You know, most of the knowledge we gain today,
a specific university degree, maybe a very niche
job title, it's likely going to be obsolete in,
what, 10 years? Technology is just moving so
fast. It is. That's not just a guess anymore.
It's really the foundational truth of this era.
This constant, relentless change is just making
all our old ways of staying valuable. Yep. Well.
Irrelevant. So it makes you ask the question,
what is the one skill, the single non -obsolete
skill that we can actually rely on? What keeps
you valuable when this AI wave comes for everything
else? That skill, the indispensable one, is human
agency. Welcome to the Deep Dive. Today we are
unpacking a really critical source. It's called
Unlocking Human Agency, your survival guide for
the AI era. This is a deep dive into really the
essence of professional survival. Yeah, and our
mission today is pretty straightforward. We're
going to define what human agency actually is,
we'll identify the psychological traps that,
you know, stop us from using it, and then we'll
map out the actual skills you need to build it
and multiply it with AI as a tool. We're basically
turning this guide into your personal operating
system for what's coming. Okay. Let's jump right
in. We have to understand what agency truly means
because the source is very clear that it's so
much deeper than just, you know, being productive
or just being busy. Yeah, that's right. The core
definition is actually simple, but it's really
powerful. Human agency is the power to iterate
without permission. Iterate without permission.
That phrase really stands out. It implies the
sort of internal engine. It's like watching a
small child learn how to walk. They fall what?
a hundred times. They don't look around for a
manager to sign off on them trying again. They
just, they try a different way, instantly. That
is pure iteration. And the tragedy is that as
we get older, our schools and our jobs, they
actively train that instinct out of us. We're
tapped to wait. Wait for the grade, wait for
the paycheck, wait for the manager's approval
before we do anything. We get really comfortable
waiting for that list of instructions. We just
wait for the rules. Exactly. And success in this
next decade means you have to unlearn all that
conditioning. You have to find that childlike
energy to just try things, test an idea, see
if it works, adjust, and do it all again without
asking for validation. That's the heart of agency.
But there are these huge psychological hurdles
that block us. The source points to the first
one, and it's a big one, the conformity trap.
The stats on this are pretty sobering. I mean,
some studies suggest almost half of people are
living in just complete conformity. They only
do things that are popular or, you know, what's
considered normal in their field. Which historically
made a lot of sense. It was a survival instinct.
A few thousand years ago, sticking with the group
meant you didn't get eaten by a saber -toothed
cat. Right. Safety in numbers. But today, that
instinct is completely backward. Conforming now
means staying in a job that AI is already replacing.
That template you're following is becoming obsolete
in real time. So fitting in isn't safe anymore.
It's actually the biggest risk you could take
because the path everyone else is on is the exact
path technology is paving over. Precisely. And
that feeling of not being in control, that leads
right into the second big psychological trap,
learned helplessness. This is such a classic
idea from psychology. The experiment where an
animal is repeatedly shocked in a little cage
and eventually it just stops trying to get out.
Even when the door is wide open, it's built these
invisible chains in its own mind. And we do the
exact same thing. Maybe you tried to launch a
business and it just failed hard. Or you applied
for 20 jobs and got nothing back. Those failures
create this little voice in your head that says,
see, it's no use trying. Agency is the direct
counter to that. It's waking up and realizing
the door is open. Those chains are just in your
head. Breaking them just means standing up and
walking through that door, even if past failures
tell you not to. That takes a conscious effort,
though. A huge one. So if conformity is so dangerous,
how does breaking out of it actually translate
into professional value right now? High agency
means building your own instructions, not waiting
for a list of tasks. Yeah, that's it. You go
from being a consumer of instructions to a creator
of value. OK, so let's talk about the mindset
you need to actually do that. Right. This requires
a fundamental shift from what the source calls
the employee mindset, which, you know, needs
a task list, to the scientist mindset. And I
love this reframing because it changes your entire
relationship with failure. A scientist doesn't
get, like, sad when an experiment fails. No,
they don't take it personally. They just say,
okay, hypothesis incorrect. I now have data on
what doesn't work. Failure is just feedback.
And that iterative loop is the engine of agency.
The source lays out this five -step process,
which is basically treating your life like a
lab. Step one, pick a clear goal, something small
like, I want to earn $100 online this month.
Step two is you make a guess, a hypothesis. For
example, I think five LinkedIn posts about my
excretes will get me a client. Step three, you
test it. You actually write and publish the posts.
Step four, you check the data, not your feelings,
but actual clicks, messages, engagement. And
then step five, and this is key, change one thing.
Maybe the topic was wrong, or maybe the time
you posted was wrong. It's just this constant
data -driven cycle. And this is exactly where
AI stops being a threat and becomes this massive
multiplier for your agency. Yes, exactly. If
you have agency, AI is the most powerful lever
you will ever have. We should really stop thinking
of AI as just a tool for boring tasks. It's more
like a hyper -efficient internal team of analysts
and writers that work at the speed of light.
But you, the human, you're still the CEO. You
set the vision. You provide the soul. Low agency
people are using this incredible resource to
like summarize emails or write a simple memo.
They were completely wasting the machine. Whereas
high agency people are using it to build entire
systems to do research 10 times faster. They're
creating things that used to take a whole team
of people. They're compressing years of work
into months. You're basically scaling your own
mind by a factor of a thousand if you get this
right. Whoa. Yeah, imagine scaling that 10x research
speed to a billion queries a second. That changes
absolutely everything about how fast you can
learn and act. That's real leverage. And that
potential is only unlocked. if the human is providing
the strategic direction and the will to try things.
So what's the biggest mistake people make when
they first try to bring AI into this process?
They only use AI for simple tasks, wasting the
chance to multiply their core vision. Speaking
of multiplying, let's get really specific. Let's
break down the five human skills that power agency.
The first one is computation. Right. And computation
is just processing data. We have to start by
accepting that AI is just fundamentally better
at this. It can read a thousand books in a second.
We can't. So the human role isn't about speed,
it's about steering. High Agency is knowing how
to use these tools to organize your messy thoughts,
to analyze huge sets of data, but strategically.
It's basically prompt engineering for strategic
thinking. The AI does the heavy lifting, which
frees up your brain to focus only on interpretation
and the final decision. A great prompt would
be something like Here are 50 customer reviews.
Find the top three complaints, their root cause,
and suggest three cheap solutions we can implement
this month. That's using AI as a strategy partner.
Okay, next is skill two, transformation. This
is about how fast you can turn an idea or that
data you just analyzed into a real thing, a video,
a website, a product. The world pays you for
what you build, not just what you think about.
Agency demands that you move fast from thinking
to making. Speed is everything here. And then
skills three and four are tied together, variation
and selection. Yeah. So variation is about generating
a ton of ideas. If you have one idea and it fails,
you feel like a failure. But if you have 100
ideas, one of them is bound to work. Right. And
the 99 failures don't matter. AI is amazing for
this. You can just ask it, give me 20 unique
titles for a newsletter about client acquisition
for writers, and you get them instantly, instant
variety. But then comes selection. That's the
other side. It's the ability to look at those
20 titles and pick the winner. And this is a
purely human skill. It comes from experience,
from testing things, from building a strong gut
feeling. AI can't really copy that critical judgment.
Not yet. That critical judgment takes time. Honestly,
I still wrestle with selecting the best idea
out of 100 variations myself. It just, it requires
real -world experience that an AI doesn't have.
It absolutely does. Selection is probably the
hardest one to master because it depends entirely
on all your messy real -world data points. And
that brings us to skill five, which is attention.
This might be the foundation of everything. Your
agency depends completely on where you decide
to point your energy. I mean, if you spend all
day scrolling TikTok, you're not growing any
agency. Your focus is just scattered and you're
only consuming. Right. Agency grows when you
deliberately focus that mental spotlight of yours
on solving one specific important problem. you
have to direct your energy toward creating, not
just absorbing. So since AI handles computation
and variation so well, why do you think selection
is the hardest skill for a human to master? Selection
requires experience and a gut feeling developed
only through continuous testing and doing. Okay,
so if we've got these skills, we need a safe
place to practice them, right? Without bedding
the farm. The source calls this the agency gym.
And that gym is social media. It's the open internet.
I mean, starting a business used to cost thousands
of dollars. It was a huge risk. But now you can
test an idea for free. If you post a video and
it gets zero views, what did you lose? Nothing.
But you got data. And if it works, you get audience.
You get confidence. You build agency one small
successful test at a time. To really succeed
in that gym, though, you need to build what the
source calls a skill stack. This is about resisting
that urge to specialize in one tiny thing and
instead becoming more of a generalist. Agency
really lives at the intersection of four different
areas. Right. First you need what they call evergreen
skills. Things like writing, sales, marketing.
Skills that were valuable 50 years ago and will
be valuable 50 years from now. Second is personal
interests. This is just what you love, what you're
curious about. This is what gives your work that
human soul that an AI can't just copy. Third
is direct experience. All your past wins and,
more importantly, your past failures. That's
the data that builds your selection skill we
were just talking about. And fourth is just the
internet. That's your free distribution machine
to reach thousands of people instantly. So the
skills to learn are writing, marketing, sales,
and AI literacy. That's your 10x power tool.
But what about people who are just? They're truly
stuck. A really common one is waiting for some
kind of passion to show up before they start
anything. Yeah, waiting for passion is such a
classic mistake. Passion doesn't come first.
Passion comes after you start doing something
and you start getting a little bit good at it.
If you're lost, don't wait for passion. Just
start moving away from what you hate. Hate your
commute. Okay, research remote jobs. Movement
creates clarity. And the other big one is time.
People feel like they don't have time, but this
isn't about hustle culture, is it? Not at all.
Agency is about efficiency. It's about building
smart systems. You don't need eight hours a day.
30 minutes of real deep work. Using AI tools
like, you know, using CLAW to summarize a dense
article in two minutes. That's often enough to
run your daily experiment. To give everyone a
concrete starting point, the source lays out
a really simple 30 -day jumpstart plan. Yeah,
it's a manageable four -week thing. So days one
to seven, just find one thing you're curious
about. Research five people who are already successful
at it. Days 8 through 14, run a tiny experiment.
Post one thing you learned about it on LinkedIn
or X, just one. Days 15 to 21, check the results.
Look at the data. Did anyone like it? Did anyone
comment? Use that feedback to change one small
thing. And then for the rest of the month, days
22 to 30, keep posting, keep iterating. And this
is critical. Reach out to one person in that
field. Offer to help them for free. just to learn
how they work. So if someone is truly completely
stuck, what's the single best first step to find
some direction? Stop waiting for passion. Instead,
start moving away from what you dislike to gain
immediate clarity. That's really the core insight
here, isn't it? The most successful people in
the future are going to be the unreasonable ones,
the ones who just don't wait for permission or
validation to create something. They're the people
with human agency. You have everything you need
to start right now. You've got the internet,
you have these unbelievably powerful AI tools,
and now you know the five skills. The only thing
left to do is take that first, probably messy,
self -directed step. So here's your challenge
for this week. Pick one small topic you want
to learn. Ask an AI tool to explain it to you
like you're 10 years old. Then write one paragraph
about it in your own words and share it somewhere
online. That simple act of creating and sharing,
that's the birth of your agency. Don't wait for
permission. Just start.