5 ways to become more “high agency” in the age of AI

In a recent OpenAI town hall, CEO Sam Altman was asked his opinion on the most important skill people should learn in the age of AI. After some initial throat clearing, Altman’s first piece of advice was clear: “Become high agency.”

“Agency” has become the word of the moment. According to various Silicon Valley types, it’s how you avoid becoming part of the permanent underclass, the “most important personality trait of the 21st century,” and the difference between protagonists and non-player characters (NPCs) in the game of life.

But the word “agency” has two distinct meanings in the AI age. Those touting its importance in the examples above are talking about the ability and willingness to take action — an agentic person doesn’t just think about doing things; they do them. But “agency” can also refer to someone or something that acts on your behalf. That gap — between acting for yourself and another acting for you — is a central tension driving professional anxiety right now, particularly in white-collar fields where AI can both augment workers and potentially replace them.

On the one hand, AI is empowering. It’s never been easier to send a cold email or create an app. Two recently published nonfiction books capture this ethos in the title they share: You Can Just Do Things. On the other hand, as AI itself becomes more agentic — acting on behalf of its user with minimal direction — some are starting to feel disempowered, not only in their daily lives but also in shaping their futures. When a select few are getting unfathomably rich while the vast majority of workers worry about their place in the economy, it’s easy to feel like the passive recipient of a world others created for you.

“There’s a way to use AI that allows you to get more done,” Cate Hall, the author of the more recent You Can Just Do Things book, told me. “But there’s another version where individual judgment and discernment get sanded away, leaving you without the productive friction that leads to a meaningful life.”

Hall argues that the most valuable kind of agency to develop right now is not the fluidity with which you can deploy a swarm of AI agents, but rather your “capacity to both see and act on all of the degrees of freedom that life offers.” This specific kind of agency can help minimize feelings of disempowerment as we navigate this new era. Here are five tips for developing it.

Clarify your intrinsic motivation

Increasing your agency starts with understanding what intrinsically motivates you. Daniel Pink argues in his 2009 book, Drive, that the carrot-and-stick approach to motivation leads people to forfeit some of their autonomy, which can “spring a hole in the bottom of their motivation bucket.”

Instead, Pink advocates cultivating three elements of intrinsic motivation: mastery, purpose, and autonomy. Those elements can also serve as valuable guideposts in the pursuit of agency. Ask yourself: In this season of life, what do I hope to learn? What problems do I care about solving? What steps can I take right now?

Learn to love the moat of low status

In You Can Just Do Things, Hall argues that you have to be willing to endure a period of potential embarrassment in order to change your life. She calls this “the moat of low status.” This might mean asking stupid questions, making rookie mistakes, or being willing to feel incompetent.

“Fear of being temporarily low in social status stops human beings from living richer lives,” Hall writes. It’s a moat precisely because not everyone is willing to risk looking like a fool. But if you learn to love the moat, you might realize that, over time, embarrassment has melted away, replaced by skills and a newfound willingness to make bold moves.

Test the handles

I sometimes fantasize about a faceless authority figure coming down to tell me exactly what to do with my life. This would free me from the weight of making decisions for myself and grant me permission to simply act: If someone would just tell me which job to pursue or who to marry, I would know where to direct my attention.

But according to Jay Yang, author of the other You Can Just Do Things, the world isn’t going to give you permission to act, and we sell ourselves short when we assume the life we want is on the other side of a locked door. “You have to be willing to test the handles to see if the door is actually locked,” he told me. “Don’t tell yourself ‘no’ before the world gets a chance to say ‘yes.’”

Focus on what you can contribute

For my last book, How to Not Know, I interviewed climate therapist Barbara Easterlin, who specializes in helping people deal with climate change anxiety. “One of the best ways to move through climate anxiety is to start contributing toward a solution,” she told me. “Climate action is this large tapestry, and we all have to find our individual thread to pull on.”

Brooke Taylor, a career coach and author of Healing the Success Wound, believes the same advice applies to finding a sense of agency in your career. “In the absence of clarity around what comes next, the best thing you can do is focus on what you can contribute,” she told me. “When you’re scared about the future, focusing on your contribution — even in a realm of your life outside of work, like your local community or a side project — can serve as an antidote to scarcity and fear.”

Act in spite of uncertainty

There’s a beautiful metaphor in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Esther, the protagonist, is sitting beneath a fig tree trying to determine the course of her life. Each fig represents a different path — one as a poet, another as a professor, another as a traveler, and so on. “I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose,” Esther bemoans.

Today, it feels like a whole generation of professionals is Esther in the crotch of the tree. We still have to choose our next steps, even when we don’t know how our choices will turn out. In the words of psychologist Rollo May, “Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt.” In an age where AI is capable of acting on your behalf, agency is picking a fig for yourself.

This article is featured on Big Think.