You Can Just Do Things

PERSONAL agency is the ability to see choices and the belief in your ability to act on them. Agentic people take ownership of their own lives.

You Can Just Do Things author Cate Hall believes that personal agency is learnable. And while agency may not matter on an average day, “agency really matters when you’re faced with an opportunity that could change your life completely. A little moment when choosing to deviate from your routine could have outrageous results.” You Can Just Do Things provides valuable insights into growing our agency and living an intentional life.

Hall says that most people are selectively agentic. That is, they don’t apply the same can-do approach and resourcefulness equally in all areas of their life. If you divide life into three areas: work, relations of all types, and self-relationship, which includes health, mindset, and spirituality, then you might be high-agency in one but not the others. “The exertion of willpower makes you feel like you’re trying. But the feeling of effort doesn’t mean that you’re Actually Trying.”

You may think that you’re really struggling to deal with problems in the other areas of your life. “But struggling is not evidence that you’ve tried everything. To the contrary, the continuous need for willpower may be the sign of a badly engineered life.”

I’ve talked with people who don’t think they have a choice. They just take has been handed to them. “The human default is to voluntarily accept constraints, convincing ourselves that they are mandatory. We choose to accept a set of expectations placed on us by others—or that we imagine others are placing on us. Then, we act as if we’re stuck indefinitely.” We must habitually question our thinking and challenge the path we are on. Is this what we really want? In this way, we can in real-time decide if a change needs to be made and of what variety.

One of our most valuable tools is feedback. “You cannot expect to reliably progress in areas where you’re not getting reliable feedback.” Avoid binary responses to feedback. “Instead, embrace mental fluidity, examining all of the possibilities between ‘they’re completely wrong’ and ‘the worst-case scenario is true, and now I must die of shame.’”

Failure is just part of growth. Iras Glass once said, “‘If you’re not failing all the time, you’re not creating a situation where you can get super lucky.” Hall adds that most people “take failure extremely personally, rather than as a prompt to consider radical re-invention.”

“‘This is the way I am’ is an all-purpose excuse. It’s easy, credible, and hugely limiting. Instead, I find that adopting the belief that traits are changeable, working at them as though they are, and seeing what happens is a much more useful way to approach life, one that will over the long term reliably yield more freedom than adopting the opposite belief.” If you think you are unreliable, observe someone who has a reputation for reliability and ask “‘What kinds of things do reliable people do that I could adopt?’ Reliability is made of micro-actions. For some people, these micro-actions do seem to come more naturally than for others. But they are clearly learnable behaviors.”

As we go through life, we might learn the wrong lesson from our limited experiences. Hall advises us to “Be skeptical of what you’re ‘learning’ when the personal stakes are high. Once you’ve really invested in the wrong lesson, it can take years—or a lifetime—to unlearn, unless you make a point of becoming aware of your conditioning.”

When it comes to the emotions we try to avoid at all costs—what she calls the Cringe Minefields—they are where our biggest self-improvement gains are likely to come from. “You simply cannot see the landscape of options in your life objectively-the possibilities on the other side-if the cringe is controlling you.”

You can increase your chances for luck. “The more times you interact with the outside world, the more chances you have to get lucky-to find the collaborators, friends, and projects that, together, provide the right soil for you to bloom.”

We humans are unfortunately hardwired to readily reject options that will require effort when we think the chances are good that we won’t succeed. Flipping the script from ‘That won’t work’ to ‘How do I make this work?’ can help you discover degrees of agency you didn’t realize you had.

Even the most successful-looking people are winging it to some degree just like us. “They all feel self-doubt and confusion at times. They’ve all wasted a ton of time and made bad decisions.” And that’s inspiring. “Because if the world is being shaped by scared, insecure, confused, irresponsible people like us, then we too can shape the world.”

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