“Agency” is the kind of word that, right now, floats thickly across the web — one of those sticky buzzwords the cynical love to hate but secretly recognize as necessary. It's a bit like “taste”: precise enough to examine closely yet vague enough to become a catch-all. Why the appeal? Probably because while intelligence is becoming as mundane and effortless as a keystroke agency stubbornly clings to our human heart, reminding us we're still choosing, still acting, still (mostly) not robots.
There is one week left to apply for Free Agency and this impending deadline has kicked off some reflection on how agency manifests in individuals.
Agency, I've found, expands through doing. It's cumulative: action breeds more action, and suddenly a hesitant doer transforms into someone natively agentic. Those who've had a restlessness of agency since childhood — often seen in obsessive hobbies, early passions, or late-night tinkering on tools and toys — rarely lose it. But the corporate world tends to try and tamp down agency, and thus sometimes it whispers rather than shouts, especially at the start of something new — a company, a project, a timid idea barely breathed aloud.
To pin some of these ideas down, I’ve been collecting notes on these agentic actions and mindsets. I've arranged them into a chart, simple and clear, like one of those tidy diagrams you'd see at the top of a trailhead outlining the guidelines of the park.
And if you find yourself admiring the aesthetic, it nods (humbly) toward another set of principles: those drafted for the Sea Ranch community.