The Learnable Superpower

Here is the thing about agency that nobody tells you: it's not a personality trait. It's not something you're born with or without, like perfect pitch or double-jointed thumbs. Agency is closer to cooking or parallel parking: awkward at first, embarrassing in public, totally learnable if you're willing to tolerate looking stupid for a while.

Most people treat agency like charisma or athletic ability: you either have it or you don't, and if you don't, well, that's just your lot. This is convenient because it means you never have to try. But it's also completely wrong.

Agency is the manifest determination to make things happen. Not intelligence (though that helps). Not credentials (ditto). Not even talent. It's the willingness to notice what everyone else ignores, tolerate what everyone else avoids, and act while everyone else is still deciding whether to care.

The Advantage Everyone Sees But No One Takes

Real edges in life have a specific profile: they're effective, they're obvious once you see them, and they're universally ignored because they're annoying, uncomfortable, or socially awkward.

Consider professional poker. You could spend years grinding through game theory solvers, squeezing out marginal percentage gains. Or you could learn to read physical tells: the way someone breathes before a bluff, the micro-expression that precedes a fold. Physical reads are a massive edge. They're also uncomfortable to learn (you have to stare at people), socially weird (you're basically profiling strangers), and require admitting you don't already know something.

So almost nobody does it.

This pattern repeats everywhere. The biggest advantages in any domain usually sit behind a wall of collective denial. Not because they're hard to execute (though they might be), but because they require you to do things that feel wrong or embarrassing or like cheating even though they're perfectly legitimate.

The question isn't "what edges exist?" The question is "what edges exist that I'm subconsciously screening out because acknowledging them would obligate me to do something uncomfortable?"

Rejection as a Leading Indicator

If you're not getting rejected regularly, you're not aiming high enough. Full stop.

Most people treat rejection as failure: evidence that they asked for too much, reached too far, misread the situation. This is backwards. Rejection is a calibration tool. If you never get rejected, it means you've pre-rejected yourself so thoroughly that you only ask for things you're certain you'll get.

The habit of asking for "unreasonable" things (mentorship from someone famous, a job you're underqualified for, feedback from someone who intimidates you) does two things. First, it occasionally works, which is wild. Second, and more important, it recalibrates your sense of what's possible. Every time you ask for something audacious and survive the "no," your internal threshold for risk shifts a little.

Emotional resilience to rejection isn't a nice-to-have. It's a leverage multiplier. The person who can absorb ten rejections and keep asking will simply see more of the world than the person who avoids asking in the first place.

The Feedback Problem

Most people go through life like someone cooking without tasting. They make moves, take actions, produce output, and have essentially no idea whether any of it is working because they've never set up feedback systems.

Anonymous feedback is criminally underused. It lowers social friction (people will tell you the truth if they don't have to say it to your face) and produces information you literally cannot get otherwise. Most of us walk around with conversational tics, professional blind spots, and relationship patterns that are obvious to everyone except us. This information exists. We just never ask for it.

The fear is that feedback will be hurtful. Sometimes it is. But genuinely useful feedback (the kind that makes you go "oh wow I had no idea I was doing that") is so valuable it dwarfs the temporary sting. The bottleneck isn't criticism. It's access to candor.

Engineering Serendipity

Luck isn't magic, but it's also not entirely random. You can bias the odds.

The trick is surface area. You can't predict which interactions will matter most, so you maximize exposure to chance: meet many people, explore broadly, say yes to things without clear upside. Relevance is a weak proxy for usefulness. The person who becomes important to your career might be someone you met at a random dinner party talking about bird migration patterns.

This drives planners crazy because it's inefficient. You waste time on conversations that go nowhere, invest in relationships that never pay off, pursue threads that dead-end. But the hits, when they come, are so asymmetrically valuable that the failures don't matter. You're not optimizing for batting average. You're optimizing for not striking out on the occasional home run.

High-agency people understand this intuitively. They say yes more. They follow up more. They introduce people more. Not because each action has clear expected value, but because the strategy as a whole compounds.

The Assumption of Learnability

Here is a belief that will quietly tax your ambition: that certain traits are innate and you either have them or you don't.

Confidence? Learnable. Charisma? Learnable. Optimism? Learnable. Calm under pressure? Extremely learnable. The only meaningful difference between "learnable" and "innate" is (1) whether you believe it can be learned, and (2) whether you're willing to practice deliberately.

You could study charisma the same way you'd study mathematics: read books, observe people who have it, imitate specific behaviors, get feedback, iterate. Most people never try this because treating charisma as a skill feels somehow... fake? Like you're supposed to just "be yourself" and if yourself isn't charismatic, well, tough luck.

But "be yourself" is terrible advice if yourself is bad at the thing you're trying to do. You're allowed to become a different version of yourself. That's called learning.

The Moat of Low Status

Every skill has an awkward phase where you're visibly incompetent. This is actually a feature, not a bug, because the embarrassment of being bad in public creates a moat that keeps most people out.

Learning anything new requires enduring a period of low status: the adult who can't swim, the engineer who can't public speak, the executive who doesn't understand basic accounting. This phase is uncomfortable enough that most people avoid it entirely. They stick to domains where they're already competent, which means they stop growing.

The reframe: being bad publicly isn't a flaw. It's the entry fee for mastery.

If you're not regularly doing things you're mediocre at, you're not learning anything important. And if you're not learning anything important, you're coasting. Which is fine! Coasting is a valid life choice. But don't confuse it with building agency.

The Burnout Tax

Grinding kills agency. Not immediately, but reliably.

When you're overworked, the first thing to go isn't productivity, it's creativity. Then judgment. Then initiative. Burnout manifests as a loss of agency: the urge to rule things out instead of exploring them, to say no instead of yes, to optimize for avoiding failure rather than creating success.

This is important because our culture treats work ethic as a pure good, something you can never have too much of. But work ethic without boundaries doesn't produce more agency, it produces less. The person working 80-hour weeks might look high-agency, but they're often running on fumes, making conservative choices, avoiding risk.

Rule of thumb: never take work-ethic advice from someone who hasn't burned out. They don't yet know the price.

Boundaries aren't indulgence. They're protective infrastructure for the capacity to act decisively when it matters.

The Universal Amplifier

Agency isn't domain-specific. It applies to everything: careers, relationships, aesthetics, institutions, cities, dinner parties. It's the force that reshapes environments rather than adapts passively to them.

And here's the genuinely good news: no one is born with this. Everyone can learn it. And it's never too late.

You don't need to be the smartest person in the room if you're the most willing to notice ignored advantages, tolerate rejection, ask for honest feedback, engineer serendipity, assume everything is learnable, endure the low-status phase of learning, and maintain the boundaries that preserve your capacity to act.

That's agency. And it's just sitting there, waiting for you to pick it up.

The Uncomfortable Question Nobody Asks

Here's what we don't talk about: most people don't actually want agency. They want the outcomes of agency (success, impact, recognition) without the experience of agency (discomfort, responsibility, exposure).

Agency has a price that compounds daily. You give up the comfort of blaming circumstances. You give up the social ease of going along with consensus. You give up the psychological safety of not being responsible when things fail. Every time you act decisively, you're creating a trail of evidence that you could have chosen differently.

This is genuinely hard. Harder than learning poker tells or asking for feedback or enduring rejection. Because it means you can't hide behind "the system" or "bad luck" or "it wasn't the right time." Your life becomes legible as a series of choices you made, not things that happened to you.

Some people read about agency and think "yes, I want that." What they mean is "I want to feel powerful." But agency isn't about feeling powerful. It's about being responsible. The power is just what you get for being willing to hold the bag when things go wrong.

So before you decide to build agency, ask yourself honestly: do you want the skill, or do you want the comfort of believing you never had the option? Because once you know how to engineer luck, tolerate rejection, find ignored edges, and act decisively, you lose the ability to tell yourself you couldn't have done things differently.

That's the real moat. Not that agency is hard to learn, but that most people, when they really understand what it costs, decide they'd rather not know.