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Chapter 1: 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.
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Chapter 2: What are the three essential components of high agency?
So we went full force into educational YouTube videos on commercial insurance products. It was thrilling, let me tell you. But it's what we sold. And not all of them were sales videos, not pitch videos, educational videos where we weren't trying to sell our customers. We were trying to help them solve a problem.
They watched the videos, they got educated, and if they want, they could solve that problem on their own because they now understood their options. And by the time they called us, they were already sold. All we had to do was connect their problem to the right product. This was wholly different from the way the rest of the insurance industry operated.
Was I braver than every other insurance agency owner in America? No, it had nothing to do with bravery. Was I smarter? Certainly not. Was I operating from my easy mode? Was I creating? Was I educating? Was I building frameworks and systems while everyone else was operating from fear, trying to wedge analog into digital? I was in my zone.
All three wheels of the triangle were turning automatically in that moment. I was figuring it out. I was absolutely willing to be misunderstood. People thought I was insane for making YouTube videos about commercial insurance. Those people will never buy from you, they would say.
And when things broke, I fixed them because I had the energy to diagnose the problem because I was operating in my easy mode. Easy mode doesn't just make you more productive. It makes you high agency by default.
Now, here's where this gets important for right now, this moment, for 2026, for the age of AI, because there is a conversation happening everywhere about AI, and most of it is missing the point entirely. Most people are using AI to go faster, faster emails, faster content, faster reports, faster presentations. And I want to be direct with you here.
That is the low agency move unequivocally and undoubtedly if you are in hard mode, disconnected, depleted, reorganizing folders, writing emails that don't that shouldn't even exist. And you give that person an AI tool. You don't get high agency person automatically.
You get a low agency person trying to produce work slop at machine speed because they feel like that's what they're supposed to be doing. The real play, the one almost no one else is executing is using AI to protect your easy mode. This AI was built to protect your easy mode, to protect that thing that when you do it, it looks like cheating to everyone else.
AI protects easy mode, not to produce more, to eliminate everything that pulls you away from your zone of genius, where you produce disproportionate results, results that look like cheating to everyone else. Let me show you exactly what I mean. I run a podcast, Finding Peak. It's part of this YouTube channel. We do over 200,000 downloads a month.
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Chapter 3: How can low agency impact personal and professional identity?
I'm out of here. Peace.