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How to Be More Agentic

usefulfictions.substack.com

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Re: How to Be More Agentic

#71

Post by prepend »

Podgajski wrote: post #8
yamrzou wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can directly control the amount of luck you receive: “Your Luck Surface Area, is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you're passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated.” How to increase your luck surface area (2010) — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25968751

The very definition of the word luck goes against what you’re saying. “success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions.” This is a saying that sounds good, but makes no sense. For example, how do you change your luck of getting a coin to flip 90% of the time on tails? So you would say that one was lucky if they flipped a coin 10 times and nine times out of 10 It landed on tails w…

You can’t control the outcome of the coin flip, but you can control how many times you flip the coin.

Increasing the surface area of luck is about fostering opportunities to flip a coin

Just simple stuff like showing up to work every day. Going to social events. Networking. Taking classes. These will increase the opportunities you have to flip the coin.

Thinking there’s a fixed number of flips in life is false and really a poor way of thinking.

Re: How to Be More Agentic

#72

Post by fwipsy »

SeanAnderson wrote: post #70

Is agency closely related to self-confidence? Most of the points on this list seemed related to that. Not the "don't work too hard" bit, but the rest seem in the same ballpark.

I think the connotations are a little different. Self-confidence can include a sort of complacency (confidence in what you're currently doing), whereas agency seems to be more a will to figure things out, whatever it takes.

Re: How to Be More Agentic

#73

Post by Sol- »

SeanAnderson wrote: post #70

Is agency closely related to self-confidence? Most of the points on this list seemed related to that. Not the "don't work too hard" bit, but the rest seem in the same ballpark.

I wondered the same. Seems very difficult for a person with low self-confidence to act on these recommendations.

Re: How to Be More Agentic

#75

Post by lo_zamoyski »

steveBK123 wrote: post #33
nick__m wrote: post #20

Assume everything is learnable This made me think of late grandmother who used to say : "c'est faite par du mondes" which roughly expand to "a person did/learned/discovered that so there is no a prioi reason that I cannot do so myself". That's the greatest value she passed unto me. When I feel that I cannot do something, I think about that phrase and persevere.

I actually work for a guy like this now and at first I didn't quite get what he was doing, but I really like it now. He comes from a non-technical background but can code enough to be dangerous now. He loves talking to experts in every facet of what we do, and just start from the most basic foundational questions. He has absolutely no ego about embarrassing himself by the basics of questions he asks and no shame abou…

Yes, pride is the biggest obstacle to growth. It prevents you from making our needs known, because it means making an admission that you lack something (like knowledge or understanding, in this case). It means being honest about what you are (humility), revealing your deficits. And we all have deficits. We all have lack. Love is about seeking and receiving what you lack (eros), and giving to those who lack what they seek (agape).

So what does this tell us, this tendency toward pride? I means many of us spend a horrifying amount of time posing, pretending, feigning worth we don't actually have, in order to appear to be something we are not, because we think this will get us things we couldn't by being honest. In order words, we're liars, fraud, and cheats. We lie to get things we know, or least believe, we do not deserve, through false advertising. And we fear being belittled and ridiculed and put down, or losing or losing something. We shirk responsibility this way. We confuse purity with a kind of "cleanliness". We want to appear clean, but become impure and corrupt in doing so.

The choice between pride and humility is, I think, the basic decision in life one must make, and keep making, and it can be difficult as the world does not make it easy to prefer what is good. It seems to want to reward you for pretense, and punish you for honesty and the truth. That's why you also need courage, the courage to surrender to the consequences, of doing the right thing and being humble, and embrace them. You cannot control anything but your actions within your limits. You need to be able to accept just but painful outcomes gladly, and suffer the injustices. The inability to suffer, to suffer injustice, is the gateway to pride, and pride comes before the fall, before death and stagnation. You get further in life by suffering and moving forward, suffering and moving forward, suffering and moving forward.[0] There is no life in you otherwise. There is no love in you otherwise.

[0] This is also why the Via Crucis is so powerful. Life is not a party or a pleasure garden. It's a struggle that ends in death. The only choice is one between miserable comfort and wasteful decay on the one hand, and struggle, suffering, and total exhaustion on the other. The Via Crucis, a road full of suffering that passes through death, at least ends in final liberation. But that is the price, the narrow gate. Most choose the wide gate of miserable self-preservation, something they will loose in the end anyway.

Re: How to Be More Agentic

#76

Post by broscillator »

Podgajski wrote: post #65
broscillator wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might also be that you find that lottery ticket and don't play it, because you believe you have no agency to do anything with the money anyway. > Just like you cannot change the fact if a coin lands on heads or tails. You can, just throw the coin again until it lands the way you want.

> You can, just throw the coin again until it lands the way you want. Oh, I didn’t realize life is that simple. I can just keep doing things until they turn out the way I want.

There's a glimpse there, beneath the deprecating sarcasm, of beginning to understand the point of the article.

Re: How to Be More Agentic

#77

Post by ilaksh »

I feel like what I actually need to have more agency is just money or rich connections that want to give me money. Since I'm broke, not very healthy, and isolated, I am just trying to get by. My ambition (in some sense) is probably about a billion times greater than my means, however.

Re: How to Be More Agentic

#78

Post by motohagiography »

So refreshing, and timely. Diving into the moat of low status is a huge multiplier. Courting rejection is a super power because when success is explosive and non-linear, it favours the players who make the most attempts, and not the hardest ones.

Timely because it's not just winter, I hit a really hard personal low over the last few months. This article reminded me that I do hard, scary, and difficult things, and my lows get none of the consolations of mediocrity. I do them because once you are good at hard things, you get untouchable confidence founded on genuine humility of having crossed the moat of low status, which translates into other parts of your life. The lows are when you lose sight of that, and thank you for helping to put this back in perspective.

Re: How to Be More Agentic

#80

Post by brnt »

steveBK123 wrote: post #33
nick__m wrote: post #20

Assume everything is learnable This made me think of late grandmother who used to say : "c'est faite par du mondes" which roughly expand to "a person did/learned/discovered that so there is no a prioi reason that I cannot do so myself". That's the greatest value she passed unto me. When I feel that I cannot do something, I think about that phrase and persevere.

I actually work for a guy like this now and at first I didn't quite get what he was doing, but I really like it now. He comes from a non-technical background but can code enough to be dangerous now. He loves talking to experts in every facet of what we do, and just start from the most basic foundational questions. He has absolutely no ego about embarrassing himself by the basics of questions he asks and no shame abou…

> You also start to realize how narrow and sometimes shallow expertise is

Thanks for putting this in such clear words.

What I would really like to learn is not to be ticked off about seeing this. I get annoyed when somebody is pawning their expertise of as something grand while I think it's quite limited, and often, of course, so limited that they can't even conceive of the space outside their limits. I find my natural reaction overly negative and just not productive.

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