people overcomplicate or mythicize "agency" -- that's bad for the world, so I idiot-proofed it:
being agentic looks like:
noticing “Someone should really do this (very useful) thing”
noticing “Hmm no one’s doing it / Do I know someone else who could do this?”
“I can do something about it!”
“I go do it / I did it! click here to see my learnings.”
rinse and repeat.get your reps in.
every hour, every quarter, every chapter of your life.
someone described as “high agency” just does this at a higher frequency / intensity, or harder problem-selection.
~~~
that’s it.
stop waiting for all the traffic lights to turn green, you can just do things, get your reps in.
for example, teach someone for 3mins what it would take them 3hrs.
for example, proactively taking pictures when the event organizers are too busy, anticipating pictures are useful.
for example, noticing there’s no AGI-preparedness university group in your school and inserting yourself to start one.
for example, proactively starting a better vegan protein-bar company because most protein bars suck.
for example, noticing not enough people are communicating about risks from advanced AI so you hit record and make videos that explain AI security gaps.
this is battle-tested myself btw / there’s skin-in-the-game to my 4-step plan:
that’s how i started Caltech AI Alignment without being a caltech student.
that’s how i think about being proactively useful in running my org.
that’s how u sharpen your instinct of doing useful things / break the cycle of doing useless things.
that’s how u stop rationalising yourself out of courage to do-the-thing; stop planning to learn to ride a bike, struggle thru riding the damn bike!
that’s how u go ideally build something the world needs (go above ‘build something people want” — many wants are insignificant or useless).
also, skip reading self-help books about “how to be agentic” and just do-the-thing.
get your agency reps in.
i drove 6hrs from the bay, crashed at friend A’s couch, wrestled with Wordpress to ship a good-enough website in 6hrs, borrowed easel pad+stand and foldable table, secured friend B from UCLA as technical facilitator, called friend C with access to free college-library-printing to help print a stack of 500 b&w flyers for free, asked friend D where the highest-foot-traffic intersection at caltech is. showed up over 2 days, 4hrs each; got 1 parking fine but eh, we won.
AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix.
Cross-posted from Good Structures.
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