not chosen before it.
Which makes "cultivate high agency" almost circular. you're being told to develop the label we hand out to people who already won. Conviction is the cheap part. It's identical in the founder who's right and the one who's about to find out he isn't.
The only thing that separates them in advance is whether the rule they broke was load-bearing, and that's a knowledge problem, not a nerve problem. So the essay celebrates the free half, the willingness to ignore the rule, and skips the decisive half, the reading of which rules were real. Agency is the easy part. The edge was always in the audit.
This is part of what we (Wisdom Partners) call Ownership Culture. We help leaders build the mindsets and systems that empower agency throughout the company.
Love this article. I'm going to include it in our must read list for our clients.
High agency is real but this framing has a blind spot - it pathologizes waiting in every form, which is how you get founders who pivot six times in eighteen months and call it 'OODA loop thinking' instead of just being unable to sit with discomfort long enough to get signal. The Wright Brothers analogy is doing a lot of work here; for every Wilbur who ignored consensus and flew, there are a hundred people who ignored consensus and just fell. The trait that actually separates them isn't agency, it's calibration - knowing which walls are social and which ones are load-bearing. Is there a version of this framework that accounts for when the highest-agency move is deliberately choosing not to act?
One of the most valuable ideas here is the distinction between waiting for permission and taking responsibility.
I’ve worked with hundreds of job seekers, and the people who make the biggest career leaps are rarely the smartest or most qualified on paper. They’re usually the ones who stop waiting for perfect conditions, start reaching out, start building, start learning, and create opportunities for themselves.
That said, I think high agency isn't about believing you control everything. Life still involves luck, timing, economic cycles, and circumstances outside our control. The real advantage comes from focusing relentlessly on what we can influence instead of getting stuck on what we can't.
Intellectually fulfilled! Learn philosophy, and you’ll set yourself free intellectually.
The piece treats high agency as a trait you can cultivate to win, and survivorship is the easy objection to that. The harder one is that the visionary and the fool make the identical move. Same conviction, same refusal to wait for permission. At the decision point they are indistinguishable.
The outcome sorts them afterward, and then we go back and award the winner the word "agency." Butterfield ignored a rule and got Slack, so we call it vision. The ones who ignored a rule that was actually holding something up, we call reckless, if we name them at all. The trait got assigned by the result, not chosen before it.
Which makes "cultivate high agency" almost circular. you're being told to develop the label we hand out to people who already won. Conviction is the cheap part. It's identical in the founder who's right and the one who's about to find out he isn't.
The only thing that separates them in advance is whether the rule they broke was load-bearing, and that's a knowledge problem, not a nerve problem. So the essay celebrates the free half, the willingness to ignore the rule, and skips the decisive half, the reading of which rules were real. Agency is the easy part. The edge was always in the audit.
Founding a company is mostly realising the adults weren’t hiding a secret manual from you.
There isn’t one. Everyone’s guessing, some people just send the email sooner.
This is part of what we (Wisdom Partners) call Ownership Culture. We help leaders build the mindsets and systems that empower agency throughout the company.
Love this article. I'm going to include it in our must read list for our clients.
High agency is real but this framing has a blind spot - it pathologizes waiting in every form, which is how you get founders who pivot six times in eighteen months and call it 'OODA loop thinking' instead of just being unable to sit with discomfort long enough to get signal. The Wright Brothers analogy is doing a lot of work here; for every Wilbur who ignored consensus and flew, there are a hundred people who ignored consensus and just fell. The trait that actually separates them isn't agency, it's calibration - knowing which walls are social and which ones are load-bearing. Is there a version of this framework that accounts for when the highest-agency move is deliberately choosing not to act?
Great article, thanks for sharing.
Thanks for sharing!
One of the most valuable ideas here is the distinction between waiting for permission and taking responsibility.
I’ve worked with hundreds of job seekers, and the people who make the biggest career leaps are rarely the smartest or most qualified on paper. They’re usually the ones who stop waiting for perfect conditions, start reaching out, start building, start learning, and create opportunities for themselves.
That said, I think high agency isn't about believing you control everything. Life still involves luck, timing, economic cycles, and circumstances outside our control. The real advantage comes from focusing relentlessly on what we can influence instead of getting stuck on what we can't.