Ryan Hanley

If this is the kind of kid that you want on your team, here's the deal.

My family is broke.

I cannot pay for college.

Whoever reduces that burden the most, essentially whoever gives me the most money, that's where I'm going.

When the University of Rochester letter arrived, I opened it and immediately, immediately flipped as fast as I possibly could to the acceptance part.

And once I saw that, immediately went to financial aid package.

90% covered.

I started crying.

legitimately crying right there again alone crying at a kitchen table that my mom bought at a garage sale because I was going to college I didn't know it at the time but there's a name for what I had done there's a name for what happened at that kitchen table George Mack calls it high agency high agency is one of those ideas that once you see it once you learn it you cannot unsee it it it

burrows into your brain.

It's not optimism and it's not confidence.

It's not even intelligence.

Mack describes it as a tricycle, three wheels, clear thinking, bias to action, disagreeability, remove any one of those wheels and the whole thing stops working.

The person you'd call that person, that friend, that family member that you'd call if you were stuck in a third world jail cell, that's the high agency person in your life.

not the smartest person you know, not the most credentialed, the one who would actually figure out how to get you out of a third world jail.

That 17 year old at the kitchen table, he was not the most talented baseball player in New York.

I can promise you that.

He wasn't the best student.

He had no connections, no money, no roadmap.

But what I was willing to do was figure it out.