A field guide for unclear situations
stops here.
High agency begins with the second question: what can still be moved?
These are my notes on High Agency by George Mack. The ideas, stories, and framing are his. I turned the main claims into diagrams and exercises you can test for yourself. Read the original first if you have thirty minutes. Nothing on this page is stored anywhere. What you type stays in your browser.
On this page
00 See it first
It is easier to recognise high agency in a person than to define it. The essay starts with examples, so this note does too.
In 1964, a judge said he could not define obscenity and knew it when he saw it. High agency can feel the same. You have probably met someone who has it, even if you never named the trait.
The question
You wake up in a foreign jail cell
You get one phone call. No lawyer, no embassy, no money. One person you actually know. Do not think about who deserves it or who would be upset to be left out. Who do you call?
You probably chose that person because you trust them to find a way through an unclear situation. Their title, income, and intelligence matter less than whether they can act without a map.
When you're told that something is impossible, is that the end of the conversation, or does that start a second dialogue in your mind?
Eric Weinstein, quoted in the essayHow to spot them
The essay lists ten common signs. Select the ones that describe you honestly. There is no external score, and your answers stay in your browser.
Checklist
Ten signals
Low agency in one image
People reached the moon in 1969. Bernard Sadow filed his rolling-luggage patent in 1970. An ordinary inconvenience can remain obvious for years without anyone treating it as a problem worth solving.
Diagram
Two dates
People land on the moon and come home.
Somebody puts wheels on a suitcase.
The hard problem went first. The easy one had been in everybody's hands the whole time.
01 Three wheels
The essay defines agency as three traits: clear thinking, action, and willingness to reject a weak answer.
Optimism says the glass is half full. Pessimism says it is half empty. High agency says you can turn on the tap. The people you would call from that jail cell may differ in age, education, politics, and temperament. They share a habit of shaping events. They refuse to wait for events to shape them.
Diagram
Three readings of one glass
Two of these are opinions about the water. The third one changes how much there is.
The essay breaks it into clear thinking, a bias to action, and disagreeability, and calls the combination a tricycle. Take a wheel off and see what you get.
Diagram
Deflate a wheel
The three traits can work against each other. Careful thinkers may delay action. Fast movers may act before checking the goal. Agreeable teammates may accept the first no. High agency requires balancing all three.
02 Do you have agency?
Most people do not begin with high agency, but the habit can change.
People learn early to follow social rules, avoid risk, and wait for permission. Schools often reward the same habits. Low agency is common because those habits are common. They can still be examined and changed.
The good news in the essay is short. You have agency over your agency.
Self-diagnostic
Twelve questions, three wheels
Rate each statement from 1 (never true of me) to 5 (always true). Answer for the last three months. Answer from your record of action; future plans do not count. Your answers stay in this browser.
Where that puts you
Two axes are enough to place someone. Clarity is whether you can name the problem. Will is whether you move on it and keep moving when told no. Hover any quadrant to read it. If you scored the questions above, your marker is already on the field.
Hover or tap a quadrant.
03 Five lines of software
The essay names five beliefs that support independent action.
Panel
Five lines, one install
1. There is no unsolvable problem
Your mind follows the question you give it. Ask what is wrong and it produces problems. Ask what is working and it finds different evidence. The quality of the question shapes the answer.
The essay's question is a good one. Does this defy the laws of physics? The answer is almost always no, and saying it out loud clears the board.
Tool
The physics gate
Does this break a law of physics?
Difficulty, cost, and embarrassment do not make a problem physically impossible. If the solution obeys physics, a solution can exist.
Has any human ever done something in this class?
In 1961 Claude Shannon and Ed Thorp decided that beating roulette was a physics problem they could measure. They built the first wearable computer, hid it in a shoe, timed the wheel with a toe switch, and took an edge off the house. Thorp later documented the system.
Who told you this was impossible?
Name the source. Ask what they tested. Many claims of impossibility describe one person's failed attempt. That does not establish a physical limit.
If it is possible, what is the first hour of work?
You have moved this from impossible to unstarted. Now define the first hour of work.
David Deutsch explains this with an asteroid. With penguins in charge, the outcome follows the rock's physics. With people in charge, the odds change as they learn and act. Drag the slider.
Model
An asteroid, one year out
Penguins in charge
Fixed. The rock's trajectory is the whole story.
Humans in charge
Nobody acts. The rock arrives on schedule.
The numbers are made up. They show why you cannot give fixed odds for anything humans are still working on.
2. There is no way
In the essay's account, Matthew Syed describes watching them warm up before Wimbledon. Nadal attacked the practice court and soaked his shirt. Djokovic calibrated, shot by shot, without expression. You could hear Federer laughing before you saw him, trying trick shots for his own amusement.
Three routines with nothing in common except that each one belonged to the person doing it.
The essay also recounts a conversation between Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan in a Paris cafe. Dylan asked how long Hallelujah took. Cohen said a couple of years, and was playing it down. It took him closer to seven. Cohen asked how long Just Like a Woman took. Fifteen minutes.
Comparison
Time to write one great song
Both songs endured. Their methods could hardly be more different. A routine works only when it fits the person doing the work.
3. There are no adults
Passivity often comes from believing that competent adults are handling the problem. We stop believing in Santa and the tooth fairy, yet keep believing in an unseen group of adults who fully understand the situation.
The cards below summarize examples collected in the original essay. Their mistakes do not cancel their work; they show why no accomplished person should be treated as infallible. Tap a card.
Exhibit
Kill your gurus
Their mistakes do not erase their work. They show that accomplished people remain human. You do not need to wait for a flawless expert to act.
4. There is no normal
Trying to look normal has a hidden cost. People hide unusual interests to gain approval, then become easier to forget.
Conventional behaviour is easy in the moment and often forgotten. Unusual acts may feel awkward now but become lasting stories. At funerals, people remember specific choices and personal quirks.
Model
What people remember
Shock
You pay for everyone at the table and the table is embarrassed.
Protest
You fly across the world for a birthday and hear you did not have to.
Anger
You give fully honest feedback on someone's idea and they go quiet.
Their favourite story about you
Told at your wedding and, later, at your funeral.
The thing they tell people
Repeated for years, usually with the details improved.
One of the few they trust
Honesty is priced badly in the moment and correctly over a decade.
5. There is only now
We remember the past and imagine the future in the present. Our time to act is always now, and that time is limited.
The essay recounts a story from film director Kevin Smith. His father spent a working life cancelling stamps in a post office to keep a family fed. Smith got a call at six in the morning, arrived at the hospital, and read his mother's face before anyone spoke. Then his brother told him their father had died screaming. Not as a figure of speech. The conclusion Smith drew was that a man can follow every rule and still end that way, so the sensible move is to chase the things you actually want while you can.
Counter
Your life in months
04 The Wilbur case
Wilbur Wright shows all five beliefs in practice. The account below follows the Smithsonian's history of the Wrights' research and its record of the 1903 flights.
In 1885 Wilbur Wright was eighteen, healthy, well loved and expected at Yale. Then a boy from the neighbourhood hit him in the face with a hockey stick during a skating game. The injuries kept coming back. Wilbur spent years unwell with heart palpitations and depression, and Yale quietly disappeared from the plan. His mother was dying of tuberculosis in the same house. He nursed her until she died in 1889.
Injured in a skating accident at eighteen. Yale is cancelled. Life happening to Wilbur.
Largely housebound. Nursing his mother through her final illness.
Reads everything. Writes to the Smithsonian in 1899 for every publication they hold on flight. The first act of agency.
Picks Kitty Hawk from weather data and travels seven hundred miles to a sand bar with a glider.
Builds a wind tunnel. Tests around two hundred wing shapes. Rewrites the published aerodynamic tables that were wrong.
Powered flight. Wilbur's fourth flight of the day lasts 59 seconds and covers 852 feet.
During his recovery, Wilbur studied birds as evidence that controlled flight was possible. Earlier attempts had failed, sometimes fatally. Public confidence in powered flight remained low. The engineering question remained unchanged.
There was no search engine and no aeronautics degree to enrol in. Wilbur wrote to libraries and to the Smithsonian and asked them to send him everything. Then he reasoned in a straight line.
The fourth step required personal commitment. Wilbur brought in his brother Orville, and they built full-size gliders behind their bicycle shop. They treated each new problem as an engineering task.
They calculated that they needed steady wind of around fifteen miles an hour and soft sand to crash into. Ohio has neither.
Wrote to the US Weather Bureau, got the station data, and read the whole country from first principles. The answer came back as Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
They turned a vague complaint about conditions into a query against a dataset that already existed and that anyone could have asked for.
Neither brother had really left Ohio. There was no convenient way to move a glider across the country.
Packed the glider, spent days on trains and a boat, and camped in a tent on the dunes for the season. Repeatedly, for four years.
They acted despite the travel and discomfort. Local opinion did not change the plan.
Everyone else was chasing stability and power. Control in three axes was an unsolved problem that had killed people.
Copied birds. Wilbur watched buzzards twist their wingtips to roll, and built wing warping to do the same thing with cable and cloth.
They also stopped trusting the published lift tables when their gliders underperformed, built a wind tunnel in the shop, and tested around two hundred wing shapes to produce their own numbers.
They wrote to manufacturers with their power and weight requirement. Nobody could supply it.
Their mechanic Charlie Taylor built one in the shop in about six weeks, with an aluminium crankcase to save weight.
When suppliers could not meet the requirement, they built the part themselves. They also designed propellers because marine theory did not transfer to air.
The four years were difficult. Gliders broke. Calculations turned out to be wrong, including ones taken from the recognised authorities. One bad day in 1901 Wilbur told Orville that man would not fly in a thousand years. The next morning he was drawing again.
Not within a thousand years would man ever fly.
Wilbur Wright, on the train home from Kitty Hawk, 1901On 17 December 1903, they flew four times. Orville's first flight lasted 12 seconds. Wilbur's longest lasted 59 seconds and covered 852 feet. They succeeded without institutional funding or an aeronautics degree.
You said you would ring the person you named from that cell. Wilbur is the other name on that list, and he never met you.
05 Five low agency traps
The same framework names five habits that weaken agency.
Low agency can mean staying stuck on a searchable problem, delaying an important call, or letting the room's average opinion replace your own judgement.
Each trap below includes a description, what it sounds like from the inside, and the one question that gets you out.
Map
Five traps, five questions
TRAP 01 The vague trap
The vague trap avoids stating the problem clearly. A person can think for years without defining what needs to change. Images and moods feel important but give action no target.
Things have not really been right for a while and I am not sure what to do about it.
Get the problem out of your head and into another medium.
Write it down. Draw it. Use a whiteboard. Say it out loud to someone who will interrupt you. Giving the thought a form exposes what is unclear. Walt Disney mapped the whole empire on one sheet in 1957. Christopher Nolan drew the plot of Inception because it could not be held in a sentence.
Vague problems usually come from vague questions. What career should I choose gives you nothing. What does my ideal week look like hour by hour, what does my worst week look like, and where is my current week sitting between them gives you something to act on this evening.
TRAP 02 The midwit trap
The midwit trap makes a simple task needlessly complex. One person takes the obvious action. Another studies the problem and returns to that same action. The person in the middle mistakes complexity for intelligence.
Before I start I should really understand the landscape properly.
Diagram
The curve
The goal
I want to become a better writer. Tap each point on the curve to see what they do about it.
What would the person on the left do? Find it by inverting.
How to guarantee failure at this
- Do not do it at all
- Do it inconsistently, in bursts, then stop
- Only do the parts that bore you
- Never show it to anyone who would tell you the truth
- Wait for the conditions to be right first
Flip each one
- Do it
- Do it consistently, on a schedule you can keep
- Do the parts that genuinely interest you
- Show it to one person who will be honest
- Start under the conditions you have today
The right column is simple. Try it before adding another layer to the plan.
TRAP 03 The attachment trap
The attachment trap treats old assumptions as facts. Once the frame feels fixed, every new fact gets forced into it. The essay calls this “last principles” thinking: reasoning from an assumption that was never tested.
People like me do not get into rooms like that.
What would I do if I had ten times the agency?
The question forces you to inspect the assumptions. The frame may be creating the limit.
The bouncer says you are not coming in tonight. You can accept that as a fact about reality, or you can ask the question and watch options appear. Go round the back. Find who owns the venue. Come back in a different outfit. Arrive with a camera crew and let the club decide whether it wants footage of itself turning someone away.
A version that works better for some people: imagine an identical twin whose only job is to have ten times your agency. What would they try this week?
TRAP 04 The rumination trap
The rumination trap repeats “what if it goes wrong?” until time runs out. No option is perfect, so the person delays every option.
I have spent five years thinking about moving. Every version I imagine has something wrong with it.
Diagram
The loop
Round and round. Each lap feels like progress because it uses the same energy as thinking.
How can I take action on this now?
Treat rumination as a warning. Respond with an action that can produce useful evidence.
Turn the decision into an experiment. If you are 60% confident that another city would suit you better, visit it and collect evidence. Running the test is progress. Five years of thought cannot replace direct experience.
TRAP 05 The overwhelm trap
The overwhelm trap compares where you are now with the final goal in one step. Learning quantum mechanics, earning a black belt, or building an aeroplane then feels like one impossible action.
I would not even know where to begin.
Games begin at level one. The first task is small enough to begin and useful enough to lead into the second.
Tool
Build the first five levels
What is the smallest first step I can take?
Level one is small enough to do today. It may be no more than writing possible levels two to five. You need a first step before you need a complete map.
06 Which trap is yours?
Six ordinary situations. Four plausible responses each. One of them is the high agency move and the other three are traps wearing sensible clothes.
Answer the way you would actually behave on a normal Tuesday. The pattern at the end is worth more than any single answer.
Game
Six situations
07 Five tools
The essay closes with practical tools. I made the first one clickable because using a flow chart teaches you more than looking at one.
Tool 1. The high agency flow chart
Bring one stuck problem. Answer honestly. Every terminal node is either a named trap with an escape route, or the news that you already have agency here and can stop diagnosing.
Tool
Walk the chart
Tool 2. The Swedish House Mafia technique
This technique comes from the original essay. Gather the sharpest people you know. State the real problem without protecting your pride. Shut the door, put the phones away, test ideas against one another, and act on the strongest option before the group leaves.
Run the room in order. The method ends in action, not a better meeting.
Tool 3. The story razor
When two options are otherwise equal, ask which one makes the better story. This is Amjad Masad's rule as presented in the essay. Use it only as a tie-breaker after evaluating risk. If both choices are sound, choose the one that makes you an active author of your life.
Tool
Apply the razor
Tool 4. Ask for help, properly
Derek Sivers describes having three mentors. When he gets stuck he writes the problem out for them: the context, the options, and what he thinks about each one, compressed so as not to waste their time. Then he predicts their reply and edits the note to address it. Then he predicts the reply to that. By the end the answer is usually obvious and he does not send it. None of the three know they are mentors.
The value was never in the reply. It was in writing something good enough to deserve one.
My reading of Sivers, in one lineDiagram
The draft that answers itself
Tool 5. A change of perspective is worth fifty IQ points
The essay uses this parable: a wealthy man walks into a New York bank and asks to borrow five thousand dollars for two weeks. The bank wants security, so he hands over the keys to a Rolls Royce. Staff laugh about it after he leaves and park the car in the basement. He returns, repays the loan with about fifteen dollars of interest, and is asked why a millionaire needed five thousand dollars. His answer is that he could not find anywhere else in Manhattan to park for two weeks at that price.
The lesson does not depend on whether the story is literal. A better frame can reveal an option that the obvious framing hides.
Diagram
One transaction, two frames
The bank sees security, paperwork, and about fifteen dollars of interest.
The same paperwork, priced against every garage in Manhattan.
08 Turn intention into action
Reading changes nothing by itself. This ten-minute exercise asks you to act.
The essay proposes starting from a value, then turning it into visible action. Choose something you care about. Write ten concrete ways to express it. Pick one that stretches you, divide it into small steps, and begin now.
Worksheet
Your sheet
Name a value
Something vague and real. Gratitude, loyalty, courage, curiosity, love, ambition.
Ten specific ways to make it real
Write quickly. Each line must describe an action another person could observe.
Pick one
Choose one that matters and feels slightly uncomfortable. Do not confuse danger with useful discomfort.
Break it into micro steps
Find the address. Write the thing. Press send. Small enough that none of them can be argued with.
Do them now
Not tonight. Not this weekend. Tick them off above as they happen.
Notice what it feels like
Record what you completed. Return tomorrow and repeat it. Your actions provide stronger evidence about your priorities than your intentions do.
09 The library
Examples collected in the original essay, followed by my lesson from each. Unless another source is linked, treat them as the essay's accounts.
A truck driver and a photocopier
A twenty year old lorry driver wanted to make films and could not pay for film school. Between shifts he sat in the USC library, pulled the staples out of film students' theses, and photocopied them. Six months of that gave him an education in effects and cinematography. His name is James Cameron.
The line: the gate was on the tuition, never on the knowledge.
A six year old and a YouTube search
Cole Summers asked his father how people get rich. His father, recovering from a long run of surgeries, told him to go and watch videos about Warren Buffett. He set up a company at seven breeding rabbits, taught himself corporate tax at nine, and bought and renovated a house at ten using YouTube for the trades.
The line: nobody checked whether he was allowed to. Including him.
Burn the boats
Good intentions do not guarantee action. A public commitment can add a real social cost to quitting. The added cost can help, although it does not guarantee follow-through.
The line: design the consequence before you need the motivation.
The ticking clock
The essay's example is an offer structured so the payment falls every month it goes undelivered. You do not need to feel motivated when the cost of a slow week is written on the wall in front of you.
The line: you can create urgency through the structure of a commitment.
The trillion dollar test
If solving this paid a trillion dollars, and failing carried a death sentence, would you find a way? If the answer is yes, the problem was never capability. It was price.
The line: “impossible” often means the current cost exceeds your commitment.
The suitcase
People walked on the moon before wheeled luggage became a commercial product. Bernard Sadow filed his rolling-luggage patent in 1970.
The line: the biggest unsolved problems are usually in your hands.
Figure
What was actually in the way
Six cases, one shape. Select any of them.
Figure
Test the gate
10 Why I keep this page
My research measures how safety alignment changes a model's calibration and where the cost is greatest. That work connects directly to this essay.
In my work, vague questions often hide behind “more thinking,” while over-scoping hides behind “being thorough.” I make progress when I can state a claim plainly enough to test and disprove it. That is the same discipline this essay promotes.
There is one place I would push back. Disagreeability is a real ingredient and it is also the one most easily faked. Refusing to update looks identical to independent thinking from the inside, and it feels better. The version I want is the one Wilbur had. He distrusted the published lift tables enough to build a wind tunnel. The brothers tested their assumptions and produced more accurate data, as the Smithsonian record explains. They verified the claim themselves and had the nerve to act on the result.
The other line I keep is that limits are the work. If the honest answer is that you cannot yet do the thing, that is a finding, and findings are useful in both directions.
The whole method
The wall is real. The first route rarely is.
Your progress
Twelve things this page asks you to actually do
Credit. Every idea, story and framing on this page comes from High Agency by George Mack, The words, diagrams, and interactions here are my interpretation; the central ideas are his. Read the original.
Historical details on the Wright brothers are checked against the Smithsonian record rather than taken from the essay, and one date and distance differ slightly as a result. The page labels every illustrative figure so readers can distinguish it from measured data.
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