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Exercises to Improve Agency

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You can just do things.

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Background

Agency can be trained. A person can become better at setting a goal and achieving it by deliberately practicing and achieving smaller goals. Competence creates confidence, in turn creating a self-reinforcing loop of achievement and ever-growing goals.

Practice should be gradual and masterful, i.e., work slowly through exercises that are interesting and have a solid grasp before moving onto a more challenging one.

Remember, you can just do things.

Suggested Readings

List

These are roughly grouped by difficulty—it's difficult to keep track of them all relative to one another. Some tasks have easy, medium, or hard ways to do them, so I either chose the average or most beneficial or included the same thing multiple times with a slightly different description. And yes, the easy ones do matter.

A lot of these come across as "bucket list-y", but that's effectively the point: these are goals, achievements, experiences, etc that you can do if you want to. They are entirely optional yet entirely achievable with the proper ingredients of hard work, consistency, and commitment.

Remember, you can just do things.

Contact me for additions.

Easy

  1. Everyday tasks, like tying your shoe, blowing your nose, brushing your teeth, making your bed
  2. Vote in an election
  3. Get a different haircut
  4. Plan a party
  5. Cook a full meal
  6. Complete a basic home repair
  7. Get a restaurant to make you something not on the menu
  8. Say no to a request
  9. Start a website
  10. Perform experiments on yourself
  11. Sign up and train for a physical challenge (5k, triathlon, obstacle course race, mountain climbing)
  12. Ask someone if they want to hang out
  13. Research better service plans (phone, internet, power) and switch providers

Medium

  1. Write and publish a book
  2. Fix a mechanical device (watch, bicycle, car, boat, etc)
  3. Acquire a human body part (tooth, skull, kidney)
  4. Learn to drive: automatic car, manual car, motorcycle, boat, plane, submarine,
  5. Lose weight (if overweight) or gain weight (if underweight)
  6. Create and run a YouTube channel
  7. Apply for a game show (Survivor, Jeopardy!)
  8. Buy a house without a realtor
  9. Acquire an automatic rifle
  10. Switch careers (within the same city)
  11. Acquire a hectare of land in another city/state/country/continent
  12. Attend Burning Man (Vibe Camp for those readers)
  13. Make friends online and meet them in person

Hard

  1. Run for office (local/regional/national)
  2. Build and deploy an algorithmic trading strategy
  3. Complete a DIY home renovation
  4. Get access to something exclusive with a fake pass
  5. Learn a language
  6. Organize a conference
  7. Shoot a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG)
  8. Make friends with someone in another country and convince them to let me sleep at their house within 24 hours of meeting them
  9. Start a company
  10. Get a friend out of a foreign jail/prison
  11. Climb K2

Quotes

While I think motivational quotes are often bullshit, there are some that have power behind them, and when coupled with the right person and right mindset, provide an epiphany of-sorts that anything can be done.

Literally every person ever in Silicon Valley:

You can just do things

Sam Altman:

you can grind to help secure our collective future or you can write substacks about why we are going to fail

Invictus by William Ernest Henley:

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul

Eliezer Yudkowsky:

Hesitation is always easy, rarely useful.

See Also