The Single Most Important Trait That Matters in Your Friends, Coworkers, Kids, Partner & Life
Amazon made this trait famous
The internet loves to ma$sturbate over psychological hacks.
They say you can think your goal into reality, exactly like the book “The Secret” says you can. But fortunetelling isn’t a human trait you should focus on. Another trait that’s a waste of time is confidence.
Today, a guy told me, “I’m confident I can get 1M views per X post.” They’ve never written online and haven’t read any books for a while. Overconfidence is everywhere. In the corporate world it turns into stupidity.
The trait you must look for in friends, coworkers, kids, partner and life overall is one you’ve probably never heard of: High Agency.
The origin of this powerful phenomena
High agency is a concept most people don’t know. I discovered it in a Tim Ferriss podcast years ago with Eric Weinstein. He says…
"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?"
When I started to write everyone told me I needed a website and to pay for SEO. I had no money or web development skills. So I forced myself to find another option and discovered the power of writing on social media.
No one told me this was high agency thinking.
One of the greatest writers on the internet, George Mack, popularised what it means to be high agency. He says…
“A High Agency person looks to bend reality to their will.”
You either figure out how, or you create a new reality in which your view of the world becomes possible. You make the impossible, possible.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also helped make the trait of high agency popular. This question is what he uses to find high agency people:
"If you were stuck in a third world prison and had to call one person to try and bust you out of there - who would you call?"You find a way or you find an excuse. High agency is another way to describe someone who is resourceful. Or as my former boss said “someone who can figure sh*t out.”
A short story to leave you speechless
Stephanie’s son is in a car accident. He’s 19.
The police knock on her door. “Come this way, mam.” She drives with them to a trauma center far away. Out the front there’s an ambulance hosing off blood from the back. Her motherly instincts tell her this is her son’s blood.
Her son survives but needs 24/7 care.
She’s not fussed. She works as a senior executive at an ad agency. She has best-in-the-world health insurance. Her son gets great care. But then the insurance cover runs out.
“Sorry Stephanie, you’re on your own. There’s nothing we can do.”
She rings the insurance company. They won’t tell her what the problem is or even what benefits her insurance has. She speaks to a lawyer. He wants $30,000.
She doesn’t have it. She decides to put her son in a nursing home instead of taking him home with her and battling through. During the ordeal her son’s peg tube falls out. This is common. No big deal.
The nursing home put the tube back in. Normally, you’d do an X-ray to make sure the tube went back in properly.
The nursing home didn’t have an X-ray machine, so they guessed the tube was in the right spot. They guessed wrong. Food was going into his abdominal cavity. It gave him sepsis.
This is when the story gets dark.
The doctor told her they could operate but he’d go into a coma and never come out.
The other option was to end her son’s life. She made the hard decision to tell her son he needed to die. He didn’t love to hear it.
Three days later he died.
This story has two possible endings. If Stephanie was a low agency person she would have become a victim. She would have let this story define her life and ruin it. She would have held a grudge against the medical system.
She would have joined the “life ain’t fair crowd.”
But Stephanie is high agency. After her son died she decided to heal. She turned into a badass. She and a friend started a non-profit that challenges medical insurers that won’t tell customers what their benefits are.
They now help others fight the medical system. She still has a daughter too. Her daughter is high agency like her mommy and became a trauma nurse. She’s saved more lives than the one life of her brother that she lost.
High agency people choose the empowering alternative.
The quiet signs of a low agency person destined to fail (avoid these)
A guy emailed me today: “How do I start writing online?”
A sign of a low agency person is someone who is too lazy to google answers to basic questions. A high agency person doesn’t ask an obvious question like this. No.
They take action using 101 tips from the internet, then get feedback when their actions create questions or problems.
If you allow people to act low agency and give them answers to these googleable questions, you reward this bad behavior and help to contribute to the further decline of humanity.
Low agency people love to ask for permission.
That’s why they love degrees and the 9-5 world. Someone has to say yes. They people-please the sh*t out of a person in power so they can get permission to make their goal happen.
Low agency people seek mentors too. They think someone other than themselves can figure out their life’s problems.
And they dare to ask people to be their free mentor, as if everyone’s time isn’t valuable and someone will drown their baby so they can have time to sit on endless Zoom calls telling them how to place stickers in a toddler’s scrapbook.
Low agency people are adults in diapers.
They need to be told what to do. They have to have someone else change their nappy and wipe their butt. They can’t think for themselves. They wait for the right time to do things.
They say “someday” (mayday) to goals, then sit on their butt and eat Doritos. They never have enough time or money (or both) to get stuff done. It’s always an excuse.
“I’m too busy.”
“My budget can’t accommodate that.”
They never think they should free up some time or do the most obvious thing in the world and find a way to make more money. They even embrace lottery thinking and believe they’ll get lucky. Or worse, they believe in hope.
Something will change … but it’s not them.
The next level of “agency” that’ll transform your life
My internet friend Zach Pogrob likes to take things to the extreme. He says acts of extreme agency push you even further.
Leave the country
Check into rehab
Quit the toxic job
Dare to start a business
Move out of your current home
Declare bankruptcy and start again
Tell the micromanager boss to F off
End a marriage or break up with a boyfriend/girlfriend
These extreme acts create inflection points. They lead to new chapters in life. They help you go from an unresourceful state to being highly resourceful.
From this place you can do or be anything.
Until you cut off the poisonous body part, it infects your whole body. The knife wound hurts but not as much as a lifetime of low agency.
Here’s how to become a high agency person (and quietly change the world):
The first step to becoming high agency is to surround yourself with high agency people. The more you see them act, the more you become them.
Because the people you spend time with transfer their beliefs, stories, and behavior over to you whether you are conscious of it or not
These are the traits of high agency people (stick to them like superglue).
You feel a wave of energy being around them
Low agency people suck the life out of you.
When I spend time with my former buddha boss he gives me more energy. He’s full of possibilities. He shares stories from history. He’s present.
He’s not a ball of anxiety with phone notifications pinging every 2 seconds. When we have coffee we leave our phones at home. At the end of our talks I feel inspired. I feel like I can do anything and help others.
High agency is energy. It helps you bend reality in ways that mesmerise.
They make you think differently
High agency people challenge the status quo.
Whatever the conventional wisdom is they normally have the opposite opinion. They challenge ideas. They don’t get easily offended and run off like a pussy cat. They can hold two opposing views in their head at the same time without exploding like a nuclear bomb.
They spend more time on the solution than the problem
Problems can tear us apart.
We can complain, blame, and be hypnotized by a problem. Instead of looking for a solution we spend all our time thinking about the problem in disempowering ways.
High agency people have the mindset of “sh*t happens.”
They move on from the problem fast and think about what ways they can solve it. They take ownership. And most of all, they learn from their mistakes so the problem doesn’t happen again.
Their driving mindset is that a positive outlook on the world will help them solve more problems, and therefore, increase their value.
They can be the co-founder of Netflix, then work in an Amazon fulfillment center tomorrow
This person is mega high agency:
One day they’re the co-founder of one of the most popular apps in the world. The next day they’re working in an Amazon fulfillment center on minimum wage.
Why is this high agency?
Because they don’t have a huge ego. They know that life has ups and downs. They back themselves to start again from nothing and find a way.
They use mental models, frameworks, and razors to make decisions
Most people make decisions as if they’re playing blackjack.
They guess or hope for good luck. High agency people read a lot, then take the lessons and turn them into mental models and frameworks to save them time.
They don’t drown in mainstream content
Viral social media posts are for circus monkeys.
TikTok is for, well, I won’t say it because it’s the worst app in the world. Low agency people share news stories and get h0rny over who’s running for president, even though it’ll do nothing for their quality of life. They major in the minor.
High agency people read niche content. Random Substacks. Tweets from accounts with 500 followers. Books from unknown authors. Or history stories from hundreds of years ago that 99% of people have never heard.
You never know what they’ll say next
They’re unpredictable. There’s no pattern to their life. They embrace randomness. They’re unhinged. They go down rabbit holes. They love long tangents.
Final Thought
When choosing who you spend time with focus on people who have the single most important trait of high agency.
If you want to think like a high agency person, try asking yourself questions like this one from tech guru Peter Thiel: "How can you achieve your 10 year goal in 6 months?" Questions are the seeds of high agency thinking. Learn to ask better ones.
Tell me if you worship high agency people the way I do and why in the comments.
P.S. High agency people don't leave any opportunities on the table.
But many people are sleeping on LinkedIn.
What's to gain on LinkedIn?
Money, connections, clients, and customers. (take your pick.)
My LAST LinkedIn session of the year starts in a few hours.
This is the single best thing you've written, Tim.
I'm a high agency person who had to repurpose my life after my 28 year old daughter died. Or else.
I left a toxic work culture in healthcare and started my own business as a nurse practitioner and self-care coach. I'm connected to my why at all times, and it makes my unf#kwithable.
Thank you for this post!