Alexandersmap

    Tag: Eric Weinstein

    • Leaning Towards High Agency

      “When you’re told that something is impossible, is that the end of the conversation, or does that start a second dialogue in your mind, how to get around whoever it is that’s just told you that you can’t do something? So, how am I going to get past this bouncer who told me that I can’t come into this nightclub? How am I going to start a business when my credit is terrible and I have no experience? You’re constantly looking for what is possible in a kind of MacGyverish sort of way. And that’s your approach to the world.” – Eric Weinstein on The Tim Ferriss Show

      I was brought up to follow the rules. Thinking that adults knew something in this world, I would follow rules of behavior and take no as the answer. Fall in line, do your part, don’t question things… passive, low agency characteristics.

      But I also grew up bending the rules ever so slightly in my favor, or breaking them outright. At four taking my three year old sister for a walk to visit my grandparents a mile or so away across a busy road? Let’s do it. At eleven or twelve taking my dad’s Playboy magazines and trading them with the neighbor’s dad for his Penthouse magazines and charge money for the other kids to read the articles? Seemed okay to me.

      But somewhere along the way you slip into the workforce and pick up obligations. Maybe you enter middle management and start following the HR playbook. And slowly, over time, you become passive and decidedly low agency. You become… sheepish. But somewhere inside you that inner maverick chafes at the wool coat. And then you listen to a guy like Eric Weinstein talk about high agency, you hear the example of the main character on The Martian finding a way. And you understand.

      “It’s important to be willing to make mistakes. The worst thing that can happen is you become memorable.” – Sarah Blakely, Spanx

      We generally accept things the way they are. But what if we questioned things a bit more? What if we tried a different way to do the thing that didn’t work the first or second time? What if we developed higher agency within ourselves to set our lives in the direction we want it to go? To be more Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sara Blakely or Elon Musk or Steve Jobs in our own careers? In our own lives?

      “Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.” – Elon Musk

      I think it starts with where we are right now in our lives. Living through a pandemic in our own way with Zoom or Teams, a laptop and a mobile phone at the ready. We’re all dealing with restrictions on travel and social distancing, some with a much harder hand to play than others, but as the stoics would tell us, we must play the cards we’re dealt anyway. And what do we do next?

      “What we face may look insurmountable. But I learned something from all those years of training and competing. I learned something from all those sets and reps when I didn’t think I could lift another ounce of weight. What I learned is that we are always stronger than we know.” – Arnold Schwarzenegger

      While we were complaining about shortages of toilet paper there were thousands of people figuring out a vaccine to make this problem go away. Right now, there are people building companies, writing the next great novel, inventing things or doing critical research that will outlive us all. The next big thing, created in the same time of COVID that you and I are living through. So what are we doing with our time? How are we going to work through whatever it is that isn’t working and finding a way through? A way to finally get it right?

      “There is an awful lot of fails before you get it right.” – Elizabeth Isabella, Scripted Fragrance, an Etsy business featured on CBS Sunday Morning

      I heard the Eric Weinstein interview on Tim Ferriss a few years ago now. I had the High Agency dogma reinforced in a George Mack Twitter thread a while back now too. In general I’ve leaned into higher agency in my own life. But still have a lot of fails before I get it right. Don’t we all? Keep trying.

      “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.” – Steve Jobs

      We might not ever get to a point where we’re mentioned in the same list as Schwarzenegger or Jobs or Blakely or Musk, but then again, maybe we will. But only if we pivot more, find a way forward or through, and shake off the passive. Time marches on. Will we?

    • 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.”?