Imagine you wake up in a foreign prison cell. No context. No plan. One phone call.
Who are you dialling?
You're not calling the friend who sends you podcast recommendations about resilience. You're not calling the colleague who panics when the Wi-Fi drops. You're calling the person who finds a way when everyone else sees a dead end. The person who hears "that's impossible" and immediately starts asking why — not to argue, but to map the gaps in the wall.
That quality isn't charisma. It isn't intelligence. It isn't optimism.
It's High Agency.
And it's the single most underrated trait separating the people who talk about doing things from the people who actually do them.
What is high agency, really?
Most people operate in what I call default mode. Low agency. Autopilot. They take the world as it's handed to them — the rules, the norms, the "that's just how things work" assumptions — and they build their entire life inside those walls without ever checking if the walls are real.
When someone tells a low-agency person "that's not possible" or "that's not how it's done," the conversation ends. They accept it. File it away. Move on to something easier.
High-agency people hear the exact same sentence and something different happens. It doesn't end the conversation — it starts a second one. A quiet, internal dialogue that sounds like: "Okay, they said it's not possible. But is it actually not possible? Or is it just not possible the way they tried it? What if I approached it from here instead?"
That's the difference. Low agency treats resistance as a wall. High agency treats it as information — a data point about one path that didn't work, not a verdict on all paths.
High-agency people view reality as malleable. Not in a delusional, manifestation-poster way. In a practical, hands-dirty, "the physics allows it so let's figure out the engineering" way. They see the world as something to be actively shaped by human initiative, not passively endured until something better falls from the sky.
The three-wheel formula
Here's what I've noticed about high-agency people — it's never just one trait. It's not raw willpower. It's not just being smart. It's not just being stubborn. It's three things running simultaneously, and the moment you remove one, the whole system breaks down.
1. Clear thinking. The ability to strip away conventional wisdom, inherited assumptions, and borrowed opinions — and look at a problem from first principles.
Most people solve problems with templates. They ask, "What did someone else do in this situation?" and copy-paste the answer. That works until it doesn't. Clear thinkers ask a different question: "What is actually true here, independent of what everyone believes?"
This is the difference between knowing the recipe and understanding the chemistry. One makes you a cook. The other makes you dangerous.
2. Bias for action. Ideas are cheap. Everyone has ideas. Your Uber driver has a startup idea. Your cousin has a business plan in a Google Doc somewhere. The world is drowning in ideas that never made contact with reality.
A bias for action means you refuse to let hypotheses stay theoretical. You test them. Quickly. Messily. Before the plan is perfect, before the deck is polished, before anyone gives you permission. You'd rather have ugly data from a real experiment than beautiful logic from a thought experiment.
The gap between thinking and doing is where most potential goes to die. High-agency people don't let things live in that gap for long.
3. Constructive disagreeability. This is the one most people are missing.
Clear thinking and action are great — but they collapse the moment someone in a position of authority tells you to stop. A manager. A professor. An investor. A parent. Society in general.
Constructive disagreeability is the willingness to push past "no" when you've done the thinking and believe the no is wrong. It's not being contrarian for the sake of it — that's just noise. It's having the spine to say, "I hear you, I respect your position, and I'm going to do it anyway because I've thought about this more than you have."
Remove any one of these three and agency collapses. Clear thinking without action is armchair philosophy — the internet is full of people who can diagnose every problem and solve none of them. Action without clear thinking is reckless chaos — you're just moving fast in the wrong direction. And both are useless if you fold the moment someone with a title tells you to sit down.
Four operating rules to rewire your default settings
Agency isn't something you're born with. It's a set of mental defaults you can install — like upgrading your operating system. Here are four rules that high-agency people run on, consciously or not.
Rule 1: Does it defy the laws of physics?
This is the ultimate filter. When someone tells you something is impossible, run it through one question: Does this violate the fundamental laws of physics? If the answer is no — if thermodynamics, gravity, and the speed of light aren't standing in your way — then it's not impossible. It's just unsolved.
Claude Shannon and Ed Thorp wanted to beat the house at roulette. Every gambler in history had tried and failed. Standard wisdom said it couldn't be done. But Shannon and Thorp didn't listen to standard wisdom — they listened to physics. The roulette ball obeys Newtonian mechanics. Its trajectory is predictable if you can measure velocity accurately enough. So they built the world's first wearable computer, hid it in a shoe, and improved their odds by 44%.
They didn't break the rules of the casino. They used the rules of the universe.
Most "impossible" things are only impossible because nobody with the right combination of clear thinking and audacity has tried the right approach yet. The laws of physics are the only real constraints. Everything else is a story we agreed to believe.
Rule 2: There is no single right way.
This one kills more potential than anything else. The belief that there is one correct path — one proven playbook — and your job is to find it and follow it.
Look at tennis. Rafael Nadal warmed up with raw, violent aggression — every ball hit like a personal grudge. Novak Djokovic warmed up with clinical, mechanical calibration — each stroke measured and optimized. Roger Federer warmed up like he was playing in his backyard — relaxed, loose, almost casual.
Three of the greatest to ever hold a racket. Three completely different operating systems. They didn't succeed by finding "the right way." They succeeded by finding their way — the exact model that suited their body, their mind, their temperament.
The same applies to building companies, writing, investing, creating content, and every other domain where people obsess over best practices. Best practices are averages. They tell you what works for most people most of the time. If you're trying to be most people, follow them. If you're not, find your own operating model and commit to it fully.
Rule 3: The "adults in the room" don't exist.
This is the one that freed me the most.
Low-agency thinkers carry a quiet assumption that somewhere, above them in the hierarchy, there are competent adults who have everything figured out. The experts. The authorities. The people running the show. And because those people exist, the best strategy is to wait — wait for instructions, wait for approval, wait for someone smarter to tell you what to do.
Here's the truth: those people don't exist. Not the way you imagine them.
Steve Jobs was fired from his own company before he built the most valuable corporation on earth. Wolfgang Mozart died broke. Isaac Newton spent years chasing alchemy — literally trying to turn lead into gold. These are the giants. The legends. And they were all deeply, fundamentally flawed humans figuring it out as they went.
Nobody has the complete map. Nobody has all the answers. The people you admire are just people who started moving before they felt ready — and kept adjusting along the way.
Once you internalize this, you stop waiting for permission. You stop looking for the adult in the room. You realize that the adult in the room is whoever decides to act like one. And that can be you. Right now. At any age.
Rule 4: Don't trust — verify.
The default human behaviour is to download consensus. "They say the market is crashing." "Experts agree this is the best approach." "Everyone knows you need a degree to be taken seriously."
Who is "they"? Which experts? Everyone where?
High-agency people don't accept popular opinion as a data source. They go to primary sources. They read the actual paper, not the headline about the paper. They talk to the person who did the thing, not the person who wrote about the person who did the thing. And most importantly, they question whether the right question is even being asked.
Sometimes the consensus is right. Often, it's a game of telephone — someone credible said something nuanced, it got simplified, then oversimplified, then repeated until it became gospel. By the time it reaches you, the original insight is buried under layers of lazy interpretation.
Verify everything. Especially the things everyone agrees on. Unanimous agreement is often a sign that nobody bothered to check.
How to spot high agency — in yourself and others
You can't measure agency on a resume or in a job interview. But you can feel it. Here's what to look for:
The energy test. After spending time with a high-agency person, you feel charged up. Not drained. Not overwhelmed. Energized — like the ceiling on what's possible just got higher. Low-agency people leave you feeling heavy. High-agency people make you want to go build something.
The background test. Their opinions don't fit neatly into any pre-built mould. They're not parroting a political party, a business guru, or a Twitter thread. Their worldview is assembled from direct experience and independent thought, which makes it unpredictable — and usually more interesting than anything you'd find in a book.
The prestige test. They're willing to walk away from comfortable, high-status positions to build something from zero. The corporate title, the safe salary, the social approval — none of it has enough gravity to keep them in a place where they're not growing. They'd rather be broke and building than comfortable and stagnant.
The question test. Before rushing to solve a problem, they stop and ask whether it's even the right problem. This is subtle but powerful. Most people waste enormous energy solving the wrong problem efficiently. High-agency people spend time choosing the right problem — and then attack it with everything they have.
The real takeaway
Low agency is our evolutionary default. It's the survival software that kept our ancestors alive by staying inside the tribe, following the leader, and not questioning the way things were done. That software made sense in a world where stepping out of line meant getting eaten by something.
It doesn't make sense anymore.
The world we live in now rewards the people who test the edges. Who ask "why not?" after everyone else has accepted "no." Who treat the rules as a first draft, not a final copy.
You are not a passive viewer watching a fixed world play out in front of you. You are not a bucket, sitting still, waiting to be filled by whatever life pours in.
You are a tap. You control the flow. You decide what gets built, what gets challenged, what gets changed.
Reality bends far more than most people ever bother to test. The only way to find out how far is to push.