You Can Just Do Things - Cate Hall

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

Introduction

Maybe you know someone else like me, the kind of person who’s constantly changing jobs or blowing something up, but who always seems to land on their feet. The kind who blunders sideways through life with panache, achieving unreasonable results without following the normal rules for success—without, let’s say, deserving what they get. You might wonder: What is that person’s secret? I would bet that the answer is the subject of this book: personal agency.

I think of agency as the capacity to both see and act on degrees of freedom that other people overlook. It’s being able to see choices where others only see constraints.

I have come to believe that if you want to live a satisfying, meaningful life, agency is the most important thing to cultivate

Agency entails a radically different way of relating to the world. Rather than avoiding failure and rejection, agentic people see these as the inevitable costs of personal progress, and opportunities for learning. Rather than assuming that everything worthwhile has been done already, they assume that many great ventures are postponed out of inertia and fear

They choose to believe that everything is learnable, even traits and skills often believed to be innate, like charisma or curiosity.

fundamentally, they take responsibility. They act on the world, rather than the world acting on them.

the kind of responsibility I have in mind is something different from obligation—it is its antithesis, in fact. The kind of responsibility taken by agentic people is more like autonomy, ownership, release, liberation. It’s an antidote to the wrongness of feeling stuck in our lives.

You figure out how to move in new directions. In the process, you learn that many of the supposed rules in life are imaginary boundaries.

The really excellent news is that agency is not a fixed trait—you can become more agentic.

agency didn’t come naturally to me. In fact, I lived the first three decades of my life on autopilot

This is another important lesson about agency, one conveyed by the title of this book: When I left law to play poker professionally, I was still losing money playing it. The “reasonable” path would have been to spend a few years studying as a side hustle while working my way up from the lowest stakes to higher ones. Instead, I figured out how big a risk I could take without literally bankrupting myself and jumped straight into the deep end, trusting that I’d be able to figure it out.

Anytime you find yourself in the enviable position of actually knowing what you want out of life, you’re allowed to skip all the artificial steps standing between you and it and work on your goal as directly as possible, doing only what matters to advance the plot.

I consider the state of addiction to be the opposite of agency. Agency entails the ability to recognize all the degrees of freedom one has. Addiction strips them away, reduces life to one option, and subordinates everything else in service of making sure that option is selected over and over again.

After brain damage forced me to relearn how to accomplish some of the simplest tasks in my life, I stopped assuming that I knew the best way to do things, opening up new space for continuous improvement. And, since defeating addiction requires solutions that work when you’re at your laziest and weakest, I let go of my fetish for mental endurance and hard work and started being more eager to look for shortcuts to the results I wanted

I’ve since realized that many people want more agency, but not everyone knows where to start. This book is my attempt to take agency cultivation out of the realm of chance by distilling its most important aspects into a series of practical tactics

It’s organized into five sections:

Wake up and move: How to see your life afresh in order to find possibilities for high-agency behavior

Be willing to look stupid: How to stop seeing your life in terms of the “Path of Least Embarrassment,”

Get out of your lane: How to shed stories about who you are and what you’re capable of that don’t serve you

Walk through walls: How to take your life into your own hands and make radical progress on your goals—fast.

Find your limits: How to locate your “real ceiling,”

Each of these categories contains multiple tactics. No one tactic is the key to agency

if you absorb any one of them fully, it will take you meaningfully closer to the mindset I’ve come to count on, which I also see in others who achieve outlandish results. In combination, they become even more potent.

A couple closing notes

First, it’s my experience that, rather than being high- or low-agency in a global sense, people are almost always selectively agentic.

I suspect this happens because, when we first encounter a problem in the world, we approach it with the level of resourcefulness that’s available to us at the time—spiritual, psychological, financial. But we allow our orientation to the problem to become fixed in time at that point of low agency, and it never occurs to us to revisit it.

In my particular corner of the world, there are tons of high achievers in work. But many of them haven’t applied the same ingenuity to their inner life or relationships

Instead, they just put up with those problems—or, worse, they fight through them, with a primitive solution that requires willpower

Look across the three theaters of your life—work, relationships, and self-relationship—and take note of the biggest issues you face. Then, read this book with that area in mind, because that’s where cultivating agency is likely to be the most transformative

Second, the astute reader will notice that, sometimes, I offer seemingly contradictory tips

But there’s really no contradiction. In a boxing match, the coach in your corner would, at times, advise you to be defensively responsible, to keep your hands up and stay patient. Then, later, if you’d hurt your opponent, your coach might urge you to just knock the guy out.

They’re both options that are appropriate at different times.

Agency is about seeing new options for effective action, and feeling at liberty to choose unconventional ones

Section I: Wake Up and Move

Sometimes the possibility of taking full responsibility for your life comes upon you like a revelation

it’s also possible to intentionally engineer this kind of epiphany. You can learn the art of looking at your life afresh, of waking up to the way things really are rather than the way you’ve deluded yourself into believing they are.

To this end, the chapters in this section will show you how to:

Ask radical questions about the way you currently live

Deal explicitly with the unspoken problems in your life

Come to see yourself more clearly by getting real information about how others see you.

they can provide you with a powerful new perspective on life. Seeing, however, isn’t enough; you actually have to act on the new possibilities you’ve uncovered.

it’s never too late to change course. But how do you actually internalize that truth and get to work? How do you take action when you feel paralyzed?

Chapter 1: Stare into the Abyss

It can be hard to say when the haunting begins, because we tend to ignore the doubts, pushing them out of our minds. But they lurk patiently on the edge of perception. Perhaps: “Am I actually miserable in my marriage, despite how hard I try to be happy?”

Most of us naturally gravitate toward being low-curiosity and high-ego; we defend the self-image we currently have. That means shutting out hard questions

I’m suggesting that you take the time to engage in that intentional, intensive self-questioning. Call to your mind that big scary question that could shake up your way of being and dwell on it with a spirit of genuine inquiry. It’s okay to go slow; you don’t need to solve your life’s biggest challenge in an afternoon. The key thing is just to admit to yourself that you know the question.

the question of whether you are living a life you truly want;

Ask yourself, what question should you spend time with? What abyss do you need to stare into?

If nothing comes to mind immediately, try these on for size:

Are you currently accepting something as “self-care” that is, in fact, an addiction?

Are you currently doing something that is doomed to fail? If so, why aren’t you adjusting your approach? Do you actually want to fail, because that would be more socially acceptable than just quitting, or more comfortable than radically changing the way you’re going about it?

How many hours per year of “leisure” time do you blow on activities that aren’t actually rewarding, and what could you have done with the last couple years’ worth of that time instead?

Which causes do you earnestly believe you care about, but never devote time or money to?

Imagine your child, or someone else you love, inherits your exact habits upon coming into adulthood. Which ones would you pay good money to delete from their life?

Chapter 8: Learn to See Traits as Skills

The default way of viewing the world is to believe that there is a huge number of things about ourselves we cannot change, particularly if they’re qualities we’ve had since we were young. Maybe that’s being bad-tempered, or introverted, or anxiety-ridden.

I assume that most things we think of as fixed traits are actually quite malleable if we both believe they are and put the same effort into learning them that we would into learning anything else

I had a more fixed mindset about personality before I experienced addiction and watched it turn me into a much worse version of myself

I’m absolutely willing to believe that there are limits to how far an assumption of malleability can take you. Just as it’s relatively easy to change your weight but very difficult to change your height, personality traits probably lie on a spectrum of how readily changeable they actually are

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

many attributes are nothing more than labels we attach to clumps of behaviors and skills that we can learn.

They may be complicated clumps

Social attunement requires strong perspective-taking ability, getting out of our heads to consider other people’s feelings and experiences, as well as skill in reading body language and tone of voice

But cooking is also a complicated clump of behaviors, and most people are confident they can become decent cooks with practical instruction.

Our tendency when thinking about characteristics we’d like to change is to engage in highly critical self-talk

These negative identity thoughts are self-fulfilling prophecies

Instead, 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.

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