High Agency is the Game (and Most People Aren't Playing)
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What personal experience shaped the concept of high agency?
I was 17 years old, sitting at a kitchen table my mom bought at a garage sale. No dad in the house, stepfather working 12 hours a day on the road, construction crew. My mom was busy with my little sister. It was just me. I hand wrote letters to 17 different college baseball coaches Package them up in VHS tapes, me hitting, fielding, whatever I could get at the time. And in every single letter, I said the same thing that most 17 year olds would never have the nerve to say. I said, I'm a power hitting right handed catcher. I finished 29th out of 325 kids in my class. I want to study science or engineering. 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.
No hedge, no performance, no pretending that I had options that I didn't have. 17 letters, 17 years old, 17 VHS tapes. Total clarity about what I needed and what I was offering if they were to offer me a scholarship to go to that school.
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.
I was willing to be misunderstood because that letter was weird. Coaches don't get letters like that. And I knew that if something broke along the way, I could fix it. I didn't have a name for the three wheels that George Mack calls high agency, but they were turning all the same. So here's the problem. Most people might have one wheel, maybe two on a good day spinning for them. And almost nobody, nobody, especially today, can sustain all three consistently over time. The question is why? I want to tell you what the opposite of high agency feels like. not theoretically, from the inside, from my own experience. It feels like that dull, nagging sensation, a low-grade disconnection from who you actually are, that voice in the back of your mind creating doubt, shame, and guilt.
because you know you're not doing the work that matters. And it translates physically. Death scrolling Instagram at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday when you should be doing something productive. Reorganizing folders on your desktop at 9 o'clock at night. Spending hours on emails that have no real value and should never even have been read in the first place. scheduling calls with no real purpose. Just you have meetings on the calendar so that you can look busy. I lived this. There was a season in my career, in my life, where I took a job, a big title, more money than I'd ever made or seen before. And I was miserable from day one. The CEO eventually looked at me in a board meeting and he said, haven't you realized by now that you were a vanity hire?
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