(2024-03-06) Hall How To Be More Agentic

Cate Hall: How to Be More Agentic. To succeed as a startup founder is, in many ways, to be a high-agency person. With artificial intelligence agents in the news, we felt it was high time to republish Cate Hall’s essay on human agency. Hall is a former professional poker player, lawyer, and medical startup cofounder who was able to do all of these things because of her own agency. Read her tips to learn how to be the master of your own fate

In my way of thinking, radical agency involves finding real edges: things you are willing to do that others aren’t, often because they’re annoying, unpleasant, or obscured in a cloud of aversion.

Here are some of the ones I’ve noticed and started seeking out.

Court rejection

Ask for things. Ask for things that feel unreasonable, to make sure your intuitions about what’s reasonable are accurate (try not to be a jerk in the process). If you’re only asking for things you get, you’re not aiming high enough.

Seek real feedback

This is among the lowest-hanging fruit for self-improvement, but few people really try to pick it.

In many contexts, the way to get good feedback is to give people a way to provide it anonymously.

You also want to make it easy to find—I have a link to my feedback form in my Twitter bio

Increase your surface area for luck

The last couple of times I was looking for a project to work on, I made a point of meeting as many people doing related work as I could, even if there was no obvious benefit to doing so. At first, I did this just to advertise my existence to people as I entered a new field because someone is always hiring or looking for a cofounder.

I learned that I have very little ability to predict how useful a call will be in advance. There is relevance, when work is closely related to something you’re working on, and usefulness, when work advances something you’re working on. Relevance is easier to predict, but it’s not a very good proxy for usefulness, which is a product of many other things including the other person’s enthusiasm and the breadth of their interests

Assume everything is learnable

Most subject matter is learnable, even stuff that seems hard. However, beyond that, many (most?) traits that people treat as fixed are actually quite malleable (cf growth mindset)

Agency is a good example. I learned agency late. In my teens and twenties,

Many other supposedly fixed traits can likewise be altered: confidence, charisma, warmth, tranquility, optimism...

Someone recently asked how one might go about learning charisma, and my answer was boring. Read a few books, watch many hours of charismatic people interacting with others, and adopt a few of their habits.

Learn to love the moat of low status

If you can learn to thrive in the moat, it’s incredibly liberating

Don’t work too hard

grinding kills creativity and big-picture thinking, even if it temporarily increases output

Agency has built our world

Agency is the skill that has built the world around you, an all-purpose life intensifier that lets you make your corner of it more like what you want it to be, whether that’s professional, relational, aesthetic, whatever. Build a better mousetrap. Have an enviable marriage. Start a country. No one is born with it, everyone can learn it, and it’s never too late.