You Can Just Do Things - by Cate Hall and Sasha Chapin

Agency is the capacity to both see and act on degrees of freedom that other people overlook.
It’s being able to see choices where others only see constraints.
Hidden doors in the walls of life, and the courage to walk through those doors, to defy the forces keeping us normal.

Rather than avoiding failure and rejection, agentic people see these as the inevitable costs of personal progress, and opportunities for learning.
Rather than assuming that everything worthwhile has been done already, they assume that many great ventures are postponed out of inertia and fear.
Rather than taking it for granted that the experts have it under control, they expect that something more can be done, and that they can be the ones to do it.
They choose to believe that everything is learnable, even traits and skills often believed to be innate, like charisma or curiosity.

Agentic people take responsibility.
They act on the world, rather than the world acting on them.
It’s an antidote to feeling stuck.

Know what you want out of life.
You’re allowed to skip all the artificial steps standing between you and it.
Work on your goal as directly as possible, doing only what matters to advance.

Defeating addiction requires solutions that work when you’re at your laziest and weakest.

We defend the self-image we currently have.
That means shutting out hard questions.

Senior associates slowly sank under the weight of their increasingly cushy lifestyles.

Open your mind, and it might also trigger your inner defense mechanisms, kicking up all sorts of apparently reasonable objections.

Answer a related question:
What consequences am I trying to prevent by living in a way I don’t like?

What values do you claim publicly but violate in private?

Which causes do you earnestly believe you care about, but never devote time or money to?

Which talent or goal that you “plan” to pursue have you made zero progress on in the last year?

Self-deception requires more mental energy than telling the truth.

We overrate the downside of change.
We underrate how strategic acts of quitting can set us up for a much better life.

The most reliable way forward is to drop identity altogether.
Have selective amnesia.
Imagine you’ve been parachuted into your present life as a stranger.
Whoever was here before you certainly made a mess of things, but now someone more capable is here to take over.

Improve the situation:
In movies, the characters aren’t allowed to communicate well.
Name the problems out loud.
Break the fourth wall of the real, underlying issue.
Dialogue that would make for bad movies, but good living:
“Every time we have plans to hang out one-on-one, you invite someone else to join us — is that intentional?”
“I’ve been feeling a low-level tension between us, like maybe we’re quietly annoyed at each other but trying to stay polite. Is that just me?”

Staying silent rather than naming an issue?
That’s a belief that by raising the problem, we’ll be making it into a big deal.
But problems that seem small are often indicators of more serious issues.
In that case, not addressing the apparently small problem exerts a psychological toll on you.

Before you even name an issue, ask yourself:
Is this really the important issue to name?
Or is this a manifestation of something deeper that would be even more powerful to tackle?
If you were an audience member watching the movie, what would you be screaming at yourself to say?

In the world of movie logic, most people who raise issues are jerks.
If you raise an issue, people may assume you are that jerk.
You are seen as a potential attacker, so they defend.
Ask yourself if you’re really trying to solve the problem, or if you just want to inflict some punishment.

We all know the itchy feeling that arises when nobody in an interaction is really being sincere.

Raise the issue before you have a solution in mind.

The length of time spent practicing does not predict competence.
Average effectiveness of therapists declined over time as they gained experience.

We get in our own way with a low-curiosity, high-ego mindset.

Get good, solid information about how you’re perceived: collect anonymous feedback. True criticism that allows you to improve.
When you get feedback, it’s worth asking yourself:
Will this feedback help me tackle one of my priorities in life?
Or is it just the kind of self-improvement exercise that plays into the fantasy of becoming a perfect human being?

Fear of looking weird to other people.
This causes us to underrate the effectiveness of unusual ways of acting.
Those who are unbothered by seeming unusual, accomplish great things.
Our best options are socially unusual.
Even if our tribe turns against us, we can find another one.
Societies reward social boldness when it’s performed skilfully.
Embarrassment is the feeling of breaking the rules.

Gain an edge by jumping into the “Moat of Low Status,” enduring some painful clumsiness so you can do interesting things.
Play games you probably won’t win.
Embrace being temporarily low in social status.
Look stupid or talentless or corny.
Fear of low status keeps many people from pursuing their dreams.
They would rather be hypothetically good — talented in their imaginary world — than be bad on the way to becoming good.
We often turn instead to theoretical learning, even in domains where experiential learning is obviously faster.

On your first day of dance class, you don’t know how to move your body.
Isn’t that exhilarating? You don’t know how to move your body!
This thing you’ve been lugging around is now a whole new vehicle.

As we get older, our lives become increasingly routine, if we let them.
We get more constrained and repetitive in our actions, and, as a result, our days become less stimulating.
We barely notice life happening because we become so good at walking the Path.

When you tackle a new challenge, you may find yourself in a state of heightened awareness.

Always be looking for new moats to jump into.
This continual, self-inflicted humiliation is one thing that separates the good from the great.

Make audacious requests.
Generate social friction.
Violate expectations.

If you don’t routinely encounter rejection, you are not asking for enough.
I hadn’t turned down a request from my students yet, which meant they weren’t being annoying enough.
When you tell ambitious people that being annoying is part of their job, they take to it like professionals.

Smoothness begets smoothness.
The best salespeople are nonchalant.
Self-assured people simply act as if they walk through a world of friends, and this is typically a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“I’m not trying to convince you to change your mind — but could you tell me why it’s a no for you?”
Don’t run, ask why.

Be open about your failures, rather than trying to hide them — openly discuss what you’ve done wrong, and what you’ve learned.

See traits as skills.
Supposedly fixed attributes, like charm and industriousness, are skills that can be learned.
Attributes are nothing more than labels we attach to clumps of behaviors and skills that we can learn.

Courage means facing fears.
Intelligent risk assessment combined with emotional regulation.

Social attunement requires strong perspective-taking ability, getting out of our heads to consider other people’s feelings and experiences.

We say to ourselves:
“I’m such a fuck-up,”
instead of:
“Oh, I have this cluster of fuck-up behaviors; I wonder what it would be like to learn an alternate path.”
Or we say:
“He’s so confident, unlike me,”
rather than:
“He’s learned how to have a captivating social presence — maybe I could, too.”

What kinds of things do reliable people do that I could adopt?
Reliability is made of micro-actions: keeping a calendar, following up on emails, setting reminders, learning how to structure commitments so they don’t overwhelm you.
For some people, these micro-actions do seem to come more naturally than for others.
But they are clearly learnable behaviors.

You don’t need to develop every positive attribute you wish you had.

Develop the freedom to make your world — including you — more like you would like.

I didn’t “need to” improve on this score.
That whole time, no one put a gun to my head and commanded me to.
I simply made life harder for myself every day by failing to learn how to do it.
You’re always free to stand on principle this way.
The cost is just that it will require you putting in multiples more effort in other ways in order to produce the same results.