Personal Agency — a Playbook for Life

What is agency, and how to be agentic

Mar 12, 2025

I recently made a couple of big life decisions:

Deciding to move to a new city
Deciding to run a marathon with only 2 months of training time

and it has been nearly.. effortless. And I realized that I could only do this because I have been prioritizing one thing in my life: Agency

By being agentic, you have more control over your life. It's a form of manifest destiny.

Being agentic is like driving down a mountain road in a Porsche 911.

You are in the driver's seat, feeling each turn. Adjusting for the body roll. Breaking as you enter each turn, accelerating as you exit. It's raw.

The only thing between your ass and the pavement is a few inches of steel and aluminum. You push it close to the guard rail, millimeters between the edges of your tires and a cliff that, if you went off, would mean certain death... but you are guiding the way, controlling the car. It's nearly effortless. It's flow. You are active in the pursuit of experiencing life.

This is agency.

You are active in your experience of life.

But most people don't have agency. They don't get close to the guard rail. They don't know when to brake and when to accelerate.

I'll drop the metaphor.

They don't have the clarity to see their options in life. And even if they did truly see their options in life, they wouldn't know how to make the right choice—nor have the balls to do make it.

There exists immense friction that creates a gap between them and the life of their dreams — because of a lack of agency.

This is what agency is all about:

Agency is knowing where you want to go, and going.

It's not grinding. It's effortless.

And it starts with being agentic.

Core aspects of personal agency and being agentic:

Agency can be broken down into two subsections:

First principles:

Awareness and stimuli
Pragmatism
Action

Foundations:

Health
Learning
Play
Identity

Each of these plays a vital role, but it starts with first principles, and then you build off of them with the foundations. This is how you design, build, and live the life of your dreams.

First principles:

It all starts with AWARENESS, STIMULI, and IDENTITY:

We are clouded. Our awareness if near-zero thanks to overstimulation and malformed identities. I have written about over-stimulation at large in other newsletters, so I will keep it short here, but if you want to read more, I will link some resources at the end of this section for further reading.
(you can also just browse the archives of the KEEP GOING Newsletter and follow your intuition)

Here is the honest truth:

You have been trained to look for the wrong signals that make a good life. We are taught to look for status signals as success: how much money we have, we ask ourselves if we have the right car, the right clothing, the most affluent friends, a full calendar... we look for these instead of looking for the signals of truly makes a good life.

The issue is, we aren't told what makes a good life for ourselves. We have to define our own success, but we are not given the tools for that.

It requires us to be aware of what provides us with peace, happiness, joy, out-of-body experiences, etc.... And the sooner we are able to actually listen for the right signals, the quicker you can get back on track.

You can't know if you are off course (in life) if your map is blatantly wrong for you. Agency is about finding and reading your own map. Then you follow it to the best of your ability and adjust course along the way. You do this by listening for the right signals instead of the wrong ones.

Here is the kicker:
We can't look out for those signals because of immense noise from stimuli.

Normal, raw, life can't compete with tiktok and corn (in the short term).

We see our life with blurred vision, not for what reality actually is. Our minds are full of things that aren't real. It tells us we NEED to care about X, Y, Z.

It's obvious to see why we can't make intelligent choices. Our personal agency is doomed if we can't remove the stimulation.

Here are some quick examples that you can do to remove stimulation and increase awareness:

Delete instagram from your phone, replace the habit with journaling
Add a site blocker extension to your browser, and block ruthlessly
Instead of scrolling on X, go for a walk without listening to anything
Read philosophy: find what resonates and what doesn't

Throughout this process of removing stimuli, you will find your natural proclivities coming to the surface. And you must listen to them, and do your best to remember them (I suggest journaling :>).

There are endless tools for this. But it boils down to this: remove yourself from hyper stimulation, get your dopamine baseline to a reasonable level, and know thy self.

Answer these questions:

What is my definition of success?
What lifestyle do I want to live?
What is fulfilling for me?

Pragmatic intuition: Balancing rationality with intuition

Once you remove excess stimulation, and regain your self-awareness, you will naturally listen to your intuition more. But there is an issue:

Intuition is a lost art, and we have become so overly rational and risk-adverse that we lose all semblance of a LIFE WORTH LIVING.

Examples of overly rational moves:

Staying in the safe job
Saving money for retirement
Never leaving your small town because 'family'

Here is a differing reality of those:

You can always get another job, so quit yours and go all in on yourself (if you so desire)
Saving for retirement is like giving money to your 65 year old self who can't use it, so why prioritize it?
Your small town and your family will exist after traveling for a while, but you will never understand yourself if you never change your environment. So get out.

None of those are really that risky. After all, betting on yourself is never a risk.

Intuition is your gut instinct. It's trusting yourself and where you feel guided to. Most people's intuition can be wildly inaccurate from over-rationality, but there is only one way to improve your intuition: by using it.

Do things intuitively for a week and see the results:

Don't track your calories and macros: eat intuitively and see what happens
Say yes to something that doesn't necessarily make sense but you WANT to do it
Listen to your gut feeling when talking with people, don't over rationalize the body language and analyze the power dynamic

Doing this, you will find yourself blundering, and excelling. This is about finding your edge, and where your instinct is right and wrong.

Now that you tested it, you balance this with rationality. We are already skilled at this. We overthink everything, and find the most optimal solution. With our intuition is check with rationality, we can safely drive our Porsche down the mountain road and not drive off the cliff. But we can still find the edge and get intuitive results.

By being pragmatic, working with intuition and rationality in a yin-yang relationship, you can get disproportionate results effortlessly.

Final piece of the puzzle: Action

This one is a given. But you need to be able to take action on the awareness you have gained, and the pragmatism you are intuiting.

Let's get back to our definition of agency:

Agency is knowing where you want to go, and going.

I covered how to know where you want to go. Now we need to get there. You do this by taking action.

Here is a sample plan:

Find what success means for you, list out your long-term goals in work, life, relationships, etc.
Break each aspect of 'success' into intermediate goals/milestones
Make a short-term plan to attack the intermediate milestones (2 weeks to 3 months in duration)
Do the actions required.
Repeat with what you learned from executing

You will not nail everything on the first go. That is okay. It's ideal, actually. If you did everything right, you wouldn't learn anything from it.

Action is about being active in your own life, not being passive.

Something to note:

Your short term plan shouldn't feel hard or require immense grinding. If it does, it doesn't align with you.

Agency and being agentic isn't about grinding. It's about finding your edge, where you get results effortlessly.

To find your edge requires your intuition and self awareness.

When making a plan for your intermediate milestones, ask yourself "What would this look like if it were easy?". Use that as a heuristic for life.

Foundations of agency:

Now that we have covered the first principles of agency, lets talk a little bit more about every day, foundational tools of agency:

Health

Taking care of your body is the clearest entry point to agency. When you take care of any aspect of your health (physical, mental, spiritual) you are exercising your agency.

Some simple agentic actions regarding health:

Going to bed earlier (and having a dialed circadian rhythm) #kgn/ideas
Going for a walk
Following a diet temporarily
Get some sun
Breath work
Have a training routine

You are doing these actions to net a result in your life. Simply put... that is agentic as fuck.

Exercising, following a diet, getting good sleep... making these choices for yourself is the lowest hanging fruit of personal agency. It is the simplest and most accessible way you can exercise your agency.

When you lose control over your body, you are 10x more likely to lose control of your mind. And your mind is the core processing unit for making any and all agentic decisions going forward, so take care of it. Speaking of your mind...

Learning and thinking

Your ability to learn and think at a high level is more important than ever before.

We live in a time of immense, overwhelming amounts of choice. And your ability to make a good, intelligent decisions is vital for not only maintaining your agency, but becoming more agentic.

And that is all predicated on your ability to think clearly, and learn.

Your course work (school required or self-assigned—a very agentic action) will be stale, and honestly might suck sometimes. But you can always extract good things from it.

You might learn squat about the topic of the actual course, but you can learn to think differently. You can always see things from a different perspective, and see more of the forest and less of the trees.

Get a different point of view
Practice critical thinking and problem-solving
Synthesize connections to other topics
Learning how to learn better (meta-learning)

No matter what you are doing, get something out of it.

Play

Along with intuition, the art of play is lost.

By partaking in play, we:

Gain autonomy (synonym of agency)
Express emotions in a socially acceptable way
Improve problem solving
Foster grit and creativity

Some examples of play that adults can do:

Martial arts
Pretty much any sport..
Exercising your inner artist (writing, painting, design, etc)
Travel & exploration
Games

The beautiful thing about most of these is that they have constraints. This forces us to play within some lines, but allows us to exercise our agency and deeper needs in life without doing something psychotic.

Identity

Finally, agency is something you must make your identity.

One of the strongest levers we can pull on as humans to make change in our lives is through our identity. When we make something our identity, we almost always follow through. It gets results.

By making agency our identity, we make agentic actions effortless

This is meta-agency right here.

You can do this many ways:

Spit affirmations in the mirror
Write "I am agentic" over and over again in your journal
... But nothing is as strong as a signal for our identity as doing agentic actions over and over again.

That is how you identify as agentic. And by identifying as agentic, you gain agency over your life.

Examples of agency:

moving to a new city/country to follow your pragmatic intuition.
buying a one-way ticket to a country where you don't even speak the language
quitting your job
signing up for a marathon
starting a successful business
writing and publishing a book

The above are larger decisions, but exercising your agency also looks like:

taking a walk
going to bed when you choose to (and for a good reason, not because you should)
saying no to a night out and doing coursework you have always wanted to do instead
consciously putting the phone away
setting boundaries with people who drain your energy and attention
cleaning your environment (and crafting your environment)
using an app blocker
journaling
etc.

Agency is a core part of KEEP GOING. Agency epitomizes intentional living, and fueling your own journey.

Become more agentic.
Live better.
KEEP GOING.

B.S.

Want personal help with this? Book a 30-min call w/ me for free, no strings attached. Would love to get to know my readers more personally.

https://cal.com/bslagle/life-alignment-chat

The explanation for why you can't get yourself to work

Time management is overrated

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