The future belongs to those who understand that AI needs direction, tools need masters, data needs insight, content needs context, success needs vision.
The mind is a story engine, and those who learn to control it will thrive.
Most skills will be irrelevant in 10 to 20 years.
That is unless you completely change how you think about success.
Because if you're a high agency individual, that doesn't matter.
Why?
Because you aren't dependent on a specific skill for your success.
Because you aren't a specialist.
You didn't focus your mind, preventing you from learning outside of that focus on the status of a high-paying job or degree.
You have a vision and you understand that in today's world, you can learn any skill or acquire any knowledge that is needed to achieve it.
Now unfortunately, if your parents did not cultivate the skill of agency in themselves, they probably didn't pass it off to you.
And unless you have deliberately and painfully gone through the process of relearning, you have some work to do before you feel in control of your future.
Now.
With that said, the most important skill to learn that will be relevant now, in ten years and until you die is agency, because if you can set your own life direction, do what is required to achieve it and avoid the infinite number of temptations and distractions in today's world, you will never be at risk of replacement.
And if you do get replaced, it doesn't matter because you can quickly adapt.
So in this video, I want to share five ideas on what agency is, why it matters more than ever and how to practice it so you can get what you want in life.
So the first idea is that agency is the ability to iterate without permission.
And this is a slight redefinition of what most people are talking about online right now in terms of agency, because they're saying that it is the ability to act without permission, but we'll see why that is wrong.
And maybe it isn't wrong.
Maybe that's the definition of agency, but I want to redefine it in a way that is actually useful to you.
So we'll start with a quote from Krishnamurti.
It is only those who are in constant revolt that discover what is true, not the man who conforms, who follows some tradition.
So, in order to understand what a high agency individual is, it's very helpful to understand what it is not.
Agency is not mechanical conformity.
Conformity is when your mind is still connected by an umbilical cord to society.
Conformity is a stage of development where your mind operates entirely through cultural programming, judging truth based on popularity and acceptance by others rather than your own direct experience or independent investigation.
Now, if you really think about what i just said, if you don't understand what i just said, please go back and re-listen to it.
You understand that that is one of the greatest threats to living a good life.
Now, when you're born, your mind is like a new computer.
There's a base operating system, but the hard drive is completely blank.
For the first 20 years of your life, you do not think independently, and that's okay.
Nobody does no matter how independent you think you are, because that's just another form of conformity.
The little kid that thinks he's rebelling against his parents is just conforming to what his friends want him to do.
Now, in the spiral dynamics in nine stages of ego development models, they show that around 50 of the population is at the conformist stage of development, meaning half the population lacks the cognitive development for genuine agency.
Now, conformity stems from survival, because humans don't only survive on the physical level, like animals, where they're reproducing genes, but they survive on the psychological level, where they're reproducing beliefs, ideas and information.
If you work a job, you have a low degree of agency in that domain of life, because if that job were to go away, Your survival is at stake.
So you must conform in order to keep the job.
I mean, that's what you have to do to get the job in the first place, is you have to conform to what you think the boss will like so that he can hire you?
And then while you're on the job, you have to maybe wear a specific dress code.
You have to go through a specific set of processes to do your work that are approved by the boss or your manager.
Maybe you have to conform to a nine to five style workday.
As another example, if you have hard set beliefs that bind you to a specific political party or religious organization, you do not have a high degree of agency, because your ideas of good and bad originate from your culture, not your own personal investigation or discovery.
Everyone in the tech and business space and the AI space right now loves to talk about being high agency, But that's just another form of conformity to what is popular in the tech and business space.
And if you're not talking about it, then you're not with it.
With that said, this video has some degree of conformity.
We're all conformists in some ways and since it's a survival strategy or survival tool, it can be used like a tool.
I'm surviving in the sense that I'm trying to stay relevant in the YouTube space.
So what does true agency look like?
And how can we start to develop it in ourselves so that our emotions, finances and opportunities in life aren't dictated by someone else?
The first thing it looks like is that high agency people iterate without permission.
To have agency is to be the subject of a sentence rather than its direct object.
It is the tendency to act rather than wait to be acted upon.
That is a quote from Devin Erickson's article, The Third Ingredient of Success.
Now, agency literally means the condition of being in action or operation.
When it's used to describe a person, it means the tendency to initiate action towards a goal without outside prompting instruction or permission.
But when we look at what actually makes people successful, it isn't just acting toward a goal.
Anyone can start a business, but that doesn't mean it will reach any form of success.
Most of them don't, in fact, because they're missing the one critical piece of the puzzle.
If something doesn't work, you reflect on the situation, make an adjustment and try again, over and over, until you reach your end destination.
Agency then, in my opinion, is not only action, but an undying commitment to iteration, learning and doing in unison, making mistakes and correcting mistakes without being seduced back into a comforting conformity because it's not working.
And yes, I'm talking to you, people who start and quit after two weeks.
Now, the second tell of a high agency person is that they treat life as one giant experiment.
Low agency people can be characterized by the employee mindset.
They are assigned a task, often with some form of status or credential that triggers the part of their brain that craves acceptance by the tribe, and their decision making is immediately compromised.
They can no longer think outside of the confines placed upon them.
Now, high agency people are scientists of their own lives.
They have an idea, they set their own goal, they create a hypothesis or an educated guess on how to achieve it.
Then they test tinker, research and make an attempt toward the goal, and then they fail.
A lot.
But since this is an experiment, that's a part of the process.
They expect to fail.
Because how else are they going to narrow down what doesn't work until they find what does?
Now, this is a significant issue with how people perceive success today.
They are promised something by someone else, like a job that pays a lot of money or a business that can be built really quickly so you can get rich quick.
And those people do exactly what they're supposed to do.
But when they inevitably fail, they deem it impossible and blame everyone but themselves.
They don't notice that they made a mistake and that they can correct that mistake and try again.
Now, the third thing is that high agency people believe in the difficult.
You're watching this and you want to become high agency because you believe that it will make a positive difference in your life.
You're trying to reach a goal.
You're trying to achieve a goal.
And goals come in three forms.
There's easy goals, so things that we do every day, or things we can achieve with the skills or resources we already have.
There's difficult goals, so things we can't do right now, but that we can eventually do if we acquire the right skills and resources.
And then there's impossible goals, so something that is either outside of the realm of possibility and reality, or something we can't do until we complete the series of difficult goals that allow us to see impossible goals as possible.
So low agency people have a belief system that was more than likely conditioned into their mind when they were a kid or later on in life, with any kind of ideology they accepted into their life, like a political party, a religion, a friend group they joined.
And that belief system skews how they perceive difficult goals.
They see difficult goals as impossible goals and don't even try them.
And they don't even understand that impossible goals are only impossible right now, until you get to a point where they become possible.
Now, if you take Seligman's dog experiment, which is an experiment done on dogs, you can see how society does just this to most people.
So in this experiment, dogs were exposed to unavoidable electric shocks, making them feel as if they had no control over their environment.
Later, when they were placed in a situation where they could simply jump over a small wall to escape the shocks, the dogs did not attempt to do so.
They just whined and bore the shocks even when escaping was easily available to them.
So the goal of reaching the life you want may be difficult, but you were trained to believe that there is no way to achieve it, so you don't even think about it or consider that idea.
In other words, you're just trained to bear the shocks of the default path.
You just think that the pain of the life that everyone is going through is normal and not optional.
The good thing is, is that there is a way to practice agency.
You can cultivate it as a skill or a trait.
But these practical steps don't matter unless you have a deep understanding of how this applies in today's world.
So those were the characteristics of what a high agency person is.
And now we need to move on to the second idea, which is that AI is not a threat to the high agency people.
To illustrate this, here's a tweet that I wrote a while back and it got a lot of engagement for some reason, but it's just how I've been using AI.
Choose a task, find a YouTube expert that teaches it.
Have AI summarize their video, at example, slash context.
Have AI turn that into a meta prompt test, refine and reuse that prompt.
This has led to the best results in almost everything I have AI do.
I actually broke down that entire process two videos ago.
I don't remember what the video is called, but the thumbnail says learn AI in 34 minutes or 29 minutes.
It says something like that.
Okay, so back to the point.
You now have access to any knowledge you would ever need to achieve whatever you want.
And yet, people still do nothing with that information.
That's a crucial point.
Success is now easier than ever, yet the people who weren't going to achieve it still aren't going to achieve it.
Meaning, this was never about access or equal opportunity.
It's always been about agency.
High agency people, on the other hand, will outpace everyone else by 10x because they act without permission and the barriers to action are now close to non-existent.
If you can't achieve a big goal due to limited money or resources, you can set a smaller stepping stone goal that will help you acquire that money or resource.
Everyone is worried about the same thing and frankly, they're only afraid because they can't think clearly.
So let's look at the prime example, which is that AI is going to create so much content that human creators don't stand a chance.
I'm actually writing about this right now.
You can read it on my newsletter link in the description.
First thing here is that AI is a tool.
Tools need someone to use them for a specific purpose.
So sure anyone can ask AI to generate a viral post or a thousand viral posts from a podcast, and the AI can rank them or run a simulation on whether or not they're actually going to go viral.
But what good is that?
What actual good is that?
Have you thought about it or have you just heard that and been like, oh yeah, that sounds kind of true.
Okay, i'm done thinking about it.
You can get a bunch of likes and a bunch of followers that way.
But what about monetization?
What about loyalty or what about any of the other things that make a brand work long term?
Yes, you can ask ai to help with that or help you understand it, but now you're doing something completely different.
You're not asking ai to do it for you, you're learning.
Now you're orchestrating the realization of a larger vision.
And it's not that different from doing it yourself.
You're just getting the information from a different source now in a faster way.
You are still the decision maker.
And sure, AI can generate a beautiful image on command, but there is a huge difference between someone who has a vision and uses AI to help them execute that vision and someone who just wants to create a quick image.
Many artists nowadays use AI for first drafts.
Many artists still take it into Photoshop and make tweaks that would allow it to look more like what they want it to look like, because you can't get super detailed with the image generators right now.
So as a whole, I believe that AI has exposed what really matters in the creative process.
When you ask AI to make all the decisions for you.
In other words, you ask it to guess what works, based on hundreds of thousands of opinions on the internet.
There is no through line.
There is no theme.
There is no personality.
There is no vision.
There is no context.
That's what creators are.
Context creators.
They're not content creators.
The content is meaningless without context and AI generations are the same.
So, aside from brain rot and memes and there's actually some great ones out there actually like scrolling and seeing some of the brain rot which are only good at keeping you on the platform until you see an advertisement.
So the social media platforms can make money, which then have a through line and brand vision crafted for a specific purpose by a specific person, using AI or not.
AI is practically useless unless the person using AI is already good at creating content.
Did that click for you?
99 of AI generated content goes straight to the bottom of the barrel, because if that content worked, then there's value there.
And it doesn't matter if it was AI generated or not, because it was more than likely orchestrated by a human who was passing off their personal context to it.
When building a business, you must have a brand mission that AI helps you execute, and you must iterate constantly.
When writing a book, you must maintain control of all minor details and beyond that, you must still be able to get people to read it audience, marketing and sales, which the book is not going to do itself.
When creating art, you must still have an idea that you are attempting to bring into reality.
In other words, nothing has changed.
People just hate what's new, and that new is shining a light on what mattered in the first place.
If you can't create art with AI, then you were never an artist to begin with.
You were simply good at using a tool, like Photoshop, and tools get replaced.
Vision and agency do not.
So speaking of that, that brings us to idea number three, is why generalists win in the AI age.
Schools were created to enslave the brightest minds by promising the prestige of specialization, so they remain narrow-minded and didn't overthrow the true rulers.
That is a quote from my book that you can read free on my Substack Purpose and Profit.
That is taken quite a bit out of context.
But that quote is largely true.
Now, whenever I write or create a video on becoming a generalist or a polymath or someone with multiple interests, people just seem to pop up and they want to tell me how wrong I am.
And of course, they never give me a coherent argument as to why a specialist is better.
Actually, sometimes they do, but they don't actually listen to what I'm saying in the first place.
They don't steelman my argument.
They usually inadvertently prove me right.
And some of them even proceed to quote the classic from Shakespeare, which is a jack-of-all-trades, master of none.
Yet they're unaware that that is a misquote and it ends with but oftentimes better than a master of one.
Now some may think shakespeare was a specialist playwright, but that was simply a vessel.
He had to have a deep understanding of human nature, character development language, classical literature stagecraft religion philosophy, military tactics music navigation, the natural world, social structures, the body and medicine.
The list goes on.
He was a synthesizer who used his diverse interests as his edge.
Now take a fortune 500 ceo charles darwin steve, jobs or any other visionary or strategist who achieves outsized success has a specific vision that they then learn and take the necessary steps to achieve.
Do not confuse a specific vessel or niche as being a specialist.
Specialists are attached to the skill.
Skills always get replaced and evolve as technology advances.
We don't see this now, but Photoshop disrupted the art industry.
You see Photoshop now and you see it as an integral part of our process.
But I can guarantee if we were back in those times where Photoshop came around or not even just Photoshop, but computer generated graphics came around the manual, hand-drawn artists were probably just screaming at the top of their lungs that this is going to ruin everything.
That's exactly what's happening right now with AI.
And while I'm very pro-AI, there's going to be more videos on me talking about the other side.
I think there's things that are very, very wrong with AI, like the content creation space right now.
And people just asking, hey, create me a script for this.
And then they just read it to the camera.
And you can obviously tell that they're using AI.
I have a lot to say about that.
Now generalists?
On the other hand, they aren't.
They don't care whether or not the skill is going to be replaced or if it's going to evolve, because they're focused on the goal.
They're focused on the vision.
They're focused on doing what's necessary, including changing the goal, so that they can thrive in anything they do.
They don't identify with a skill or think they're passionate about a skill, like being passionate about Photoshop.
They're passionate about their direction in life and creating that.
So let me break this down further.
Humans are tool builders.
We thrive in any niche because we can adapt to it.
If you were to put a lion in Alaska and a polar bear in the Savannah, they would die.
If you were to put a human in either, They would build shelter, clothing and hunt for something to eat, because they can create a plan and execute on it.
The reality is to educate large numbers of immigrant children.
In the 1800s, during industrialization, America adopted the Prussian education model, which was not education at all but a weapon of mass conformity.
It was designed to create obedient soldiers, compliant citizens, civil servants and well behaved workers through mandatory attendance, training for teachers, testing for students and the concept of grade levels.
Does that sound familiar?
Society wants you simple, predictable, and easy to categorize.
Why?
Because that's what best serves their interests.
That's what best serves the profits of organizations.
If you understand systems, you understand that the system takes the shape of that which most benefits the end goal which, in society's case, is keeping you sick and dumb, whether it's intentional or not.
It doesn't have to be a conspiracy theory for the system to naturally take shape of the subconscious desires of the humans at the top of the pyramid.
So what do you do?
What do you do about all this?
Well, if slaves were expected to do one thing throughout the entirety of their lives so that their minds were closed to learning more, which are specialists, then you, as a free individual, are meant to do many things throughout your life.
You're meant to be a generalist.
In other words, you revolt against the path you were set on at birth.
You pursue an interest-based education.
You use your capabilities wisely.
And that's idea number four, which is the five human capabilities.
Now, agency is great, but we're still bound by the laws of physics.
And this creates another giant worry that ebbs and flows with AI hype cycles.
Will AGI, artificial general intelligence, make human intelligence irrelevant?
Let's gain clarity on this by asking a few questions.
We're going to go through this quick.
Are human capabilities limited or are they infinite?
As high agency generalists, do we not have the capability to learn anything and do anything that our genes do not limit us from learning or doing?
We thrive in many niches because we adapt with knowledge and tools.
So the fundamental question about human capabilities is are there any limits on what we can think and how we can think?
So if the main limit is the processing speed and memory of our brain, can that not be augmented?
And when AGI becomes a thing, Will that not be ever more possible?
Will we not be AGI?
Are we not already AGI?
Will we not be amongst the super intelligent?
It's fun to speculate about these things and we have some time before it actually becomes reality.
So I want to focus on the near future.
So there are five fundamental human capabilities.
Can AI or AGI ever make those irrelevant?
The first capability is computation, which is mental.
So is there any limit to what we can compute?
No, because once you have a universal computer that we can hold in our hands, it's just a matter of time and memory to compute anything.
We have that, and if AGIs or aliens had that, they would have the same repertoire of computation as us and no advantage over us.
You may say that AGI will be able to compute much faster, but that does not speed up the pace of the physical transformation that allows things to be built.
You can have an idea for building a particle collider, but you still need the resources to build it and you still need to build it from that.
The second capability is transformation, which is physical.
Transformation is creation.
We turn raw materials into rockets given the right knowledge.
Human hands and bodies seem to be especially good at creating anything, given a specific sequence of operations.
We've built spaceships and telescopes, meaning that we can build the thing that builds the thing.
We are generalists that build tools to thrive in any environment.
We are not animals bound to one niche.
So the question is is there a limit to what these basic operations can do when strung together in the right way?
Now, again, the answer is no.
If humans could tell, operate a gorilla.
There is a sequence of steps it can take to build a rocket given time.
And no, I'm not saying a single gorilla.
Imagine if Elon Musk were operating the gorilla, what would he do?
Now, the thing here is time.
Transformations take time, and singularity isn't going to change that, just as the Enlightenment or the Big Bang didn't.
The Big Bang didn't create rocket ships.
The Enlightenment didn't create rocket ships.
It created maybe some prerequisites for them, but it still took time to get to that point.
Time is a compression algorithm that prevents everything from happening at once.
In other words, AGI may be able to compute faster than our brains, but that doesn't mean it will be able to create the thing faster than humans.
You can have an idea for building a rocket, but you still need to acquire the resources to build a rocket.
Now, after computation and transformation as the two capabilities, there is variation, selection and attention.
And these have to do with navigating idea space or how we create knowledge.
We can compute and transform, but do we have limits on the knowledge that allows us to do so?
Now, knowledge serves two functions.
The first is to make specific things happen, preferably good things rather than bad.
And the second is to capture patterns in reality.
This allows us to store information in an efficient way, so that we aren't always starting from scratch in our pursuits.
We understand big picture concepts like the sun rising and falling each day and seasons changing every so often.
Now without this understanding, much of our lives would fall apart.
Capturing patterns allows us to plan by proximity.
We understand that we could freeze to death in a cold environment, so we use deposits of knowledge like a jacket and hotel to keep us warm while we travel.
Now think of idea space or the unknown as a universal map with light and dark spots.
The light spots are areas you've explored and the dark spots are where your potential lies.
This map is a surface area for ideas that can be discovered and tested against reality to verify their validity.
When those results do not move you closer toward your goal or move you further from that, a problem is revealed and you must error correct toward the goal.
So with variation, the third capability is there a limit to the number of new ideas we can come up with to survive and achieve what we set our minds to?
With computation, we can navigate the entire space of ideas.
With agency, we can take any step within that space and eventually stumble across a good idea after many bad ones.
And with creation, we can move in unique ways, like flying over a forest rather than walking through it.
So we can understand anything, create anything and discover an infinite set of new ideas to solve an infinite string of problems.
Again, AGI can do the same and we are both bound by the laws of nature.
But any possibility within that is within reach.
Now the fourth capability is selection.
We can come up with any idea, but can we find the good ones?
Now, the potential problem here is that it is difficult to make cumulative progress without learning from mistakes.
It wouldn't be fun to start over from scratch if we wanted to build an electric car after a gas car.
We wouldn't be very developed as a species.
As universal cybernetic systems that's what humans are we can become more efficient at navigating idea space to avoid wandering lost we error correct.
We make mistakes and fix them.
There's no fundamental difference here either.
Now the fifth capability is attention.
One other aspect that humans take for granted is our ability to change our focus by changing our perspective.
When a problem occurs, where does your attention go?
If you want to build a rocket, does it help to ask the old gods to do it for you?
Or can you change lenses to view the situation in a way that allows you to perceive opportunities?
While this is a massive problem for humans, because we get stuck in paradigm walk and we attach to ideologies, we do have the capability to change where our attention goes when problems come up.
We can put on a spiritual lens to find peace and a scientific lens to find progress.
Identifying with a purely ascending and spiritual philosophy is no different from being an incomplete system that will fail to solve a certain set of problems.
Spirituality is a great lens or tool, but a bad master and not the end-all be-all.
So AGI does not seem like it can surpass us in any way, unless it bends what is possible, and we would have a very different problem on our hands at that point.
Now the fifth idea about agency is just how to actually practice agency.
In ordinary practical life we usually take the means for the sake of the ends, but in games we can take up an end for the sake of the means.
Playing games can be a motivational inversion of ordinary life.
That is a quote from the book Games, Agency as Art.
You develop agency by practicing other people's agencies until you can create your own.
In other words, you play by the rules until you can create your own meaning.
The most important high agency trait is knowing when to break free of conformity.
Agency as a whole is not a skill or a trait, but an art form.
And the best way to observe that art form is in games.
Because painting lets us record sights, music lets us record sounds, stories let us record narratives and games, let us record agencies.
When you play a game, you almost always start with the goal in mind. win the game.
From there, you have various quests, but those quests must be executed in order of your experience.
You start at level 1, then advance to level 2, and beyond.
And once you reach a much higher level, you are able to look back with all of your knowledge and skill to devise how you are going to reach the next goal.
The higher level you are, the more fun life becomes, because you get to choose the challenging yet meaningful goal you take on next.
It is not assigned to you as if you were in a tutorial phase.
That's exactly why your life may feel out of control.
You got to level 10, childhood, school, or job, but now you feel stuck.
The game isn't fun anymore because the game makers don't benefit from you going to a higher level, so they incentivize you to stay there.
You get trapped in a loop of boredom and anxiety because all of your tasks are repetitive and mindless and any further challenge overwhelms you because you do not know how to learn.
The most important boss fight of your life is to pursue your own path.
So how do you actually start practicing this?
First, you simply need something to pursue, and it can be anything, because nobody actually knows what they want.
Instead, they deeply understand what they don't want and allow that to create an aim for their future.
From there, they have a direction to move in.
Once you have that direction, you set a goal to make it more practical and achievable, and then you do the following.
You research processes that others have found success with.
You can find these on YouTube, social media, courses from reputable creators or mentors.
Then you experiment with various techniques, so implement the processes you learn and attempt to get results.
By the way, most of these won't work for you. and that's okay.
Then you identify patterns, principles and levers.
So note the most important aspects from everything you try.
These tend to be the things that get results.
Then you create your own process, so tailor what you learn to your unique lifestyle and situation.
And then you pass it down to others, because the teacher learns more than the student and you don't truly understand it if you can't explain it in a way that is beneficial to someone else.
This is personally why I love social media.
First.
It's where the attention is, and you're probably not going to build your life's work by advertising on the radio or getting on the TV anymore, or by sending handwritten letters to prospects.
You're going to write content, obviously.
So, aside from being an accessible, low-cost and low-risk vessel to do what you want, learning and agency are baked in.
Social media, the internet, is the great modern game.
You can study other people's agencies and their content, guides, and courses.
You can experiment in public and get direct feedback.
You can quickly identify what works and what doesn't.
You are forced to learn a future-proof skill stack like writing persuasion marketing sales storytelling, etc.
And you must truly learn what you want to talk about on the internet.
I'll let you decide what you want to do with the rest of that information.
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