The biggest predictor of success actually has nothing to do with talent or baseline intelligence and everything to do with agency. Now, agency is something that’s been a bit of a buzzword on social media for a while now. People talking about what it means to be high agency, to be low agency.
In this video, I’m going to break down exactly why you want to become a more high agency individual, what the benefits are, and crucially, how you can actually be doing that. I’m going to be layering this all with neuroscience, and I really hope this helps.
Hey, I’m Aaron. I’m a second year undergraduate at the University of Cambridge. I post about neuroscience, learning science, productivity, and student life. It would mean the world if you could subscribe to my channel. I love posting these videos and there’s a whole archive of videos that I would love for you guys to go and watch.
As always, please give this video a little thumbs up and comment if you have any video suggestions. I’m going to get straight into things.
You are probably a low agency individual. That is not your fault. That is because the institutions that we have in place, things like schools and workplaces, they value compliance over initiative.
They value you being able to hear an instruction and execute that instruction, not hear an instruction and think about how you can improve it, how you can refine it, make it more individual to you and your working processes and then execute it. Right?
So they want you to take out that link in the chain. That link is what makes somebody high agency.
Being high agency is a combination of behaviors and mindset. And I’m going to start by going through what it means to be high agency before I then move on to what the actual benefits are and how you yourself can achieve them because I think it’s really important for you to actually understand what it is because a lot of people will skip over this step.
So they you don’t really know what it is that they’re talking about and how the tips that they’re giving you are going to actually help you. So that’s where we’re going to start.
First of all, people who are high agency take ownership over problems. Even if something is not necessarily their problem, they still feel as though they have ownership over it and therefore that they should be implementing strategies to make sure that they are sort of tackling that particular problem. They’re not shy from solving problems is the big thing here.
Secondly, and really importantly, people who are high agency have got an internal bias towards action. They don’t want to plan things for the sake of planning. They might make a plan, but then they execute it, right?
They’re not constantly refining plans and tips. They are actually going out there testing ideas, not being afraid to see ideas publicly fail.
And that is something that is really simultaneously hard and difficult. Those are synonyms. Simultaneously hard and easy at the same time nowadays because you have got access to social media.
You’ve got access to people all around the world who actually don’t know who you are that you can use as a testing ground for all of your ideas by posting on LinkedIn, by posting on Instagram, on X, Twitter, wherever it might be.
you can actually iterate a lot faster than people in previous generations could. Yes, it is still scary, but I still think the barrier to being able to iterate and test has lowered. So, I think you should be taking advantage of that.
Thirdly, people who are higher agency will be more resourceful generally. They will look beyond constraints. If it feels like they’re hitting a brick wall, hitting a barrier, they’ll think, okay, how can I jump over this wall?
Not just maybe I need a completely different plan so I don’t hit it whatsoever. They tend to be a little craftier.
But what brings all of this together is the people who are high agency fundamentally have got an internal locus of control.
Now what that means is people who are high agency believe that it is their own action. So internal the things that they do that influence their outcomes.
Now people who have an external locus of control on the other hand they believe that their outcomes are influenced by luck and by circumstance. So the actions that they take do not have direct influence over what happens in their life.
You want to be thinking about the consequences of your own actions always. Your actions are what define your outcome. That is the mindset of a high agency individual.
Now there are two reasons why being high agency is a fundamentally brilliant predictor of success.
The first is that opportunity will always flow to the first movers. If you put yourself out there, even if your skill set is slightly lower than somebody else, if that other person didn’t put themselves out there, then they’re not going to be able to be matched with this opportunity because nobody knows that they have a better skill set than you.
You want to be putting yourself out there. You want to be taking the initiative that allows you to access these opportunities.
And now the point is once you access these opportunities because of the fact that you have as a high agency individual a bias towards taking action you’re going to be able to learn very very quickly and actually you’re going to be acquiring skills so much faster than the average individual that very quickly even if there were people with higher skill sets than you previously you’re going to overtake them because you’re the one taking action because you’re the one who is iterating testing trying new things and that allows you to pick up skills super super quickly and then access even more opportunity.
So you can see how this is a process that really builds upon itself in this positive reinforcement loop.
So you understand what being high agency is and you understand why it is a good predictor of success.
How can you actually become more high agency?
Because it does seem like a bit of an abstract concept and to that degree it kind of is. And so you might find this answer quite unsatisfactory because the real answer as to how do I become high agency is you simply start doing things.
You start doing things before you feel ready because you’re never going to feel ready.
Number one, and number two, there is real benefit in learning through discomfort.
When you don’t necessarily feel ready to do something, you’re going to be more open to failure, more open to taking risks because you don’t have as significant a pressure on your shoulders where you’re thinking, “Oh, I’m meant to be good at this. I need to perform 100%.”
And that can be quite a weight. It can make you feel very paralyzed. And that’s where procrastination can sneak in.
But if you’re just allowing yourself to try, if you’re just knowing, okay, I’m not quite ready for this, but I’m going to give it a go anyway, then you’ve got so much more of an upside.
And yes, it’s quite a significant mindset shift, and it can be quite hard to actually implement.
But one thing that I find really, really useful for doing this is when I catch myself thinking, oh, um, I I should I be doing this? Uh, can I do this?
I completely reframe that. It’s not should I do that? It’s not can I do this. It’s how can I do this? It’s what is the best way of me doing this.
So now the non-negotiable is that I am going to be doing that action. The question is not should I or shouldn’t I do it. No, I know I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it. That is a prerequisite. I don’t even have to think about that.
The real question is how am I going to be doing it? How can I optimize this process? How can I derive the most enjoyment? How can I really reach my goals?
So the action becomes completely non-negotiable. It is how you complete that action that you want to be questioning and thinking about and making that little switch in your mind.
That is really how you begin to bridge the gap between being a low agency individual to becoming a high agency individual.
And the more you do that, the more you will be high agency and the more benefits you’re going to be able to derive.
That is all for this video. I hope this has helped. I hope you kind of understand a little bit more about what it means to be high agency versus low agency.
If you do have any questions, then let me know in the comments.