The Invisible "High Agency" Boundary

Let's expand the whole high agency conversation

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I feel like I’m hearing the words “high agency” and “agentic” constantly these days. This is particularly true amongst the startup tech crowd.

My perspective on this has evolved over the years.

Let’s start with what high agency means:

the capacity to move a situation toward a desired outcome a.k.a. make shit happen.

As someone once obsessed with being high agency before this idea was branded by the X crowd, I think we’re largely missing the forest through the trees.

Developing agency is useful, but there is a bigger game you can play. It’s working on the context you apply agency from, which simultaneously increases agency.

Playing The Game Vs. Understanding The One You Have Constructed

Once upon a time, I was a high agency startup bro.

I was extremely confident that I could figure out any task that needed to get done and would just do it. I was obsessed with productivity systems, tools, and creating leverage to get ahead any way I could.

My sense of agency was one-dimensional in that it solely focused on working with my ability to wield external factors like my skills, social capital, and resources ($$).

The deeper I went on my consciousness path, the more I realized the limitations of looking at agency this way.

Although I spent years forging all these assets that seemingly increased my capacity to shape my material world, I was always applying my agency from a place of ignorance.

Specifically, my model of reality had been based on a set of ideas that I inherited from the outside world. They reflected what I was exposed to, more than fundamental truths. These patterned ways of perceiving things created an invisible box around me by defining my sense of possibility and way of approaching things.

So all this focus on developing agency, really just made me better maneuvering within an invisible box that I didn’t even know I was in.

Let me give you a concrete example. In my early and mid-twenties I was obsessed with networking to get ahead. I was constantly taking people out for coffee, trying to insert myself in the right rooms, and grow my online audience to become an opportunity magnet. These activities seemingly created results, which motivated me to improve my capacity for the game I was playing. I met more interesting people, got in better rooms, and developed more online clout.

These developments created some positive outcomes in my life, but the process also exhausting. The challenge was that my box told this is how the world worked. Because I didn’t see any other way, I just kept cycling trying to play the same game at higher levels.

This is the crux of where I see most people missing the forest from the trees when it comes to “developing agency.”

They focus on becoming better at playing games in the invisible box they’re in, instead of working on seeing the boundaries of the box in order to redefine them.

In this example, the walls of my box were defined by a set of beliefs embedded in my consciousness:

• It’s all up to me to go out and make meaningful connections happen

• More effort equals better results

• More connections equals more value

Are these true? They may be common ideas in the consensus narrative that is indicative of a certain level of understanding, but they’re far from absolute truths. This is just one form of a game that was played by the generations before us.

If you recognize there’s value in meeting the right people, what would an alternative game look like? How about:

• I intersect with the right people as needed

• I meet people through doing things I enjoy that don’t feel effortful

• I only need a handful of people to support me to accomplish my goals and change the trajectory in my life

What is the difference between the two games?

It’s not how “agentic” someone is.

It’s the information and energy in your consciousness that we call beliefs. These constructs define the walls in which we apply agency.

Once you understand this, you can decide which game is more interesting:

1. Focusing on maneuvering within your existing walls

2. Working to understand the invisible boundaries confining you to make adjustments and play a bigger game

3. Do both at the same time

Option 3 is the best choice and is a primary subject in my upcoming book Conscious Accomplishment: How to use Personal Achievement For Spiritual Growth.

The way to play option 3, is to use 1 as a pathway for 2.

The more we do this, the more we grow our awareness and understanding of the true nature of reality. Because we are aligning to a more comprehensive understanding of truth, we develop more agency and can wield it more wisely.

The Big Secret About Agency

Now here’s where things get interesting.

Before a consciousness journey, you probably think of your capacity to get shit done (agency) as a function of things like:

• Mindset

• Intelligence / intellect

• Willpower

• Resources ($$$)

• Connections

Underpinning these ideas is a belief that YOU are the one that makes everything happen.

There’s no doubt that this approach can get you pretty damn far by society’s standards. But there’s actually a much bigger game you can play.

The big secret that western conditioning has largely not caught onto yet is that the deeper you go on your consciousness journey, the more things happen by themselves. You don’t need to relentlessly hustle, strategize, and will yourself to do things, because they increasingly start to happen by themselves or through applying intention.

The right person to assist on something you’ve been working on just appears. That extra cash you need for a project is gifted to you.

You become a magnet and co-creator with a far superior intelligence that is orchestrating material reality, instead of just a more efficient maneuverer within one you’ve unconsciously artificially defined.

This is true power.

This distinction reminds me of the difference between a rich man and an alchemist. The rich man has all this money, but he needs to work hard to get more of it, guard it closely, and go to great lengths to preserve it. The alchemist doesn’t need to do any of these things. He just roams freely and creates more money when he needs it.

Would you rather be a rich man or an alchemist?

I’d much rather be an alchemist. You have 100x more agency. But only a small number of people pursue this path because we’ve largely forgot that we can be alchemists and are told to be rich men by people who don’t know any better.

The Path of High Agency -> Less Agency -> 10X More Agency

High agency people will keep playing high agency games until life stops working. This is their path and even though it might get frustrating to see unconscious people having wild material success, I suggest focusing on your own path.

When your high agency strategies stop working, the initial assumptions are that you aren’t applying them correctly or diligently enough. So you keep hitting the same strategies and gradually life starts to feel like a struggle.

Your problem likely isn’t that you’re doing it wrong or bad luck. It’s that you’ve hit a agency boundary that has been placed in your path by your soul.

The boundary is there to redirect you towards your life’s intention which encompasses how you’re trying to evolve. You can try to overcome the boundary with more high agency strategies. But in my experience, this never works. You’re going against a higher order determinant that is more powerful than the ol’ make smarter decisions and take better actions moves that once worked for you.

This inflection point in your life is often called “the call.”

If you don’t accept the call to begin directing your attention inward, life will continue being difficult. If you do accept the call, you can start the meandering path of waking up.

It’s quite common after an awakening and accepting the call, that your agency decreases for awhile. Things that once seemed easy, feel difficult. Maybe you have no energy or little enthusiasm to do things. I remember days where something as simple as sending an email felt like a herculean effort!

This agency dip is a predictable development. Nothing is wrong with you, and you won’t feel like this forever. It’s a required reset to redirect your attention inwards to the things that are calling for attention.

This decline in agency probably goes on for a while you focus on healing. Eventually, you reclaim your agency from an updated perspective.

At this point, you can apply your agency take action toward your goals and continue moving the artificial boundaries at the same time. Relative to what you were doing before, this integrated path can create exponential results. This because you are constantly identifying and removing the fundamental constraints in your consciousness.

Over time things can continue getting easier. You will increasingly start to develop that magnetic and co-creative power I alluded to earlier. I know this is a gloss over on the mechanisms for this to occur, but you can read some old posts on why this might happen.

This GPT graph isn’t perfect and applies to people who already have developed some agency prior to starting their consciousness journey. I also want to highlight the purpose of spiritual growth isn’t developing agency - it’s realizing greater truth about yourself and the world around you IMO. It just so happens that this is the same path to reaching your greater potential.

Whether you want to use the additional freedom and agency to build a big business or simply have more ease in your life is an ongoing conversation with your soul : )

And if you’re wondering why people who have seemingly done zero spiritual work have all the agency in the world, you’re focusing on the wrong question. This is a karma thing. Your energy is better spent focusing on your own experience as a benchmark as you on your journey.

Relative to all the hype on vibe coding, this perspective on high agency doesn’t get much play on the internet.

I think it’s time we expand the conversation!

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