Agency

As always, the content I consume has guided me down another interesting path. The latest episode of The Not OverThinking Podcast with Taimur and Ali Abdaal discussed how agency is a precious resource. The essay The Most Precious Resource is Agency by Simon Sarris sparked the conversation and so I went over to his Substack to give it a read. He raised some interesting points about how different our lives would be if we had more agency when we were younger. Agency is an interesting topic because we all have it, but it varies in degree. It’s like a muscle that needs to be flexed and in our current systems, we don’t flex it enough.

Just to be clear agency is the ability to act. We have many conversations about how we want a particular life for ourselves or how we want to change our current situation, but nothing seems to change. There’s something holding us back, preventing us from learning and growing into the person we want to become. Basically, most people want to make some form of change in their lives that they haven’t made yet.

I’m always amazed by the initiative and confidence that successful people have. Their ability to ask for what they want or ask for help with a greater goal in mind differs from their perspective from others. They weren’t born this way, and a lot of them explain that they learnt it from practice. Some were even afraid of the very things that most people are afraid of. They became aware of the need for agency and that they were in control of how they reacted to the circumstances that they were afraid of. They needed to get used to whatever they were afraid of to achieve what they wanted to achieve.

These obstacles could be rejection, talking on the phone, or giving a talk to thousands of people. Each person has different obstacles, but these are the ones Jia Jang overcame. He was afraid of rejection, and he knew he had to face it if he wanted to improve his life. So, he started on a journey of 100 days of rejection and by the end of it, he became the head of Rejection Therapy. The very site that inspired him to start. He gave a Ted Talk about his story and the idea is so simple and seems easy to do, but I’m sure many would be scared to start, just like me.

Sarris asks the question: do children have useful childhoods?  Throughout history, many successful people kept their agency intact by taking on responsibility at a young age. The likes of Walt Disney, Andrew Carnegie and Da Vinci all learnt from mentors and took on jobs at a young age. Even Steve Jobs at 13 called up Bill Hewlett to ask for a summer job at HP. This was already strange in 1968, but unheard of today. We seem to go through a schooling system that makes us comfortable. We’re aware of all the deadlines and nothing really catches us off guard. By the time we’re finished, the big bad world seems even bigger and badder.

We can get used to things pretty quickly. We may be fearful at first, but with a bit of a push, the thing that seemed so scary isn’t anymore. If it is that simple, why aren’t we helping young people improve and learn these skills in a safe environment like school? That really is the question that I’d love to know the answer to because the older we get the harder it becomes for us to change. I don’t mean it actually becomes harder, I just mean we become set in our ways and stubborn. The stories we tell ourselves compound over the years, making it harder to take that first leap.

Even while I write this knowing that facing our fears, asking for help, or being fine with rejection is possible and it just takes a bit of work, I still find them scary. I plan on taking little steps towards overcoming these fears and I know it’s possible because I’ve overcome them to become who I am today. Like writing this blog or posting regularly on Instagram. I was worried about what people would think and I got used to it very quickly. You realise that no one really cares and the benefits of improving my writing and photography outweigh my worrying about what other people think. Very few people read this or look at my photos so why worry?

This thinking can be applied to anything and yet I still struggle. Each scenario seems special with its own set of criteria and reasons why it’s different from the ones I’ve mentioned above, but they aren’t. I don’t think this would happen as much if children had more agency. If they became familiar with rejection and were encouraged to face their fears. Not just told to do it but faced them.

I know I’ve sort of combined agency and facing our fears, but I believe that these things become fears without agency. That’s why YouTube is so popular. It enables normal people to create content and grow a fan base or following, but there’s more to it. That the possibility of starting a YouTube Channel is so close and it seems like anyone can do it. And yet not everyone does because there’s that thing standing in their way. That fear of failure, of what other people might think and that who cares if you fail attitude could be so easily instilled in children at a young age. That’s what is so enticing about YouTube viewing, you almost live vicariously through your favourite YouTubers because you could probably do it too if you wanted…

I’m glad there are people in the world with more agency than me.  It shows me that they overcame these strange obstacles and took it upon themselves to create something of their own. They have agency because they worked on it or were lucky enough to get some at a young age because they were given responsibility. Hopefully, agency becomes more of a priority in the future.