Why Being High Agency Makes You More Successful (just do this) transcript

So last month I stumbled across this blog article. One of the best blog articles I've ever read. And the way that this article came into existence, I think is a perfect meta example of what the blog article itself is describing. And in this blog article is what might just be the most important skill that you can develop in the 21st century. At least that is according to the author of this blog, George Mack. Now George Mack has a very large Twitter following.

He's a great thinker. I've been following him for a long time. Really enjoy his stuff. And a number of years ago, he posed this question. I think it was back in 2017 2018. He posed this question that if you were trapped in a third world prison, you just got like, you know, arrested for whatever reason on your on your journeys through the world. You got arrested, you're in this prison. Who is the one person you would call that you have confidence would get your ass out of that jail with no more information than just help.

I need help. I'm stuck and trapped. and they have to figure it out on their own. That person that you would call has what George Mack would describe as high agency. And that is the title of the blog article. That is the title of the the URL. Actually, it's just high agency.com. I highly recommend you go read it. It'll take you about 30 minutes to read through it, but it's fantastic. There's a lot of pictures, a lot of visuals, so it's not a heavy 30 minutes.

But this concept of high agency, I want to I want to unpack this a little bit more deeply because he scratched the surface of describing what high agency is. It's the ability to go and kick a dent in the universe to find solutions without having a path carved for you. The ability to just figure out. And that is that that ability to figure out is a very valuable skill in the game of entrepreneurship, game of business.

I don't know any successful founders that don't have a high degree of figure it out ability. And so maybe you're at the beginning of your journey right now and this is still very big and scary for you and you're still trying to figure out how to figure it out, right? Well, I want to give you some ideas about how it is that we can develop agency, how we can go and and and kick a dent in the world. And one of the very first attribute, what I want to do actually is I want to give you five steps or five ideas to be thinking about.

And I want to give you some tactical takeaways, some activities that you could go and execute that would one be high agency activities. And then two would help you become a more high agency person. And if you do that, you're going to be well on your way. So number one, the very first thing that high agency people do is that they compress timelines. So instead of hearing um I need this thing by end of week, they go I need this by end of day.

I need this by end of hour. They look at things that other people say that's the standard waiting time. It takes two weeks to get this thing done or if you want to order that thing it's going to take you two weeks to get here. They look at that and they say nah, not good enough for me. I'm not going to sit around and wait for the universe to bring me the thing on the standard timeline. I'm going to figure out how I can compress decades into days. how I can get the benefits faster because you you only have as much time as anybody else does in this world.

So your your results are going to dictate be dictated by how much leverage you apply to the time that you have. And one of the biggest levers that you have is how quickly you actually execute tasks, execute things, how quickly you can pull forward timelines. So that's the first one is compressing timelines. The fastest way, well, let me put a pin in at how to actually do this until we get to the end of the video. I'm going to unpack for you some things that you can go do to help you become a person who knows how to how who instinctively compresses timelines.

Number two, a high agency person kicks down doors. They don't just go well, they they start by knocking on every door. They see a door, they're like, I'm going to knock on that door. I don't know where that door leads. I'm going to knock on that door. They never assume doors are locked or that they're going to get shot for knocking on the door. They go to every single door, and that is, you know, a metaphor for opportunity.

They go to every single door and they knock. And when nobody answers, they keep knocking. And when somebody answers and they turn them away and say, "Go away. I don't want you here." They kick down the door and they come in anyway. And they're like, "I'm taking over the house. This is my house now." Right? Like, okay, maybe it's not so aggressive. Maybe that's not so violent. But high agency people do not sit around waiting for doors to magically open.

They go, they knock on the door, they try the door handle, and then they kick it down if they have to. They make a way instead of sitting around waiting to be welcomed into the land of honey and opportunity. Third thing is high agency people run a lot of experiments. They have their fingers in a whole lot of different pies. They're trying a whole lot of things because they know that rate of iterative failure is the best indicator of future success.

The faster you can iteratively fail, the faster you will find success. Now, iteratively is the key word here. That's a weird word, but it's the ability to fail, pivot, fail, pivot, fail, try to do it again, better, fail, pivot, right? Over and over and over and over. And if you do that and you increase the rate at which you do that, it's inevitable you will eventually find success. And so, high agency people are not afraid of failure.

They experiment constantly, test everything, and then they collect a lot of data, they put it together, and they say, "Now, what do I do from here?" The fourth thing that high agency people do is they never hesitate to shoot their shot. Never hesitate. They get the ball. Fourth quarter, game on the line. They're not looking to pass the ball. They see the opportunity. They shoot their shot. So when they meet somebody at a networking conference, when they talk to somebody on the street, whenever they get the glimpse that this is a person that somehow someway it might be beneficial for them to be in proximity of, they shoot their shot.

And so if you're a business owner, the the the best indicator that I have if you're going to be successful or not is when you are standing around and if you hear somebody talking, say at the gym, you hear somebody in the background talking about a problem that you solve in your business. If you don't stop what you're doing and go over to them and introduce yourself and say, "Hey, I think I might be able to help you out.

Don't want to interrupt your sets. You got a good pump going on. Here's my card. Give me a call. I think I can help you with that problem. I just overheard you. Sorry for about about that, but uh looking good. See you later." Right? If you don't shoot your shot, you're never going to hit. What do they say? You miss 100% of the shots you never take. It's cliche, but it's true. So, if you're not willing to see the opportunity and then just go and seize it as quickly as possible, you you're not a high agency person yet.

Number five, do not shy away from hand-tohand combat. High agency people are the the ones that are the least likely to talk about scale or scalability or that won't scale. the pe the lowest agency people I I've ever met, they're always the ones who are like talking about starting a business, starting about this thing, but the thing that's holding them back is like, I'm not really sure that this idea will scale. I'm not really sure how I would scale this.

They talk about scale before they've even like done High agency people do not do this because they understand that scale is on the back end of doing things that don't scale, handtohand combat. And even at scale, even when they are successful and they have this big team and they have all these things, they still are in the weeds doing the day-to-day hand-to-hand combat, it's surprising how engaged the best founders and entrepreneurs remain even after they have people that are still operating the business.

I was listening to a podcast the other day. Um, David Senra, uh, the founder of what it's called, no founders, he talk he he reads the biographies of history's greatest founders. He distills it into his podcast and he shares it with you. And the last one that he did, the last one I listened to at least was about Todd Graves, who is the founder of Raising Canes. It's a business that does $10 billion every year in topline revenue.

Wait, is it? Yeah, that's right. And he owns 90% of it. This guy is still like as he is going in to do an interview on a podcast just like this. His team comes up and they get his approval for an ad that they're about to run on Instagram. 10 billion company still needing to get his approval to run the ads. He is that deep into the weeds. It's hand-to- hand combat. Now, I'm not saying that you have to do that. I'm not saying that if you don't do that, you're going to you're not going to be successful.

I'm just saying the most successful high agency people are not afraid to do hand- to-hand combat and do the things that do not scale in order to scale, surprisingly, paradoxically. Okay, so those are five attributes of high agency people. Uh they compress timelines, they kick down doors, they experiment constantly, they shoot their shot, and they do hand tohand combat constantly. Now, here's some ideas. are some tactical takeaways that I want you to think about how to implement.

I have recently in the last 3 weeks started posing a question to myself and putting on top of my calendar every single morning. What is one high agency activity I could execute today? Just putting myself in the frame. What is one high agency activity? And that means it's a high agency activity is typically going to require a lot of energy and and attention and output, right? But just going through that mindset of like, what is something that I could do today that others would describe as high agency?

Man, you're about to do something really powerful. So, let me give you some ideas of things that you could do that I would classify as high agency. You could create and sell a product in under 24 hours. Right now, at the back end of this podcast, I want you to go look at all of your products and your services. I want you to ask yourself, what's a new product that I could take from the sawdust uh from what I've created over here?

What's other systems or processes? What are other things that people would find valuable? How could I package that? And how could I make a sale by the end of the day? That right there is an incredibly high agency thing because most people will spend six months thinking about launching a product, thinking about launching a business. But if you can be the person who can do that in literally a day, that is incredibly high agency.

So that's one activity. Another one would be to host a dinner with five successful people by the end of the week. So what I want you to do is I want you to look around your network. I want to I want you to go to the newspaper. I want you to, you know, go to these businesses that you look up to and admire. Find a way to get in the door. Contact that person. Maybe you have a maybe you have a friend who has an in with them, right?

And then say, "Hey, I'm putting together a private founders dinner here is on this night. Would love to have you." Right? That would be incredibly high agency. Even if only one person showed up would be well worth it. Another one would be to call every single person in your phone by the end of the week. I don't know how many people you have in your phone. That could be a really big task. Could be a really small task.

I don't know. But I'm guessing you have a lot of people in your phone that you have haven't talked to in years. And it would be really weird for you to reach out to them right now, right? But that is kicking down doors. That is handtohand combat. And that is shooting your shot. So what do you got to lose? They're just strangers to you anyways at this point. So reach out to them. Start a conversation. I'm not saying go and try and make a sale to them.

I'm just saying go talk to them and see what kind of magic appears. Another one would be to um meditate for 60 minutes in one day. Try it. Seriously, if you've never tried to meditate, like most people struggle to meditate for like a minute, maybe 10 minutes. Some some weird happens at around 60 minutes though, like your brain start you start to struggle. So, I I did uh 300 days straight of uh 60-minute meditations. It was incredibly powerful.

But if you've never done that before, I would consider that to be an incredibly high agency activity. Something that is incredibly difficult but has a high amount of uh leveraged impact on you. So those are some ideas. I'd be curious though, what would you consider to be high agency activity that you could execute in the next day and the next week? Put it down in the comments. I'd love to hear from you guys and I'll see you in the next