Skip to content
Designing Agency
Agency Toolkit - Sprint #1
SelfDev OS - Sprint #2
Share
Explore

icon picker
Knowledge Base on Agency

🔍 What Is Agency?

Agency is the capacity to act with intention, persistence, and belief — even when the environment pushes back or the path is unclear. It’s not just the desire to improve life — it’s the drive to overcome, to seek knowledge, and to create meaningful systems or outcomes. Agency helps you to move through uncertainty, face complex challenges, and make deliberate changes — in your life, your relationships, your surroundings and even the world. Agency is what transforms problems into solvable tasks by pursuing the knowledge, mastery, and resources necessary to act.
🧩 Core Dimensions of Agency
Dimension
Description
Initiative
The internal drive to start — even without permission, validation, or full clarity
Persistence
Remaining in motion despite obstacles, resistance, or slow results
Knowledge-Seeking
All problems are solvable with enough knowledge (Deutsch’s optimism) — agency drives the pursuit of understanding
Autonomy
A sense of ownership over your life — acting based on your own compass instead of waiting for things to happen
Intellectual and Practical Competency
The skills and mastery needed to turn intention into real-world impact (thinking + doing)
System Navigation
The ability to understand and strategically operate within or reshape the systems you’re embedded in (e.g. institutions, culture, structures)
Adaptability
Willingness to change, evolve, and learn from failure — without losing purpose
Mission Calibration
Your agency’s “reach” is tied to the caliber of your personality — are you building only for yourself, or to improve broader systems?
Action Over Rumination
Agency cuts through the loop of overthinking and moves you toward experimentation, output, and change
Ethical System Creation
High-agency people create systems that improve life for others (not just self)
There are no rows in this table
⁠

💡 Supporting Concepts & Insights

🔁 Agency vs Passivity
Low Agency
High Agency
Trained to execute tasks
Learns how to solve problems
External permission needed
Acts from internal direction
Avoids failure
Uses failure to grow
Consumes systems
Builds and changes systems
Seeks validation
Anchored in inner belief
I feel at the mercy of circumstances
I take initiative to shape my path
There are no rows in this table
⁠

🧠 Key Ideas

Agency > Intelligence ​
(Karpathy
⁠
) Intelligence may help analyze, but agency makes you act and persist. It’s more rare, more valuable, and more scalable.
Agency must be paired with mastery and tools/resources — otherwise, it can lead to burnout or suppression (your personal experience).
You don’t need clarity to act — agency moves through fog Start in the fog. Action creates clarity.
Rumination is a trap — action is clarity’s best friend Agency helps shift from inner loops to outer change.
The more agency you develop, the more complex problems you face High-agency individuals invite difficulty — they’re drawn to systemic problems, not just tasks.
Agency is a teachable Like a muscle: train it through repetition, challenge, and gradual growth.
Education conditions task-doers Schools train us to avoid failure and execute predefined tasks — but real life is the world of problems, where solutions must be invented.
Problems fuel progress At every level — personal, family, societal — frustrations spark innovation and creativity.
Optimism = the belief that all problems are solvable David Deutsch: failure = lack of knowledge, not fate. Agency + optimism = resilience and growth.
Creating systems = the highest expression of agency You don’t just act — you build environments where meaningful change becomes possible.
Caliber of personality defines the impact level of one’s agency: personal, familial, societal, or global.
⁠

The Agency Stack

📌 This is a visual summary of how agency builds from internal compass to action. Use it as a reference — full details are above!
⁠
ChatGPT Image May 30, 2025, 01_13_07 PM.png
⁠
⁠
Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.
Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (
CtrlP
) instead.