Become High Agency

How to Fix Your Life and Become Unstoppable

By Matt Knee

Introduction

Are you sick of living life on autopilot? Do you want to become the kind of person that always gets what they want? If you’ve arrived here you’re probably familiar with the concept of high agency (if not, read on). I believe it is the single most important skill you can develop as a human, and anyone can learn it. 

Want to be more respected? Become high agency. Want to be more attractive? Women and men alike both love competence because it signals “high value.” Become high agency. Want to get what you want out of life? Become high agency. 

Now, am I the most high agency person alive? No, but I built a company, with no funding, to the INC5000, helped thousands of startups, exited for millions, wrote a book, developed a productivity system, created a business operating system and built a life that I think is pretty great.

I think high agency will make our world better. I’ve always been obsessed with understanding high performance behavior and I think teaching it is the highest leverage thing I can do. So, as is said, “the coach isn’t always the best player,” but I do think I’m onto something here if you’ll give me a few minutes. This information could change your life. 

Agency is a huge topic, we’re basically trying to understand and codify human accomplishment and effectiveness. I’ve tried my best to condense this into something as short and actionable as possible. Read carefully though, some paragraphs cover a concept that took myself and others a lifetime to learn!

What is High Agency?

The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me. – Ayn Rand

High agency is accomplishing what you intend regardless of obstacles, resources or mental state. Now, there are a bunch of definitions of high agency going around but I’ve thought about this a lot and that’s the best definition that encompasses everything I’ve learned about agency over the years. If you want to simplify it even more: High agency is how reliably you get what you want.

The writer George Mack helped popularize the phrase “high agency” in his 2025 essay, crediting Eric Weinstein and Tim Ferriss for the initial idea. I wrote about agency being a “Founder Superpower” in my 2019 book Startups Made Simple (I’m pretty sure I heard it from Eric Weinstein as well, though I don’t recall).

You can see I listed it as “Superpower #8” – I’ve since upgraded it to the single most important superpower (and not just for startup founders).

“Agency” means “the condition of being in action or operation” so taking action is by far the most important part of becoming high agency. 

High agency means you happen to life, life doesn’t happen to you. You are the hero and author of your own story and not a supporting character in someone else’s. You act intentionally, independently and without permission. Or as the kids say, which I love: “you can just do things.” Usually, nobody is stopping you and those that try can be surprisingly easy to ignore, move around, or if it comes to it, push aside. 

Over the years, I’ve asked people to describe the most high agency person they can think of in popular fiction and two names consistently come up: James Bond and John McClane. Now, I know these guys kill a lot of people and that’s not exactly what I’m advocating here! 

But, if you look at our definition of high agency, you can see that both of them always accomplish what they intend, regardless of obstacles, resources or mental state. In the worst possible circumstances, with little or no help, with everyone against them, they always find a way to accomplish their goal. This is why everyone loves them so much – they’re unstoppable! Think of any popular hero in real life or fiction and you’ll see they will likely fit the high agency stereotype. 

I think stories about heroes are actually intended to teach us to be more high agency. Now, for us mere non-fiction mortals, we can take these examples and apply them to our daily lives. Yes, maybe we didn’t get the best resources in life, the best genetics, family, money, looks, power or whatever. But there’s no rule that says we need those things to take action and keep going until we get what we want. 

It may be harder for us but, frankly, that just makes it that much more impressive and confidence-building when we “just do things” and get what we want. It’s massively more satisfying getting what you want without the free ride of money or power or whatever.

It’s also important to understand that agency is a spectrum. Some people have basically zero agency, but we can build agency over time. Or we can lose it due to poisonous mental programming, learned helplessness or worse. 

Why High Agency Matters Now

Lack of agency is likely behind every major societal and personal problem we have. You name the issue and I can usually cite lack of agency as the underlying problem: the “competency crisis,” the “meaning crisis”, device and other addictions, political/bureaucratic incompetence, most mental and physical health problems. The list is endless. We’re actually living in a low agency crisis! 

Human agency, I believe, was getting better the past few centuries as we broke out of the slave or serf mindset and had access to better education and opportunities. But now I believe it’s actually getting worse.

Imagine if we could flip a switch and give every human the high agency skillset (backed by good ethics). Is there any doubt in your mind that this would dramatically improve almost every imaginable aspect of living on Earth? We’d probably be living in a paradise and be to Mars and beyond. This literally is a skill that could save the world. 

It all starts with entropy. If you don’t act, life drifts towards decay. So this is the number one problem: complacency. The mindset that someone else will take care of things and that our existing lives can’t be changed, that life doesn’t need to be consistently worked on. You actively need to push back against entropy or things will continue to get worse, just by default. This applies to your personal life, business, government, everything. 

And you can see why entropy is setting in: AI and the internet have pretty much solved how to do things. Short of building nuclear reactors, practically every human can look up the basics of how to do almost anything that matters for them: improving your skills, starting a business, getting in shape, beautifying your environment, improving your relationships. etc. An AI can give you a personalized tutorial on how to do it and you could start working on it today. 

So, how is not the problem. Knowledge is not the bottleneck. So what is the problem? I think it’s several things: 

1. Passive mindset. Most people go along with life and never really develop agency. Life sort of happens to them, they don’t think they can “just do things” and they don’t. Simple as that. 
2. Lack of vision. People are not thinking big enough, or at all. I see so much device addiction (this includes TV watching) that there’s not one single minute of reflection on where you want your life to go. You could literally waste decades scrolling, watching videos and TV. 
3. Lack of focus. The device addiction has destroyed the ability to focus on something for an extended amount of time. And honestly, many things in life take a long time to learn and master. Something as simple as a handstand can take years to master!
4. Analysis paralysis. Because there is so much information and knowledge, there is the paralysis of choice. There are so many options on what to do a lot of people choose to do nothing. This is obviously related to lack of focus as well. 
5. Lack of action. This is the big one. Procrastination and all of the above contribute to this. Without vision you have no motivation. Without focus things don’t get done. Analysis paralysis has you frozen. Then you give up on trying. 
6. Lack of resilience. Even if you take action, many times your actions will fail, especially on more difficult goals or projects. Being able to bounce back from those failures and try again is a critical aspect of high agency. 
7. Nihilism. The belief that none of it matters. Usually as a combination of many or all of the factors above. Usually it’s a cope: if I don’t believe it matters then I won’t be judged on my lack of results in life. Terribly poisonous mindset. 

Worry not, each of these problems has a solution, probably easier than you think. And by learning to become high agency, you’re not only going to make your life dramatically better, but you’re going to future-proof yourself. 

In a world of AI taking over everything, the most valuable humans around are the ones who can actually do things and make things happen. This may be the most valuable skill of all because AI will actually give high agency humans even more leverage. 

Before I show you how, you need to understand the weapon you will be holding after you become high agency. 

The Dark Side of High Agency

I want to be clear about high agency: it can be a weapon and used for terrible things. Being unstoppable is great if you’re an ethical person and have good intentions. But most of the worst people in history have been high agency. Stalin, Mao, Hitler were all high agency! They had their vision and imposed it on their world. Every powerful politician, for better or worse, is likely a high agency person. 

So you can actually become dangerous as you increase your agency and that’s something to keep in mind. The New York Times called out the rising popularity of high agency in Silicon Valley [1] and made some similar points, especially how some can engage in “vicious creativity.” 

Being aware of the dark side of agency is also important for your safety and wellbeing. In business and in life, you will come across a lot of different personalities. I’ve learned over the years that if I detect a whiff of high agency in someone, maybe a competitor, an angry neighbor or whomever, then I know to think deeply about how I engage them. Like I said, agency is a weapon and you won’t want someone, especially someone without ethics, to be at your neck, they can possibly ruin your life. This is important to learn so you don’t cross the wrong person or at least think deeply about what you’re getting into. Frankly, once you develop your agency, people may think the same about crossing you!

High agency also has some other bad side effects. For one, as you increase your agency, you may begin to think of all problems as solvable, and perhaps by you alone! You may have encountered this type of person. You tell them some issue you’re having and immediately they go into problem-solving mode and start working on fixing it, right now, immediately. Don’t get me wrong, our planet is better off due to people like this. But if you have this mindset, then your baseline level of stress may be higher than the average person just because the world will never run out of problems to solve.

Finally, I should mention extreme stubbornness. Thinking you are unstoppable is incredibly valuable but it can backfire if you take on a task or project that is simply too much or perhaps not solvable. Not knowing when to change strategies is actually a weakness so it’s important to keep in mind. Don’t spend years on a fruitless endeavor. Remember, the definition is accomplishing what you intend, not spending decades without progress. Short of solving incredibly hard problems like quantum mechanics or world peace, make sure you’re not spinning your wheels or just being stubborn on something that is simply not working. A high agency person needs to know when to change direction or strategy. 

Where Low Agency Comes From

To understand how to become high agency, let’s find out where low agency comes from. The short answer is that it was probably beaten out of you (not literally, though that’s also true for some) and then it became comfortable. 

The point is very few people, if any, were born with low agency. Babies see something they want and just grab it or eat it. They’ll grab it out of a stranger’s hand. They’ll take what they want and if you don’t give it to them they will throw an epic fit until you do. I believe this is why many high agency people aren’t even necessarily that smart. They just know what they want and go after it, like a child in many cases. In fact, as we’ll see, many intelligent people are low agency because they overthink everything and never take action. High intelligence and high agency is an incredibly powerful combination. 

So what happened to your agency? First, you were probably punished for trying. You asked a stupid question in class and everyone laughed. You tried something and failed miserably or looked silly. Your parents and others told you that you’re not supposed to think like that, or to want certain things and to be “realistic.” 

Over time, like an electric fence, with thousands of little “shocks” on your attempts at doing things, it got to the point where you didn’t try or even think you should attempt things. Recall the famous parable of the baby elephant in the circus trying to escape the chain around its leg, finding it hopeless. That same elephant as an adult, who could easily break it, never tries because it learned that it’s useless to try and never challenged that belief. 

Next, low agency probably became comfortable. Because you don’t try things and your life doesn’t improve much, you can have low expectations, blame the world, “veg out” and let life happen to you. This is what’s known as “learned helplessness.” Some people even secretly like this (even if they won’t admit it to themselves): it gets them out of responsibility and nobody will expect anything from them. I know this is hard to believe for some, but this is a real concept called “secondary gain,” originally attributed to people with health issues that don’t want their problems fixed, because their problems give them some actual benefits (e.g. they get out of work or responsibilities and can stay in bed all day). 

Social norms also trap a lot of people. Their culture, ideology or even their friend group doesn’t like people acting without permission. Don’t rock the boat. Do what you’re told or expected to do. This is why I’m not a huge fan of the growing Stoicism revival. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve read and love Seneca. I believe that the self-mastery and other aspects of Stoicism are very valuable but a lot of the philosophy can be interpreted as accepting things as they are and not fighting back against that. 

Even worse, some people adopt low agency because it makes them think they’re smarter than everyone else, while never having to attempt anything. Because most things anyone tries will fail at first, they can always tell people “I told you so” when something inevitably fails. This is a disastrous combination of low agency and self-congratulation, an absolutely terrible mindset. This is the classical archetype of the “smart but unsuccessful” person that is so common that it’s practically a proverb at this point.

Low Agency in the Wild

We want to be able to identify low agency in the wild and frankly, within ourselves (even the best of us can have bouts of low agency). Either to change our behavior or to help others become more high agency. You probably also want to avoid people with low agency as employees, friends, teachers, your elected officials or whomever, so being able to identify them is valuable – and pretty easy. 

Low Agency behavior:

• Excuses (not taking responsibility or accountability for anything).
• Blaming (not holding themselves accountable; never admitting fault).
• Forgetful (not prioritizing important things like appointments, birthdays, etc., despite everyone on earth having a clock and reminding device aka a smartphone in their pocket).
• Low resilience (gives up on the first try, can’t tolerate any stress).
• Incompetent (not able to get things done properly).
• Low impulse control (cannot control base desires and emotions).
• Passive aggressive (purposely incompetent or slows things down as a power trip).

Low Agency language:

• “That’s not my job” (so anything outside your lane becomes a problem you ignore).
• “That’s just how I was raised” (learned helplessness).
• “I forgot” (you don’t write things down or set reminders).
• “I can’t deal with this” (poor resilience).
• “Nobody taught me how” (no self-mastery). 
• “I should…” (do or do not).

Agency example: 

Let’s use a health scare as an example. The doctor says your blood work is bad and you need to make changes or you’re heading for serious problems down the road (this could be anything: diabetes, high cholesterol or worse). Here’s how various levels of agency would respond:

• Low agency: Gets scared for maybe a week, might tell a few people about it. Takes whatever prescription the doctor gives them and changes nothing else (even though this medication causes them bad side effects). Eats the same food, skips exercise. Six months later the numbers are the same or worse. They say “it’s genetic, my dad had the same thing” and basically stop their meds and stop going to the doctor altogether because the appointments make them anxious. 
• Medium agency: Takes it seriously, Googles some stuff about it all. Starts walking, cuts out fast food, takes the medication. Life gets busy and in 6 months they’re 80% back to where they started. They go back to the doctor, gets lectured again and restarts the cycle. They know what to do but can’t make it stick. 
• High agency: Treats this like a challenge or a project. Gets a copy of the bloodwork and runs it through AI to research what actually moves each number and gets a second opinion. They get unpleasant side effects from the medication so they research a better alternative, send it to their doctor and get a new prescription that works for them. At home, they redesign their environment: clean out junk food in the kitchen, add some home gym equipment, research a simple workout plan, set a workout reminder and optimize their sleep environment. They stick with the plan and six months later the doctor notices the numbers are so good they may not need medication at all. A year later they’re in the best shape of their life and the so-called health scare is something that they’re now grateful for.

So notice these 3 responses to the exact same situation. The low agency response gets continuous decline in health, the medium agency response gets slightly better but it’s the high agency response that has taken a bad situation and turned it around to one of the best things that’s ever happened to them. This is the power of high agency. So let’s see how to build this in our own life. 

The Pillars of High Agency

A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time, most people don’t even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are. People have an enormous capacity to make things happen. A combination of self-doubt, giving up too early, and not pushing hard enough prevents most people from ever reaching anywhere near their potential. – Sam Altman

Let’s break down what high agency is from first principles. Think about what has to happen for you to get something you want (a goal): 

1. Mindset. You have to believe accomplishing this goal is possible and that you can do it. Very important. As we have gone over, many people simply don’t believe they can “just do things” so they don’t even try. 
2. Action. You have to take action. You commit to the goal, make a plan if necessary and do the work, even if you don’t always feel like it. 
3. Resilience. You have to keep going until you reach your goal. This can involve failing multiple times, changing strategies, and especially, not listening to all the people who tell you it can’t be done or that you should quit. This step is important as mastering it makes you unstoppable. 

To further make the point. Remember low agency? Basically take those pillars above and do the opposite: 

1. They don’t believe they can do things. 
2. They don’t take action. 
3. They give up easily.

So, as you can see, agency is trainable! Let’s go into each pillar. 

Pillar 1: Mindset

Mindset is the set of beliefs you hold about how things work. High agency isn’t actually just one belief, it’s a collection of them that runs in the background and shapes how you see the world and what you’re capable of.

As we went over, your beliefs were probably installed or at least heavily influenced by others: school, parents, past failures, etc. The good news is that you can simply change your beliefs to be more aligned with a high agency mindset. There are two major categories of beliefs you hold:

1. Worldview. Beliefs about the world and how it works. Does hard work pay off? Can humans change the world or is it “fixed”? Do only the rich get richer? 
2. Self-image. Beliefs about yourself, your identity. Am I deserving of getting what I want? Can I change how I am or is that fixed at birth? Can I get what I want?

Changing your beliefs is easier said than done of course, but it all can start by installing one core belief: that your actions can control what happens to you in life. This is called “locus of control“ and it has rock-solid science behind it [2]. 

People with an external locus of control believe that their life is the result of forces outside of them like luck, destiny or “just how things are.” People with an internal locus of control believe their actions control what happens to them in life, which is almost a perfect description of a high agency mindset. 

The results from long term studies are remarkable: people with an internal locus of control had much better health, wealth, relationships and mental wellbeing. Basically, a high agency mindset will get you massively better outcomes across the entire spectrum of life. 

Supporting Beliefs

If “your actions control your life” is the core belief of high agency, here are the major supporting beliefs and traits that further ingrain high agency into your life.

• Accountability. Take 100% responsibility for your life and its outcomes. You may not have been given the best opportunities in life but from here on out you will take responsibility for your mindset, actions and outcomes of your life. If you’re not accountable, you’ll tend to blame life or others for your outcomes. 
• Truth. A dedication to reality and the truth, not what you want to be true. If you can’t see what’s true, for example, if you think left is right, then you can’t make good decisions or think clearly. If your entire mindset is based on inaccurate beliefs then you’re never going to be able to navigate reality effectively. High agency people perceive reality correctly so they can think clearly and alter reality to their purposes. 
• Updating based on evidence. If truth is important to you, you will see what happens in life and update your beliefs accordingly. If something you believe always has a negative result then you probably should stop believing that. Do only the rich get richer? This is obviously false as there are millions of examples of poor becoming rich worldwide, and frankly, a destructive belief because it tells you there’s no point even trying. High agency people aren’t afraid to dismiss beliefs that are no longer serving them. This is the concept behind “strong beliefs, loosely held.” 
• Courage. Many people are simply afraid to try things. You can’t be afraid of your shadow or what others think. In reality, there are very few consequences from trying to do things and nobody is really in your way or even thinking about you. Feel the fear and do it anyway. 
• Disagreeability. Related to courage. Many times you have to simply ignore the chorus of humans who tell you things can’t be done and you shouldn’t bother to try. Humans are sort of hardwired to “agree with the tribe” (in the past, this helped humans cooperate and survive) so this one can be hard to master but offers huge benefits if you can ignore those that simply want you to conform.
• Reality is negotiable. Just because there are certain “rules” that society or others have created doesn’t mean you have to follow all of them. Sometimes they can be bent or ignored (not saying to break the law, but things like “you shouldn’t rock the boat” in certain cultures or groups are the types of rules I’m talking about here). 
• Commitment to excellence. “Excellence in all things” is a mantra of many high performance people and organizations. High agency people don’t do shoddy work or half-ass things. They commit to excellence in all endeavors. This particular trait will make you extremely valuable. 

I know what you’re thinking: “Okay, I agree that better beliefs will probably give better outcomes in life, but how do I adopt these new beliefs?” Well, think about how your existing beliefs were installed. They were probably given to you when you were young and repeated or reinforced endlessly until they became second nature. This basically became a “script” you follow, the core psychological process running in the background. You’ve used this script to interpret everything and make sense of the world. The good news is, as we’ll see later, you can completely rewrite this script.

Pillar 2: Action

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You can have the highest agency beliefs on earth but it won’t amount to much if you don’t take action. Action is where the rubber meets the road. Action is the critical superpower that will make or break your life. Many of us live in our heads all day and have grand plans that go nowhere. There is way too much focus on making everything perfect before you can take action.

Action Killers

So if we know what we want and believe we can get it, what stops us from taking action? I think these will all sound familiar: 

• Lack of energy. Which usually comes from a lack of motivation (or poor health).
• Procrastination. Knowing you need to do something but not doing it. 
• No routine. Your day is managed chaos, no plan, no structure, things get done haphazardly. If you create a simple routine, your day becomes predictable and your work gets done on autopilot (saving you hours a day usually).
• Distraction or a lack of focus. Lack of focused action has reached epidemic levels in modern society. There are so many dopamine-fueled addictions, notifications, games, types of entertainment and other distractions that it’s amazing humans get anything done these days. Entire lives could be wasted entertaining yourself to death.

Action Rules

The good news is all of these have fairly simple solutions. I call these the Action Rules (from my productivity system Zorga) and they’re backed by science: 

1. Don’t think, just start. Lack of energy and motivation often comes from the mistaken belief that you need energy first, then you start. This is actually backwards! You start first, then the energy comes. The “don’t think” part is what cures procrastination. Don’t give your brain enough time to start procrastinating, so jump into the task without thinking and you clarify things along the way. Adopt this rule and watch your ability to take action skyrocket. Pick the task, don’t think about it and just get started. 
2. Create a daily routine. No, it doesn’t have to be the 20-step thing you see on social media. Just make a basic routine: wake, breakfast/supplements, exercise at this time, deep work at this time, shut down at this time (move all dopamine-fueled activities like scrolling or games to after your work is done, as a reward). Then set some reminders until it becomes second nature. 
3. Regular focused deep work. To smash lack of focus and distraction, your deep work time slot from your daily routine is where the magic happens. Make sure this slot is on your calendar or you have a reminder/alarm set. At that time, you will silence all devices, distractions, close the door, whatever you need to get to work and you will spend anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours on your goals and tasks. This is where you will get into the magical state of “flow” that makes even boring or dreaded tasks easier. Start with your highest priority task, “don’t think, just start” and go from there. Note if you have a job, this can be done after the workday if necessary. 

So with these 3 simple things, you will have smashed procrastination and lack of energy, structured your day and have turned action into a daily habit. I know it sounds almost too simple but start doing these 3 things for a few weeks and you will find yourself at the top 10% of humanity when it comes to taking action. I’ve done this for years and coached people on this and it works. Imagine your life in a few months with dozens of focused hours of work on your top goals.

After you start taking action regularly, you’ll start to have a bias for action. Energy and momentum will build. Things that seemed impossible will seem doable. You will see that you can “just do things.” 

Supporting Skills

The Action Rules will get you far. Here are some supporting skills that will supercharge your ability to take action and accomplish your goal. Master the basics first, then layer these in if you’d like. 

• Prioritization. Don’t be high agency on low value tasks. Some tasks are much more valuable than others. Learning to tell which is which is an important skill. Asking “Is this the priority?” at every deep work session is a good place to start. 
• Speed. The ability to go from idea to reality quickly is an apex skill in life (and business). Though I’m sure they exist, I’ve never seen a high agency person that executes slowly. 
• Attention to detail. Ultimately being competent is what we all want. Attention to detail can prevent failures and poor-quality outcomes before they happen.
• Just asking. Many times when you’re trying to accomplish a goal there may be a person who could help you. Most people are afraid to ask for what they want and this is just silly. Often you’ll find them happy to help and if you get rejected, so what, ask someone else. 
• Persuasion. Sometimes there is someone in the way, a gatekeeper. Persuasion is a skill that can be learned and this helps move them out of the way. Whether it’s at a booked restaurant or you’re trapped in a 3rd world country, persuasion can be a powerful addition to your skillset.
• Strategy, planning, and basic project management. Attacking your tasks is a great start but the best high performers know how to build a strategy, plan a project and get things done in a proper order, coordinating with other people as well. This is a highly valuable skill. 

I think we can all agree that nothing will happen without taking action, so if there’s one lesson to take away from this pillar it’s that simply taking consistent action will get you very far in life.

Pillar 3: Resilience

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Of the high agency pillars, resilience may be the most important, and from what I can tell, nobody really teaches it. A lot of resilience is related to your mindset and actions so you can see how these pillars reinforce each other in many ways. The most important thing is to redefine the concept of “failure” as just feedback. Failure should not only be expected, but it’s absolutely critical to success. Let me say that again, failure is absolutely critical to success.

Virtually nobody just did something big and hit the grand slam on the first try, that’s almost ludicrous on its face. Anything of value is going to be hard, otherwise we would not value it! Think about it, if perfectly shaped diamonds grew like weeds nobody would care about them, they’d just be shiny rocks. If everyone could do a handstand it wouldn’t be in a viral video online with millions of views. Virtually every accomplished person from Einstein to Elon Musk had literally dozens, maybe hundreds or even thousands of failures before they accomplished something. 

You try something, it doesn’t work, you learn from that and try again. Most of humanity simply gives up after one or two tries. Resilience is where almost all accomplishment comes from. You need to reframe failure as just simply feedback and that’s how you become unstoppable. Change your belief into one of sustained effort instead of instant expectations and you will massively improve your resilience.

Let me illustrate this with some examples from 2 great movies: Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow. It doesn’t matter if you’ve seen them, but if you have, you’re probably seeing where I’m going with this. These movies are totally different, one is a comedy with Bill Murray, the other a sci-fi movie with Tom Cruise. But the common element between them is that the main character is stuck living the same day over and over.

At first this is demoralizing to them both, the endless life that doesn’t change. However, they soon discover that each day they learn something new, to the point where even small changes, like picking a different direction on a walk, make a big difference. I won’t go too deep into it but the point in both movies is that ultimately they figure out how to get exactly what they want and this gets them out of the cycle of failure. They learn exactly what they need to do because they simply keep trying. 

Now the metaphor here is pretty obvious, if you feel like your life is stuck and you’re not getting where you want, you just keep trying things and keep going, failure after failure because each failure teaches you something. 

Resilience is why a lot of high agency people seem insanely lucky. They always seem to get what they want. The truth is, they probably tried dozens of things while most people tried once or twice and gave up. Does luck play a part? Sure, but you can manufacture luck by simply trying more times, you get more spins at the wheel!

As long as you think the goal is still worth pursuing, you try again and again and eventually, almost certainly, if it’s possible, it will work. You just have to keep going and never give up. I know this sounds like self-help nonsense but it’s just common sense. If you can build resilience you literally cannot fail. You also become impossible to compete against, because normal people quit and you don't. This is how you become unstoppable. 

Resilience Killers

What stops us from being resilient? We’ve already shown that failure is just feedback and most people simply give up too quickly. Here are some other resilience killers: 

• Punished for trying. You were probably punished for trying anything in the past. Either by parents, school or society. You didn’t follow “the rules” and they didn’t like that. Over time this became demoralizing and you didn’t try again. As we’ve shown, you can just do things, the chorus can often be ignored and a lot of reality is negotiable. It’s important to remember this as a parent or leader so you break the cycle and don’t also punish people for trying. 
• Immediate gratification culture. This is mostly reinforced by scammy marketing (“make money fast!”) and has really ruined expectations for many people. Many things, like our example of the handstand, can take years to learn. It can take a bodybuilder several years of disciplined exercise and diet to reach the pinnacle. Now, not everything is that hard but handstands and bodybuilding are great examples of things that simply just take a lot of sustained effort over time. You name it: successful business, great relationships, good parenting, great careers and pretty much anything notable often takes years of sustained effort. 
• Endless self-reflection. There is this modern emphasis on how traumatized everyone is. While true trauma does of course exist (horrific experiences, disease, war, etc.), a focus on everyone being traumatized is just paralyzing people and killing their resilience. I know people that are incapable of sustained effort and stay in bed all day because of “traumas” that most humans would think are very minor. Truly traumatized people can be resilient and, in fact, are many times the most resilient because they learned the lesson, used their trauma to fuel their resilience and moved on. Endless reflection and dwelling, on the other hand, is many times just avoidance, makes you think you’re doing the work, and is actually stunting your resilience. Learn the lesson of the painful experience, forget about it and use it to move forward. 

Resilience Beliefs

What do we need to believe to become more resilient?

• Optimism. Life can be tough and you will run into obstacles, so it’s better to have an optimistic attitude for that reason and it’s been proven to improve life outcomes [3]. I’ve never met or read about a high agency person who was not optimistic. Or at least optimistic about their ability to handle life. 
• Gratitude. This one is scientifically proven as well [4]. Simply being grateful for what you have for even a few seconds each day has been shown to improve mood and people in a better mood are more resilient. 
• Undisturbable. Dr. Albert Ellis [5] pioneered this concept and basically, it’s taking everything negative that happens to you in life and saying “meh.” You simply won’t let anything disturb you and, frankly, why should you? There is a space between event and reaction, so just because somebody cuts you off in traffic, you can think about that and say “you know what, I'm not going to scream and honk, I'm actually just going to laugh at that.” and you can apply this concept to anything in your life. There’s no rule you have to get upset at things. In fact, this makes you easily triggerable and hence, easily manipulated! Basically, being highly undisturbable is becoming a master at emotional regulation. 
• Grit. A big part of resilience is the trait known as “grit” and is also proven to improve life outcomes [6]. People with grit realize pain is temporary and keep working toward their goal regardless of pain or how they feel. 

Resilience Practices

What else can help us build our resilience? 

• Prioritize Health. A healthy person simply has more energy, is sick less and because of that, will simply have more natural resilience. Optimizing your health is a great way to build resilience because the acts of doing that, mostly exercise and clean diet, are also resilience building activities. 
• Discipline and Impulse control. If you can control your base impulses and become disciplined, you are much more likely to keep going and be consistent in working towards your goals. 
• Think 100 reps. This is a great way to build discipline because it reminds you that consistency is king, that great things take time but also that there will be results, you just have to be patient. What does 100 reps mean? Well, if you’re working on your health, that’s 100 times to the gym or 100 days of clean eating or 100 days of meditation. If you’re starting a business that’s 100 cold calls or 100 ads posted or 100 articles written. Pretty much anything can be reframed into 100 reps and if you get better a little bit each time, this will almost certainly succeed or at least dramatically improve your learning, because remember, there is no failure, only feedback. 
• Making better decisions. Ultimately when things don’t go our way, we need to investigate why and make a better plan for trying again. Like our movie examples above illustrate, life is simply a series of decisions. The better you get at decisions, the better your life outcomes. 
• Positive self-talk. I know a lot of self-help gurus talk about this but it is actually powerful and effective. So many of us are borderline abusive to ourselves! Talk to yourself like you’d talk to a friend or loved one and quit being so judgmental. This alone can have powerful effects. 
• Ignore the haters. We categorize anyone that doesn’t believe in us or tries to stop us as haters and we simply don’t listen to them. Simple as that. 
• Nervous system mastery. All of the above are some level of mastering your inner voice and especially your nervous system. Clear thinking and taking action is difficult if you’re in fight mode all day. Being able to stay calm, relaxed, untriggered by anyone or any situation is a real superpower that takes practice but has huge benefits. Exercise, journaling, affirmations, meditation, calming supplements and especially how you talk to yourself can all help with this.

It should be clear that resilience is critical to becoming a high agency person. Now let’s go into the practical steps to implement these pillars in your life. 

How to Become High Agency

We have the knowledge we need to become a high agency person. Let’s make what we’ve learned actionable.  As we discussed, modifying your “script” that runs through your head, your beliefs, is the first part of this. Then we’ve made a simple checklist of other actions and practices you can adopt to really ingrain high agency into your life. Like so many other things, this just requires consistency.

High Agency Script

These are the beliefs to adopt a high agency mindset. They’ve been rewritten into the first person so you can practice them and basically rewire your brain with a new script. 

1. I accomplish what I intend regardless of obstacles, resources or mental state. 
2. Reality is negotiable, there are usually no “rules” or permission required, I can just do things. 
3. My actions control my life.
4. I am 100% responsible and accountable for my life outcomes going forward. 
5. Failure is just feedback and feedback is critical to success.
6. As long as something is possible, it can be accomplished.
7. If the goal is possible, then I simply try again with a new strategy until I reach my goal.
8. I am optimistic, grateful, and highly undisturbable.
9. I build grit by doing things even if I don’t feel like it. 
10. I’m unstoppable, I never give up (unless I no longer desire the goal or need to change strategies).

High Agency Checklist

Here are the practices and actions to become a high agency person. You don’t have to do them all at once of course. Just implement them as you go and one best practice is to try to adopt one each day or even for a week. For example, set a reminder that you’re going to “don’t think, just start” for a week.

Master Your Mindset: 

☐ Most important: Practice the High Agency Script regularly until you’ve rewired your beliefs
☐ Practice courage and being disagreeable (when necessary) 
☐ See reality clearly: Dedicate yourself to truth and clear thinking (strong beliefs, loosely held)
☐ Commit to excellence in all things 

Master Taking Action: 

☐ “Don't think, just start” on your daily tasks and goals 
☐ Create a daily routine (wake, exercise, deep work, shutdown)
☐ Do focused deep work (silence devices, no distractions, start with the priority)
☐ Ask yourself: What would someone with 10 times my agency do?
☐ Ask for what you want
☐ Learn basic persuasion (start with this book)
☐ Learn basic planning and project management (start with this book)

Master Resilience: 

☐ Reframe every failure as feedback
☐ Optimize your health (energy fuels everything)
☐ Think 100 reps
☐ Do weekly reviews of goals, plans, and what worked or didn't
☐ Ignore the haters
☐ Make better decisions
☐ Master your nervous system:
☐ Practice deep/coherence breathing (5 seconds in, 4 seconds hold, 5 seconds out) for 5-10 minutes per day and when stressed
☐ Try calming supplements (clear with doctor first, research best dose for you): magnesium glycinate, l-theanine, glycine, taurine, Pharmagaba, inositol

Do these things above and I promise, in as little as a few weeks, your life will be dramatically improved. 

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The Final Level

As you improve your agency, you’ll start noticing that this essay didn’t cover everything. You may start thinking bigger or thinking you're capable of much bigger things. You’ll probably want to get clear on your future direction in life (vision, purpose, mission), further improve your ability to take action, make better decisions and optimize other areas of your life like your health, mindset, relationships and finances. 

I mentioned a few times above that I created a personal development system I call Zorga. Everything you learned in this essay comes from parts of that system. If you want to experience living where you have a crystal clear life vision and make it happen, please consider Zorga as the next level of your high agency mastery. 

And if you run a business (or know someone that does), consider trying SmallBizOS to fully optimize and build a calm, organized, high agency business. 

Either way, I’m glad you came this far and I wish you luck on becoming a high agency person. The world is wide open and you now know exactly what you need to make an impact. Please use this power wisely and “pay it forward” as much as you can by teaching your team, family and friends these principles. That will improve all of our lives. 

Onward!

Matt Knee

P.S.

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