Alexandersmap

    Category: Lifestyle

    • Finding the Essence

      I grew up following my grandfather around the garden. By all accounts he wasn’t a good husband or father to his 16 kids, and I’m told he was once a vicious drunk. But he was a good grandfather to me. Age likely tempered him as it does most of us, but I think it was largely because my memories of him were from that garden. With 16 kids you need to grow some of your own food, and he knew his way around the garden. He’d likely shake his head at my flower garden, wondering why I’d take up so much valuable land on ornamentals. But I’ve raised a more manageable number of kids, and there’s benefit to flowers that go beyond caloric intake.

      I think of myself as primarily a flower gardener, but taking stock I have a respectable number of herbs and edibles mixed in; basil, cilantro, oregano, lemon verbena, chives, monarda, dill, bell peppers, jalapeño peppers and four varieties of tomatoes. I also have two apple trees, blueberry bushes, a lime tree and coffee bush in pots… and those frustratingly unproductive grapes. This year I opted out of some other vegetables I’ve traditionally grown like nasturtium, sunflowers, string beans and squash because they simply overwhelmed the garden.

      The harvest is already coming in, particularly the herbs. The challenge now is to keep up with them. Which means expanding the menu. Growing a new herb or vegetable offers two unique experiences; figuring out how to optimize its growth and then what to do with it when its time to harvest. When I was in Israel the employee kitchen had bunches of freshly picked mint that people would plunk stem and all into their tea.  I’ve been growing mint for years but never thought to do that until they taught by example.  Now that the mint is exploding I’ve taken to drinking more tea with fresh mint and give a nod to my former co-workers for showing me the way.

      So consuming the edibles is one benefit, but the larger gift is in living amongst them day-to-day. Rub the leaves and smell the oil released on the fingertips. Flowering herbs like cilantro, chives and monarda (bee balm) are good for the local bee population, and good for me as I enjoy the show as they work their way around the garden. The garden becomes multidimensional. Good for the senses, good for the palette, good for the soul.

      I think my grandfather was essentially a good man, but he was caught up in the frustrating struggles of his life and alcohol poisoned his mind. The garden drew out his attributes, and I saw the good in him. I haven’t struggled with the demons he struggled with, but I know I’m better for having been in the garden. And so was he.

    • Tech Leaps and Twinkies

      Yesterday morning I caught myself in a moment unimaginable at any time in human history beyond the last generation or two. I sat parked in my car inside a touch less car wash. Realizing I had upwards of five minutes of downtime I pulled out my Surface Pro, logged onto my iPhone’s wireless hotspot, connected to the Salesforce CRM and modified a quote that I submitted before the car wash moved to the rinse stage. None of these things existed when I last ate a Twinkie, which was, by my best estimate, sometime around 1987 or so.

      Sometimes our collective massive leap forward seems commonplace.  People watching streaming movies or checking email on a plane flying from New York to Tel Aviv is a miracle, and yet we think nothing of it.  We live in a time where miracles happen all the time but we’re so focused on the latest outrage on Twitter that we don’t appreciate the phone we’re reading it on.

      I remember being wowed by Sony Walkmans, and Compact Disks, and Cell Phones, and Blueray, and HD, and Wi-Fi, and the Internet…  and so on.  The march ahead with technology in my lifetime has been stunning.  Moore’s Law may have predicted something like this on paper, but just look at what we’ve created in so short a time.  Amazing.

      The technological leap forward from here is even more striking.  Artificial Intelligence is coming fast.  Robotics, automation, sensor data correlation, facial recognition, self driving cars, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV’s), Hyperloop vacuum tube travel, and 3D printing are already here in various stages of development or adoption.  We’re in an exponential technological revolution the likes of which has never been seen before.  Best to take a moment to appreciate the little miracles that happen all the time now.  Blink and you’ll miss it.

    • Elbow Room

      I’m not sure what my best life is, but I know that it doesn’t involve sitting in a car by myself stopped in relentless traffic.  But that’s where I found myself twice in the last 24 hours.  Friday getaway traffic in the rain was understandable.  Saturday logjam on two different highways was less expected.

      The older I get, the less I want to participate in the engineered world we’ve built around us in the United States.  I’m not particularly interested in sitting on a crowded beach, or going to the Esplanade on the 4th of July, or shopping on Black Friday, or commuting to anywhere on Route 128, or the Financial District, or really anywhere a lot of people are trying to congregate.  I don’t like traffic lights all that much, especially the ones that aren’t synced to have traffic flow logically.

      Crowded attractions aren’t my scene. Going to a Patriots game or a concert at Gillette Stadium is wonderful when you’re tailgating or in your seat watching the action.  Shuffling through security lines, lining up to go to the bathroom, shuffling back to your car to wait in traffic on Route 1?  I think not.  Irish Cottage on St. Patrick’s Day?  No Way.  Hampton Beach on a hot July Saturday?  Rain check.  Disney in peak summer crowds?  Been there, never doing it again.  Standing in line to get the best picture of St Mark’s Campanile in Venice?  No thanks.  Times Square?  I’ll walk three blocks around to avoid it.  Stand in a cue to summit Mount Everest?  You’ve got to be kidding me.  No, I’m an off-season kind of guy.  If I can’t get away with off-season, then you’ll find me up early before the crowds blow up your day.

      The planet is getting more crowded.  More people have disposable income that allows them to travel to the top sites in the world.  And I’ve got my own bucket list that includes some pretty popular places; Hawaii, London, Paris, Rome, and yes, Venice.  But I’ll find off-season if at all possible, thank you.  I’m not a hermit, I love a great conversation, a boisterous party, and the energy of a great concert.  But there’s no solitude in a line, and there’s great upside in a little elbow room.  So tell me how it goes at the opening weekend for the Encore Casino in Everett.  Expecting 50,000?  Lovely – I promise I won’t make it 50,001.  If there’s any upside to that, it’s that I’m giving someone else a little more elbow room at the slots.  You’re welcome.

       

       

    • The Daily Whip

      My morning begins with exercise, however modest, moves to daily stoic, then reading whatever book I happen to be tackling, and some writing if time allows before I plunge into the daily routine of work and life. I’ve continued this long enough that it’s become habit, and there are worse things than beginning the day this way. I won’t win the CrossFit Games or Jeopardy, but I’m further along than I’d otherwise be.

      A month after Bodhi passed, the muscle memory of my routine with him is fading. I don’t look out the window to see if he’s ready to come in, but he’s still lingering somewhere in my mind. But underfoot is a newer morning dance partner; Mookie joined us when the Red Sox we’re making their World Series championship run last fall. Once chipmunk size, she’s a lanky teenager now; full of energy, mischief and spirit.

      Make no mistake: I don’t generally bond with cats. I’m a dog person, and always have been. But Mookie got hold of me early on, and I find myself picking her up and petting her when I might have ignored another cat (as I do with the older cat). So here we are, sharing our morning together once again.

      It starts from the alarm going off, and she follows me from the closet, down the stairs and at my feet while I hydrate. When I’m done with exercise and sit down with my coffee and book she bounces back into my life and inevitably finds her way behind my right shoulder, surveying the action out the windows behind me. And that’s when it starts… the tail flicks once, wacks me in the cheek. A second time, swatting the top of my head. And then a steady beat of rhythmic whipping begins as her eyes flit from robin to chipmunk to a hummingbird working the honeysuckle. It feels like a fight scene from the old Batman TV show complete with kitschy Smack! Bang! Pow! thought bubbles.

      And I tolerate it. I’d never tolerate it from another cat. But I tolerate it from this one. This cat has worked her way into my routine. Strange days indeed.

    • Choosing the Great Over the New

      New is overvalued relative to great.  … for example, when choosing which movie to watch or what book to read, are you drawn to proven classics or the newest big thing?  In my opinion, it is smarter to choose the great over the new.” – Ray Dalio

      I’m reading a Henry David Thoreau book called Walking.  It’s a quick read – not very long at all – but full of wisdom nuggets as I posted yesterday.  I’ve recently re-read Walden, and read some Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises last fall.  It’s no secret that I’ve been reading a lot of stoicism over the last couple of years, and re-read Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations again last year.  And I have a pile of classics teed up for future reading.  So this Tweet I read from Ray Dalio today was especially meaningful for me as I try to mix in classics and opt out of things just because they’re popular at the moment.  They’re classics for a reason, and you can glean a lot of out of them if you dive in.

      Choosing the great over the new goes for things beyond books and movies of course.  You get what you pay for in life, and that applies to time as much as it does money.  I dropped a Derek Sivers quote a couple of blogs ago; “Hell Yes or No” that concisely articulates great over new in career opportunities, relationships, what you spend your weekend doing and which food, books and media you consume.  So it was with great interest that I read another Twitter thread from George Mack early this morning:

      The most VALUABLE piece of investing advice I ever received came from Warren Buffett.  

      Buffett gave a talk at University of Georgia.

       He told the students to look around at their friends and answer the following question:

      “If you could get 10% of their earnings for the rest of their lives, what friends would you INVEST in?”

      Once you have the 2-3 friends that you’d invest in, explore the WHY you’d invest in them.

      What values do these individuals hold?

      What habits do they engage in?

      Here’s teh values of friends that made me want to invest:

      1. High Agency/Resourcefulness
      2. Consistency
      3. Give more than they take
      4. Learning machines
      5. Live on the edge of their comfort zones of creating a new project
      6. Pay attention to small details

      After doing this, Buffett sugggest you look around at your friends again.

      “If you could SHORT 10% of their earnings for the rest of their lives, what friends would you choose?”

      Again, once you have these friends in mind – ask the WHY you’d short them.

      What values do they have that you’ll think will harm them?

      What negative habits do they engage in?

      Here [are the] the values of friends that I’d SHORT:

      1. Narcismism
      2. Inconsistency
      3. Arrogance
      4. Dishonesty
      5. External locus of control
      6. Map knowledge/know it alls

      Once you [have] these lists, you have finally answered one of life’s wooliest questions:

      “What are my values?”

      You have the guiding principles you can look to embody.

      You can extrapolate this further than just financial ROI.

      You can look at your friends balance sheets for happiness, relationships, fitness, etc.

      Who would you invest 10% in?  Why?

      Who would you short 10%?  Why?

      You can download the values you need for these areas too.

      This exercise is so powerful because our identity isn’t involved.

      “It’s easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own.” – Daniel Kahneman

      Emotion & Ego distort our reality.

      It’s so easy to see when a friend should break up with their partner, quit their job or shut down their company.

      Yes despite having more information on the subject than you, they still can’t see it.

      Why?

      Emotion & Ego (Identity)

      The Buffett exercise is so powerful because it gives you the ability to view your human operating system in the same way everyone else will:

      1. Objectivity
      2. Don’t care about you
      3. Want to know what value you can provide

      Self aware ness has the Dunning-Kluger effect built into its software.

      The most self aware people I know are convinced they lack self awareness.

      The least self aware people I know are convinced they are self aware.

      Buffett’s investment advice passes Peter Thiel’s test.

      You know your friends better than ANYONE.

      This means that you have a SECRET that the rest of the world doesn’t have about their values and habits,

      This information gained is truly unique to everyone who applies it.

      SUMMARY:

      1. Treat your objective analysis of other people as the best form of self knowledge
      2. Understand what values you’d invest in and what you would short in every area of life.
      3. The tactile knowledge of your friends is a secret as unique as your finger print.

      I copied this down here as much to retain it for myself as to blog about it.  Coming back around to the Dalio quote, choosing the great over the new, I’m applying this in my work as well as my reading and other pursuits.  I’ve weaned myself off of low value business relationships, and avoid toxic business relationships whenever possible.  I’ve fired customers who are such A-holes that they aren’t worth the commission check that comes with dealing with them.  And I’ve developed other business relationships that are absolutely worth the long term investment even though the return isn’t there quite yet.

      So the quoted material is longer than the original content from me this time around, but I thought I’d stick with the great instead of adding the new.  Hopefully some of my new will prove great in the long run.

    • Fences and Forests

      “At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only – when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the PUBLIC road, and walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walking

      When I moved into the house I’m living in twenty years ago, when this cul de sac was just being built, I watched a dozen deer run through the woods and diagonally through the backyard out to the front where the driveway is and then off to wherever they roamed from there.  A few years after that I became annoyed with one of my neighbors central vacuum system which didn’t (and still doesn’t) have any form of muffler on it.  I put up a six foot privacy fence on that side of the house to block out the noise a bit.  Fences make good neighbors, they say.

      A few years after that we got a very energetic one year old black lab and put him on a run, which was a cable strung tightly between two trees in the backyard with his chain hanging down, giving him some freedom of movement but not enough.  Eventually we fenced in the backyard entirely, and he had room to roam without running away.  Well, we thought so at the time.  Snow pack and exceptional climbing skills proved the fence wasn’t always as high as it needed to be.

      Then came the pool, and it justified the investment in the fence.  And that fence continues to serve us well, in theory keeping the young neighborhood kids out of the pool while being compliant with the town’s codes which require a fenced-in pool.  With a pool you have liability.  Lawyers love pools. Insurance companies love fences.

      The forest remains timeless.  It’s just on the other side of that fence, and it’s largely as it was twenty years ago, and twenty years before that.  It continues to invite itself back into the yard.  After all the backyard was once part of the forest and perhaps one day it will be again.  I see the deer sometimes just on the other side of the fence.  But they don’t run through the yard anymore.

      Thoreau would find his walking to be very different than it was when he wrote those words.  Aside from conservation land and State Parks like Walden the landscape is completely different than it was for him.  Roads are paved, land is subdivided, fences are put up to screen annoying neighbors or to protect pool owners from wandering toddlers.  Thoreau might say that the evil days have indeed come.  And looking at the building boom going on seemingly everywhere I can’t help but think that myself.  Houses and residential communities popping up everywhere.  Roads getting more and more congested.  Mixed-use development projects all the rage.

      I read a book recently that described the frustration that a family had at the development of Bedford, New Hampshire back in the 1960’s.  I know the stretch of road they described as it is today, but never knew it as the quiet country road portrayed in the book.  They ended up moving further north into Maine.  And maybe moving further away is the answer.  Or maybe it starts with taking care of your own backyard before it’s too late.  Conservation and preservation, zoning restrictions, political will and public demand are the formula for open space.  Developers rule most town halls nowadays.  When people are indifferent to the land around them the void gets filled by people who build 55 plus housing developments.  This isn’t developer bashing – developers do a lot of great things and I’ve directly benefited from development.  It’s more a call to all of us to demand more for the environment we’re creating for ourselves and future generations.  A little preservation goes a long way.

    • Dents and Ripples

      “Make a dent in the universe.” – Steve Jobs

      I was thinking about this particular quote while I drove to the local hardware store for potting soil and basil plants.  I don’t believe Jobs had this chore in mind when he asked Apple employees to make a dent in the universe.  He surely meant think and do big things.  Create transformative products.  Be bold…  and the like.  And on the face of it I agree with the request.  And yet I’m probably not going to make a dent in the universe.  I’m not really inclined to either.  Dents are a bit…  abrupt for me.  As a water-based creature I’m more inclined to make ripples.

      Ripples offer their own measure of immortality.  Ripples carry across the surface, impacting the entire body of water.  They intersect with other ripples that in turn create other ripples.  Raising children makes a ripple.  Recycling creates a ripple.  Being a either friendly, generous, loving and good person or a horrible, hate-filled, evil person creates a ripple.  Ripples carry across time, impacting generation after generation.  Martin Luther King, Jr and Gandhi create ripples today, and were impacted by the ripples of Thoreau and others before them.

      Being a ripple person doesn’t let you off the hook, but it does seem more realistic for most people.  Make the biggest positive ripple you can.  Wealthy people like Carnegie made extraordinary ripples across time with donations made possible by the accumulation of wealth.  But until you write that transformative book, or build a billion dollar company, maybe start with holding the door open for someone, smiling and saying hello?  A little act can make a huge impact in someone’s life.

      “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” – Theodore Roosevelt

      We’re all dancing with fate.  Our time could be up at any moment really.  Why not make a few positive ripples today so that if it all ends tomorrow you’re remembered with fondness, you’ve helped steer someone towards a better future, or you leave the planet a little better in some small way?  And if you somehow make it big doing what you do, maybe make a big splash too.  Those create some serious ripples.

    • The Dip That Matters

      I re-read The Dip, by Seth Godin.  I’m definitely in a Dip at my present job, and I have several opportunities to change being dangled in front of me.  So I figured I’d re-read this quick book to add some clarity to my thinking.  Here are my highlighted notes from my second reading of this book.  The question is, does this Dip matter?  Will slogging through it offer enough reward in the end, or am I wasting time in a Cul-de-Sac/dead end?  The question goes beyond a job of course.  The Dip can be applied to any decision.

      “Winners quit all the time.  They just quit the right stuff at the right time.”

      “Quit the wrong stuff.”

      “Just about everything you learned in school about life is wrong, but the wrongest thing might very well be this: Being well rounded is the secret to success.”

      “In a free market, we reward the exceptional.”

      “Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations.  Reactive quitting and serial quitting are the bane of those that strive )and fail) to get what they want.  And most people do just that.  They quit when it’s painful and stick when they can’t be bothered to quit.”

      “The Dip is the long slog between starting and mastery.”

      Scarcity, as we’ve seen, is the secret to value.  If there’s wasn’t a Dip, there’d be no scarcity.”

      “Successful people don’t just ride out the Dip.  They don’t just buckle down and survive it.  No, they lean into the Dip.  They push harder, changing the rules as they go.  Just because you know you’re in the Dip doesn’t mean that you have to live happily with it.  Dips don’t last quite as long when you whittle at them.”

      “The Dip creates scarcity; scarcity creates value.”

      “The people who set out to make it through the Dip – the people who invest the time and the energy and the effort to power through the Dip – those are the ones who become the best in the world.”

      “In a competitive world, adversity is your ally.  The harder it gets, the better the chance you have of insulating yourself from the competition.  If that adversity also causes you to quit, though, it’s all for nothing.”

      “And yet, the real success goes to those who obsess.”

      “Before you enter a new market, consider what would happen if you managed to get through the Dip and win the market you’re already in.”

      “Not only do you need to find a Dip that you can conquer but you also need to quit all the Cul-de-Sacs that you’re currently idling your way through.  You must quit the projects and investments and endeavors that don’t offer you the same opportunity.  It’s difficult, but it’s vitally important.”

      “Most of the time, if you fail to become the best in the world, it’s either because you planned wrong or because you gave up before you reached your goal.”

      “The next time you catch yourself being average when you feel like quitting, realize that you have only two good choices: Quit or be exceptional.  Average is for losers.” 

      “Selling is about a transference of emotion, not a presentation of facts.”

      “If you’re not able to get through the Dip in an exceptional way, you must quit.  And quit right now.”

      “The opposite of quitting is rededication.  The opposite of quitting is an invigorated new strategy designed to break the problem apart.”

      “Short-term pain has more impact on most people than long-term benefits do, which is why it’s so important for you to amplify the long-term benefits of not quitting.  You need to remind youself of life at the other end of the Dip because it’s easier to overcome the pain of yet another unsuccessful cold call if the reality of a successful sales career is more concrete.”

      “Persistent people are able to visualize the idea of light at the end of the tunnel when others can’t see it.  At the same time, the smartest people are realistic about not imagining light where there isn’t any.”

      You and your organization have the power to change everything.  To create remarkable products and services.  To over deliver.  To be the best in the world.  How dare you squander that resource by spreading it too thin.”

      “If it’s not going to put a dent in the world, quit.  Right now.  Quit and use that void to find the energy to assault the Dip that matters.”

       

    • Time Warps and Muscle Memories

      May has thirty-one days in it.  That would mean there are eleven days left in it.  I know – math genius.  But psychologically, next weekend is Memorial Day Weekend.  The unofficial start of summer.  Time zips right along, ready or not.

      This morning getting out of bed was a little tougher.  A weekend of yard work took its toll on me and I’m taking stock of my soreness.  But I got up and worked out nonetheless.  Not much really, just getting the blood flowing.  Coming back upstairs my routine was well-defined.  Drink a glass of water, make a coffee, read some Stoic and a few pages of whatever book I’m reading at the time, and let Bodhi out.  Except there’s no more Bodhi.  But the muscle memory remains.

      It’s not grief; not really.  Its habit developed over thirteen years with him.  When he stopped walking well I went through the same thing at 9:30-10 PM when I would think “time for our walk”.  Time took its toll on Bodhi, as it takes its toll on all of us.  The Stoics would tell you we all must die and life is only now.  And so it is.  Life requires a tack once in awhile.  This is a good time to tack.

      So there are eleven days left in May.  Time has proven once again that it won’t wait for me.  Best to get moving. Determine the set of the sail and get going already. Life is a series of pivot points, isn’t it? The heading is generally the same, allowing for some unfavorable winds along the way. Which brings me to this quote I read in the Farnom Street newsletter:

      “We are, finally, all wanderers in search of knowledge. Most of us hold the dream of becoming something better than we are, something larger, richer, in some way more important to the world and ourselves. Too often, the way taken is the wrong way, with too much emphasis on what we want to have, rather than what we wish to become.” — Louis L’Amour

      That about sums it up.

    • Walden & High Agency

      The great thing about motivational quotes is they represent wisdom and offer insight for us in our own lives, conveniently boiled down from a pile of words.  The drawback, of course, is that you’re only reading a small part of whatever the quoted person was trying to say, usually twisted into some new meaning in its abbreviated form.  As I’ve re-read and re-discovered Walden, as you may expect many old, familiar quotes pop up.  This particular thread from the Conclusion chapter, takes on a much deeper meaning when you consume everything Thoreau wrote (the oft-quoted  words in bold):

      “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there.  Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.  It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves…  The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels.  How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!”

      “I learned this, at least by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.  He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of things.  In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.  If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost, that is where they should be.  Now put the foundations under them.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

      As romantic a notion as building castles in the air is, these words seem just a little too up with people for general consumption on their own.  Like one of those motivational posters you see in offices around the world.  But taken in the context of the rest of the paragraph, they become more meaningful.  Thoreau is reminding us that we all fall into routines as individuals, and also as societies, but if we only have the courage to break out of those routines in focused pursuit of loftier objectives, the universe aligns to support us in achieving these objectives.

      Reading Walden again, I’ve realized that I glazed over much of it the first time I read it as a teenager.  The words simply didn’t mean as much to me then as they do now.  But isn’t that the case with everything?  We all pick up a little wisdom as we move through life.  But we also pick up bad habits, assumptions and biases, and become the sum of the parts around us.  Choose your path, establish those tiny, sticky habits that move you towards your objective, surround yourself with the right people and you will pass that invisible boundary Thoreau describes.  Routines can build you into something much greater than you imagine, but they can also hold you down.  Get off the worn-down mental path and see the world in a new way.

      “The universe is bigger than our views of it.” – Henry David Thoreau

      Speaking of the universe, it seems to align with the way I’m thinking at a given moment.  I know that’s not entirely accurate, I just notice things more when I happen to be thinking about something related to it, like suddenly seeing white Honda Accords everywhere as soon as you start driving one.  So upon posting this article I scanned Twitter briefly and what do I find but George Mack’s Twitter thread about High Agency, which he heard about from a Tim Ferriss interview with Eric Weinstein:

      “High Agency is a sense that the story given to you by other people about what you can/cannot do is just that – a story.  [A] High Agency person looks to bend reality to their will.  They either find a way or they make a way.  [A] Low Agency person accepts the story that is given to them.  They never question it.  They are passive.  They outsource all their decision-making to other people.

      So a Low Agency person believes the world is as people say it is.  That’s just the way things are.  A High Agency person believes the universe is bigger than our view of it, as Thoreau so eloquently states it.  Be the change you want to see in the world. and what is more High Agency than “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost, that is where they should be.  Now put the foundations under them.”?