To have agency is to be the subject of a sentence, rather than its direct object. It is the tendency to act, rather than wait to be acted upon.
– Devon Eriksen
I was a very judgmental kid.
I would always wonder why everyone was so brainwashed.
My friends at church seemed to flinch at any question I'd ask about the truth of their beliefs, like a visible glitch in their eyes, which represented their mind snapping back to the doctrine their parents shoved down their throats.
The world seemed all too robotic to me.
Wake up. Hit snooze a few times. Scroll until you're on the brink of being late. Make coffee. Sit in traffic. Work on projects you don't care about for people you don't care about. Fake smile at your boss. Fake laugh with your coworker. Traffic again. Argue with spouse. Watch TV. Pass out. Repeat.
It terrified me.
Every direction I turned, I was being prodded down what seemed to be an outdated path that would lead to the same life as the prodders.
Save your money!
Study for your exams!
Get a high-paying job!
Like NPCs in a video game.
Non-player characters. Predictable, pre-scripted, and programmed characters that follow narrow and strict behavioral patterns without agency. They are in the game, but the main character is the one playing it, in charge of their own destiny.
I always felt a sense of envy toward those people.
The ones who didn't care what others thought. The ones who could do what they want without regret or care. The ones who, ultimately, lived a fulfilling and interesting adventure of a life. They had MCE – main character energy.
At least that's what I thought when I was young, dumb, and naive.
Why Are There So Many NPCs?
Generally speaking, we have two kinds of consciousness. One I will call the "spotlight," and the other the "floodlight." The spotlight is what we call conscious attention, and we are trained from childhood that it is the most valuable form of perception. When the teacher in class says "Pay attention!" everybody stares, and looks right at the teacher. That is spotlight consciousness; fixing your mind on one thing at a time. You concentrate, and even though you may not be able to have a very long attention span, nevertheless you use your spotlight: one thing after another, one thing after another…
– Alan Watts
Reducing most of the population to mere puppets isn't the answer.
Everyone has a complex internal world that everyone else is largely unaware of and will never be able to fully comprehend, as they don't have access to it.
Placing narcissists with main character syndrome on a pedestal doesn't help either.
Both are distorted theories of mind, but there is some truth behind them.
We don't want to think we are the main character, we want to be the main character, because anything less is a disservice to your potential.
Respect in this world is reserved for those with high agency. The entrepreneur, the athlete, the intellectual. The people who forge their own path, overcome adversity, and create a story that we can't help but marvel at.
The rest get pushed under the rug, as harsh as that may seem. We label them as average, ordinary, and rarely is there a time when they produce something that society deems valuable enough to reward with attention, money, and anything else that we hold as a symbol of success.
But why?
Why do so few people break free from the herd?
Why do we give almost all of our energy to the dreams of others rather than our own?
I believe there are 3 overlapping answers to that question: conditioning, industrialization, and first-tier thinking.
The second we're born, our mind is like a computer without an operating system. We're these cute crying blobs of human flailing around, and if we aren't given proper instruction or care, we die.
With a brain primed to learn and a parent eager to mold, this can get dangerous very quick. If the parents' programming is a near clone of their own parents' programming, meaning they weren't taught (or they didn't practice) agency, then the child is that much more likely to have the same outcome. A main character must come along to break that generational curse.
Pair that with a society with an industrial foundation – a system with the purpose of creating useful workers – and you get the American Dream: go to school, get a job, retire at 65.
Think it can't get worse?
Well, human psychology has been extensively mapped over the past few decades.
It is clear that our mind – our values, beliefs, and worldview that largely influence how we think and make decisions – evolves through predictable stages over time. These stages can be grouped into first-tier consciousness and second-tier consciousness.
The defining factor of first-tier thinkers is that they can't hold multiple perspectives. Their beliefs are right, yours are wrong, and you're their enemy.
So, if your parents believe that schools, jobs, and retirement (or a specific religious or egalitarian belief system) are best for you, they will ensure that you believe the same. That's difficult to avoid when you don't know any better.
Over 95% of the western population resides within the middle-upper portion of first-tier thinking, falling into 3 camps:
- Order – Values rules, roles, and discipline often assigned by some external and almighty ruler (i.e. bible thumpers)
- Achievement – Values rationality, science, risk taking, and self-reliance (i.e. self-help or corporate ladder climbing)
- Egalitarianism – Values relativism and equality. No truth or belief is absolute or better, except for the fact that no truth is better – forming a dangerous hypocrisy (i.e. gender or identity politics)
It feels like the world is screaming at you to either praise your god, work hard, or become an activist for social rights, and it doesn't help that, being in the information age, everywhere you turn, people try to persuade you that those 3 big goals are more important than your own.
If those are the dominant values of parents, teachers, authorities, and public figures that have direct access to your young, impressionable head, the code written in it looks like that of an NPC.
Do what you're told.
Obey the authority.
Follow the herd.
And you don't have any other choice.
Survival is your base. It's the operating principle in every decision you make. If you aren't trying to protect your body, you're trying to protect your ego, and when your ego resides in a first-tier stage of development, you can quickly find yourself lashing out at others about how wrong their beliefs are. New opportunities that could change your life become scarce.
And, if you are disobedient to the beliefs of your parents or teachers, you may be cast out from the tribe, so naturally you are inclined to obey.
That's why the world feels so mechanical.
That's why the world is so ripe to be disrupted by AI, and why people sit around complaining about the fact that it will take jobs rather than the other option.
We've been trained to narrow our attention.
Spotlight consciousness as Watts would describe it.
When the authority speaks, we listen. When we are given a task, we do it. And if we don't, we feel threatened, and that fear response keeps us working toward a goal that was never our own to begin with. Some can't tolerate it, so they fall into a hole of depression and anxiety, unable to escape because their spotlight looks everywhere aside from the tools lying next to them to create a ladder.
The default path is our destiny. We filter the world through the goals we are supposed to achieve. And if you understand the mind, you understand that we perceive information that aids in the achievement of our goals.
All we see is what our programming allows us to see.
Most opportunities for meaning, fulfillment, and true success fly right under your nose unless you revolt.
Unless you reject everything you've been told was true and seek to discover what you are capable of.
Revolt Against The Default Path
Failure is the default state.
That's the brutal truth of life.
If you don't create a path, you will be assigned one, and no matter how successful you are by the standards of society, the success was never yours. Never your goals. Never your beliefs. Never your actions. You were simply a program running to achieve what you were set out to achieve.
You aren't doomed to your programming. That's the cool thing about being human. We're the only supercomputer that can rewrite its own code, and even that metaphor doesn't come close to explaining the complexity of human consciousness.
If you want to change the direction of your life, you need 3 ingredients.
- Awareness – The ability to widen your aperture and spot opportunities.
- Access – The resources to take advantage of those opportunities.
- Agency – The ability to act on those opportunities without permission.
Those are how you become the main character of your life.
Many people are aware of opportunities. Most have access to the knowledge to take advantage of them. But very few people do anything about it.
For that reason, every trait you could develop in your life is dependent on the last ingredient: agency.
Most people still believe that intelligence or book smarts play the largest role in success, but that couldn't be any further from the truth.
High intelligence + high agency = building rocket ships to bring humanity to mars.
Low intelligence + high agency = drop out in their third year of undergrad to start a business without caring about optimization.
High intelligence + low agency = graduate and get a PhD just to cry about how rich people should not exist. They never go off the guardrails.
Low intelligence + low agency = the average person following someone else's plan playing victim to their circumstances.
With the right amount of agency, it doesn't matter how intelligent you are.
The good news is, agency is a habit, and habits can be trained.
Awareness: Widening Your Aperture
In the broadest sense, a person's quest for understanding is indeed a search problem, in an abstract space of ideas far too large to be searched exhaustively.
– David Deutsch
I want you to think of success as a map.
No legend. No roads. No landscape. It's mostly blank.
Success, then, is like a needle in a haystack. An invisible pin on the map.
The only thing that does display on this map is the known. Like a spotlight illuminated only that part of the map. For most people, this area is filled with aspects of their childhood, schooling, religious indoctrination, and job training.
Your current version of success is a visible pin on the map within that defined area.
You already know what your life is supposed to look like, and you've largely accepted that. You rarely think of what life could be, and if you do, the idea of anything more quickly gets replaced with fear of the unknown.
And that fear makes sense. You don't know where the invisible pin of success is. You don't know which direction will take you there. But that hints at the problem: you've been given directions your entire life, and it's natural for you to believe that you need directions in order to succeed.
That couldn't be anything further from the truth.
So, how do you find the needle in the haystack?
First, you need a deep, intrinsic reason to take a leap of faith into the unknown. You need a brutal awareness of the fact that you don't want to live a mechanical and predetermined life, because you can directly observe that the masses don't have a life that you want to live.
People don't change until they are sick of being sick. You need to contemplate the idea of where your life is heading every day for the next month, minimum. You need to finally be honest with yourself that the discomfort of your current life isn't something you are willing to tolerate, because if you don't hate it, you will tolerate it.
Once you get your taste of the life you are in, the next step of transformation is dissonance – where your current life and potential life are trapped in a wrestling match. That is what primes your mind for insight.
Awareness of the negative is like pulling back a slingshot aimed toward the positive.
Second, you need a general understanding of how unconventional progress is made. You don't follow conventional rules or instructions that lead to known and mediocre results, no matter how secure that may seem on the surface.
If you want unconventional results, you make a guess. You act on that guess. You practically guarantee failure. You treat that failure as a data point, an error to be corrected. You make another guess, but from a more educated position, and slowly, you make the unknown known, and given the right amount of persistence, you narrow down what doesn't work until you discover what does.
That's how you create knowledge.
That's how you generate a deeper awareness.
That's how you break free from a singular, first-tier perspective and begin to expand the complexity of yourself. The more areas on the map you explore – be it business models, spiritual practices, or fitness regimens – the more you increase the potential of your character.
But that's just an abstract idea that needs to be made practical.
Access: Exploiting New Technology
If you want to reach a new area of the map, you need access to it.
You need at least a general idea that some form of opportunity lies in the unknown, paired with a sequence of steps you can take to reach that area.
In a video game, you must reach a certain level of experience before you can (1) notice the quest and (2) accept the quest to trek into the unknown.
The question is, how do we find our next quest and begin acting on it?
With the prerequisite of experiencing dissonance with your current way of life, your mind becomes a magnet for opportunity. The problem with opportunity is that most people still think with a pre-information mind. They don't realize that credentials, physical location, and money aren't a barrier to opportunity anymore.
You can learn anything on the internet.
You can follow experts in their respective fields.
You can curate a social feed ripe with high-signal ideas.
You can share what you know or what you do for the world to see.
You can leverage technology to start a business, enhance your spirituality, talk to anyone, improve your thinking, or transform your health and fitness.
Those are both the potential for opportunity and the resources to act on that opportunity.
Yet most people use the internet like a drug.
Why? Spotlight consciousness.
But we're passed that. You are ready for the next chapter of your life.
The steps are radically simple yet increasingly difficult: follow individuals who are dedicated to being useful, ruthlessly curate who has access to your mind, and expose yourself to the opportunities that you already scroll by every single day, because at least now you'll register them.
I can't tell you what path to take.
Because if I did, you may latch onto that out of fear, narrowing your mind yet again to avoid the uncertainty that is the birthplace of potential.
Agency: All Problems Are Soluble
In the late 1960s, Martin Seligman conducted a famous experiment to demonstrate how dogs could learn to be helpless.
There were 3 groups of dogs and 2 phases of the experiment.
Phase 1:
- Dog group 1 was placed in a harness and received electric shocks, but they could learn to press a panel to stop the shock. They had control.
- Dog group 2 was also placed in a harness, received the same electric shocks, but could not stop the shocks.
- Dog group 3 was in the harness for the same amount of time but received no shocks.
Phase 2 (a day later):
All dog groups we placed individually in a shuttle box – two compartments separated with a low barrier. There was a warning signal that preceded the electric shock on the side of the box the dogs were placed on.
In order for the dog to escape, all they had to do was jump over the barrier to the safe side.
- Dog group 1 escaped any shock by jumping to the other side as soon as the warning signal appeared.
- About two-thirds of dog group 2 even attempted to escape the shock. They would often lie down, whine, and endure the shocks.
- Dog group 3 quickly learned to escape the shocks.
As dog group 2 indicates, and this may be a massive stretch, I would argue that due to the environment we are raised in, two-thirds of the western population has learned helplessness.
The core idea of learned helplessness is that the perceived lack of control over an aversive event can lead to passivity and tolerating the pain. Even when dog group 2 could escape, they didn't try, because they believed it was impossible.
This helps us draw a key distinction between low-agency and high-agency individuals.
You may have little control over your intelligence, what zip code you were born in, what beliefs you were given about God, money, or equality, but agency is the ingredient that can lead to you jumping over the barrier.
Agency is a habit, not a trait. And just like helplessness can be learned, agency can as well.
To have agency is to choose a goal that is important to you, decide what actions will move you toward those goals, and as simple as it may sound… act.
But not just any goal will do.
When we look at flow psychology – the psychology of optimal experience – enjoyment is found at the edge of the known. Not so difficult that you are overwhelmed with anxiety, but not too simple that you quickly become bored.
That's where you lose your sense of self and become one with the challenge.
So, there are 3 types of goals: easy, difficult, and impossible.
Easy goals can already be achieved with the skills and resources you have.
Impossible goals are something we can't do, either due to it being outside of the realm of possibility (laws of physics), or due to us not achieving the difficult goal that makes the perceived impossible possible.
Difficult tasks are something we can't do right away, but we can eventually do if we grow, acquire skills, and collect the resources necessary to do so. They are tasks that you will fail at, but succeed if you persist and iterate.
Agency – and the good life – is belief in the difficult.
Agency is a belief that all problems are soluble.
Agency is the process of doing good science.
And that unlocks are final piece of the puzzle. We have awareness. We have access to resources. But we lack the experimentation that moves us forward into the unknown.
Good science happens in 4 parts:
- The Goal – you commit to an important goal, often stemming from a problem (or what you don't want) in your life.
- The Experiment – you make a guess as to what will move you toward that goal and act on it in the real world.
- The Experience – engaging with the world brings an experience. The original meaning of "datum" (the singular version of data) was immediate experience. Data can be physical, mental, or spiritual.
- The Confirmation – you observe the data and see whether the experiment brought you closer to or further away from the goal.
If your goal is to reach the lighthouse in a storm, you set sail, get knocked off course, steer left, see where you're at, and course correct until you reach the lighthouse.
That is how you navigate through the unknown.
That is how you develop main character energy.
You drop a pin on the map and create the directions.
And by doing so, you solidify a valuable contribution that can be passed down to humanity, bringing a deeper layer of happiness to your life by sharing your experiences.
I am confident that you are now equipped with quite literally everything it takes to achieve anything you want in life.
If you are still looking for quick fixes, tactics, or hacks, I would encourage you to reread this letter until you no longer have that desire.
You're on your own, and that's an incredible realization.
Safe travels.
– Dan
Note for this week:
The build a profitable personal brand in 60 days challenge starts on June 16th.
If pursuing your own business or creative efforts in an important goal to you, and you'd like education to help you do that, consider enrolling before the start date.
Every day you will receive one lesson and one actionable step that takes 30-60 minutes to complete. By the end of it, you have the most difficult part of business figured out: how to monetize, how to generate traffic, and how to build trust.