Something I've never had much difficulty with is doing things that other people may consider “impossible”, or outside their realm of possibility.
“Sure, I'll cook that dish from a cuisine I’m not familiar with.” “Sure, I'll learn video editing and arrange this music video in 2 days.” “Sure, I'll take on fixing this mess at work which 4 people have failed to untangle before.”
Which is pretty funny, because there are many things well within the realm of the possible that I find very difficult. Household stuff, for a start.
Comparing the two situations gives some insight as to the key parts of the thing people call agency - what “doing big things” is made of.
Motivation and its components
Motivation is all about the ability to get things done. I’ve been slowly working on a “threadapalooza” twitter thread on the topic of motivation, which is not yet complete, so I won’t re-tread the same ground here in much detail except to enumerate the components of it.
I conceptualise motivation in this thread in 5 parts:
Vision - knowing what you want/where you're going, being able to choose the desired outcome and picture it clearly
Navigation - making a plan/directions for how to get where you're going, making the plan practical enough to do
Impetus - the forward energy for the actual execution
Non-impedance - eliminating enough of the ways to lose energy that you have forward motion
Conviction - sticking the course.
There's many asterisks and details on each of the five, but generally speaking if you're trying to debug a lack of “things happening” in your life in general, there's likely something wrong in one of these areas.
In this post, I wanted to highlight a couple more concepts - relevant not just to “doing things” in general, but specifically “doing big things” or even “doing (what others consider to be) impossible things”. In the five-part motivation framework, we can consider the below as a way of bolstering our “Navigation” capabilities beyond what we need for day-to-day motivation.
Actionable parts of the world
I read an article today about perception of household chores1, which introduced me to the concept “affordance theory”2. The article argues that people don't do chores around the house because they don't perceive the actions attached to the objects:
Philosophers seeking to answer questions around inequality in household labour and the invisibility of women’s work in the home have proposed a new theory – that men and women are trained by society to see different possibilities for action in the same domestic environment.
They say a view called “affordance theory” – that we experience objects and situations as having actions implicitly attached – underwrites the age-old gender disparity when it comes to the myriad mundane tasks of daily home maintenance.
For example, women may look at a surface and see an implied action – ‘to be wiped’ – whereas men may just observe a crumb-covered countertop.
Setting aside the gendered conclusions the article is aiming for, as the non-chore-doer in my house the “not perceiving a task” mental status rings true to me. And I do notice the opposite, particularly at work - a problem with looking for a creative solution is viewed as an affordance for action by me and as an immovable obstacle by others.
Affordances are a mental construct, and we can shape our grasp of them in a few ways. The most direct is through our own learning. Every time we try a course of action for the first time, or practise it again, we have a chance to add to our understanding of affordances in the world by noticing and observing the outcomes.
We can hinder this learning through being too afraid to try, or being too enmeshed in negativity to pick up a useful affordance. If we deny ourselves the opportunity to attempt things, of course we won’t learn. And if we do something grudgingly, the affordance we learn is that we can do it but it'll make unhappy - not the most appealing option next time. So it helps to come at this from a place of kindness to ourselves and patience with our own pace of trying new things. Give ourselves the chance to learn, and learn pleasantly.
Collecting levers
The metaphor I like to use for understanding my affordances in a system is “levers”, from a boss of mine who would tell me: “always tell me the problems you have that you think are impossible, I might have some levers you don't know about yet”.
This evokes some mental motions that I credit for my power level:
Realise there are levers you don’t have
Revisit your “unsolvable” problems
Trust that other people have levers you don’t.
These three mental motions (or absence thereof) work together in a virtuous or vicious circle.
If you subtly believe that your own levers are the only ones that exist, then anything that is outside your current power level is implicitly impossible. So there's no point mulling over problems you can’t solve - they're unsolvable full stop. So you never end up asking for help, and never realise that someone else might solve them, and never learn what they're capable of that you're not.
On the other hand, if you ask for help from people with different powers to you, you observe how they solve the problem, and realise with awe the possibilities available to them that you've never contemplated. Maybe you learn some of these levers for yourself, expanding your affordances and your belief that power levels can in fact grow. Next time you encounter a problem, you know it's outside your power now, but maybe future you or someone else can solve it. So you keep mulling it and keep asking for help until you figure out something new.
At this point I've been brewing in the virtuous cycle for so long that I’ve picked up most of the levers of all the connections I ever made at work (who are a collection of very skilled, smart, agentic and capable people). This is why I basically assume all work problems are solvable. I see a problem and think “I can talk to X, who will talk to Y, who will interface with system Z in order to A” - based on a well formed map of not only my own levers but also the different lever-powers of those around me and in my network.
If this isn’t a familiar way of working for you, I recommend as a starting point the act of “writing down a description of a problem you can’t solve and bringing it to someone you believe might be more powerful than you at solving it”. Perhaps an expert in some area, the leader of an organisation, someone skilled or even just someone enthusiastic. Even if they can’t solve the problem, they might show you some levers you don’t have - which is a way to jump in to the virtuous loop.
If you already do this sometimes but not reliably, then perhaps you can find some way to systematise or enhance this pattern. Are the classes of problem you notice you don’t ask for help on? Or people in your network you don't ask for particular things, but could? Getting better at explaining your problem or listening to others’ explanations of their methods would also be effective.
If you already have a good collection of your own levers and the levers of those around you, then I suspect the next step to increasing power levels is to broaden our networks. The more well-connected we are to different kinds of people with powerful levers in different places and different systems, the more affordance we'll have.
Everpresent Internet gurus
A special case of the “define the problem and ask someone" trick is the “define the problem and ask youtube/reddit/tiktok/google” trick.
This requires a bit of skill in search engine wizardry and ability to imitate/learn from instructions, but if you have those then it functionally works the same as asking a person. You soon get a sense of what levers are afforded by each online source of information - which is an *awful lot*.
“How to cook/clean/build/fix/operate/create/learn X” for common enough X are basically all solved problems for our omnipresent online gurus. Learning from and trusting them expands your affordances an enormous amount.
Agency is not magic
The summary of all this is that a person who seems to have lots of agency probably has a combination of: enough motivation for them to get by, and a good collection of levers in the area they have agency in. Both of these are fairly mundane abstractions that you can gradually work your way to having more of.
Perhaps one interaction that makes agentic people seem magic is that having more agency will make you more capable of acquiring even more agency (by acting to streamline your motivation in new ways, or collect new levers). So from the perspective of someone with less agency, someone who has more of it would seem to be levelling up impossibly fast.
Hopefully my analysis gives you a sense that even if the overall system of agency seems magic, there are mundane and simple component parts underlying it. By putting a little energy into one of the bootstrapping parts, you might be able to benefit from the magic-like thing too.
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/men-may-not-perceive-domestic-tasks-as-needing-doing-in-the-same-way-as-women-philosophers-argue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance