Agency

Feburary 18, 2025

I used to think that success was solely a result of willpower—that achieving your goals was just a matter of raw grit. But the reality is that willpower fluctuates. Some days, you feel like crap and just can't seem to give a damn about anything. Other days you are full of energy and motivation. It's unreliable.

Agency is different. It isn't just about resisting bad habits in the moment; it's about being in control of your life.

A year ago I could barely run a mile. This past Sunday, I ran my first marathon. The difference wasn't willpower—it was agency.

Agency vs. Willpower

Recently, the above-pictured tweet blew up on the AI and tech side of twitter. Paul Graham found it so profound, he had this to say about it.

This may be the most inspiring sentence I've ever read. Which is interesting because it's not phrased in the way things meant to be inspiring usually are.

Upon first reading, it might sound like agency is just a synonym for willpower. There's a very important distinction. Willpower is your "mental strength," how much effort you can put into a task. You apply it on a micro level: reading through a boring part of a book or resisting eating junk food. Agency, on the other hand, operates on a macro level. It's the ability to act independently, to have control, to break the cycles of bad habits and to create new good ones.

Humans are inherently habitual. We tend to stick with familiar behaviors, even if they are ultimately making us unhappy. In the moment, we can use our willpower to stop a bad habit, like putting your phone down mid doom scroll. But to actually change your habits requires more than surface level self-control. It requires agency; structuring your life in such a way that makes achieving your goals as easy as possible.

Finding agency

A couple years ago, after graduating from college, I moved to Portland, Oregon, with my girlfriend. We packed up all of our stuff and drove over 1000 miles from Boulder, Colorado, to our new apartment in Portland. It was a radical shift. I went from living with dozens of friends, to living in a city I had never been to and knew no one.

Between social isolation, difficulties adapting to post-grad life, and Portland's gloomy weather, I quickly found myself in a rut. For the first time in my life, I felt deeply dissatisfied with myself. I was 30 pounds overweight, wasted much of my free time playing video games, barely read, and was making little effort outside of work to learn or advance my career. I knew I was wasn't living up to my potential, but I wasn't even sure what my potential was.

Things only started changing when, while stewing in my dissatisfaction, I asked myself a simple question: What version of myself would I look up to the most?

The answer jumped out at me, as if it had been there the whole time just waiting to be called upon. It was simple, but I had to admit it to myself: I wanted to be somebody who was hardworking, didn't waste time, woke up early, worked out, ate healthily, treated other people kindly, and was always learning and growing as a professional and a person.

To be fair, most people probably want to be something like this. The more important question was the next question I asked myself—one that reminded me of the tweet above: What would that person do every day?

The person I imagined was a version of myself with much greater agency. They would wake up early, exercise, work, study machine learning and do side-projects in their free time, and read every night. With the exception of work, I was doing none of these things.

There was only one remaining question: Why am I not doing those things? Why do I have it in my head that I can't do those things? I didn't have a good answer. That's when I realized that by not doing those things, I was choosing to be something other than what I wanted to be. To be the person I wanted to be required greater agency than I had been practicing.

Applying agency

Obviously, this revelation didn't fix all of my problems overnight—quitting bad habits, especially addicting ones like playing video games, is difficult and takes time. What it did do, however, was change the way I thought about my shortcomings. When I found myself falling into old patterns, I realized it wasn't due to lack of discipline, but lack of agency.

With this new perspective, I began experimenting with different ways to build agency into my daily life. After much trials and error, I've zeroed in on a small set of daily practices. Together, they form a system that gives me greater insight into my life, and thus, greater agency. Here are the three most important.

1. Habit tracking

Every day I track a small number of habits, such as exercising, reading, and my waking and bed time. This data is essential. Without it, you are always just a few days away from accidentally quitting a good habit. It forces you to be conscious of your own actions, thereby increasing your agency.

2. Writing

In today's age of overconsumption, it's rare that we give ourselves time to think. Writing offers that space. It allows you to articulate your thoughts and feelings in a way that can be hard to find elsewhere.

3. Defining a routine

One of the first things I implemented was a clearly defined routine, and it made an immediate difference. When you write down exactly when, where, and what you should be doing each day, you're much more likely to follow through. This doesn't mean scheduling every single minute of your day, but establishing a framework that keeps you on track.

Life now

It has been a long journey, but I've finally found a system that works for me. In less than two years, I've ran over 1000 miles, read dozens of books, and am generally much more satisfied in my life. Importantly, it doesn't take willpower for me to wake up everyday and run, or to read before bed, or to program for many hours a day. I do them all happily, but only because I made them part of my identity and my habits.