Cultivating Agency

Three years ago, I sent an email that shouldn’t have worked.

I was an undergraduate with no credentials worth mentioning, writing to a professor in Singapore whose papers had been keeping me up at night. Not because they were assigned reading – I’d found them on my own, following citation trails like breadcrumbs through the forest of academic publishing. The email was precise: here’s what fascinates me about your work, here’s the specific question I can’t stop thinking about, here’s why I think I could contribute something useful.

The response came back in less than 24 hours. By summer, I was in his lab at NUS, working on problems I’d only dreamed about touching. That email taught me something I’ve been trying to articulate ever since: the difference between accepting the world as given and recognizing it as something more fluid – a set of conventions that often dissolve under gentle pressure.

We navigate life with invisible maps. Some we inherit from our parents, some we absorb from our peers, some we download from whatever cultural operating system we’re running. Most of the time, we don’t even realize we’re following a map – we think we’re following reality itself. The moment you realize you have a map is the moment agency becomes possible. Because maps can be wrong. They can be outdated. They can be drawn by people who were navigating entirely different terrain.

Agency isn’t about throwing away all maps and wandering randomly. It’s about developing the skill to read multiple maps simultaneously – the official one that everyone else is using, and the one you’re drawing yourself based on direct observation. When these maps diverge, that’s where the interesting decisions lie.

Here’s what I’ve noticed: when you deviate from expected paths, you encounter a specific kind of resistance. It’s not always dramatic opposition. More often, it’s a subtle friction – the slight pause before someone responds to your unconventional plan, the careful way they phrase their concerns, the stories they tell about others who tried something similar.

This friction isn’t arbitrary. It’s the social equivalent of air resistance – a force that increases with the speed and magnitude of your deviation. And like air resistance, it’s not inherently good or bad. It’s just physics.

The people with high agency aren’t the ones who don’t feel this resistance. They’re the ones who’ve learned to factor it into their calculations. They know that moving against consensus requires more energy than moving with it, and they budget accordingly.

There’s a common misconception that agency means being contrarian – that the goal is to be different for its own sake. This misses something crucial. The founder who drops out of college isn’t trying to be weird; they’re optimizing for something specific that happens to require an unconventional path.

Real agency is boringly strategic. It’s about having clear objectives and being willing to take non-standard routes to reach them. The apparent weirdness is a side effect, not the point. I think of it like this: if you’re navigating by different stars than everyone else, you’ll naturally end up in different places. The goal isn’t to be in a different place – it’s to be in the right place for what you’re trying to achieve.

Every time we make a significant decision, we’re essentially running a computation: given my goals, my resources, my constraints, and the state of the world, what’s my next move?

Most people outsource this computation. They use cached solutions – career paths that worked for previous generations, life scripts that seem to produce acceptable outcomes. There’s nothing wrong with this. Cached solutions exist because they work reasonably well for many people.

But cached solutions are optimized for average cases, not specific ones. They’re like using the same recipe for every meal – nutritious enough, but hardly optimal for every situation.

People with high agency do more of their own computing. They’re willing to work from first principles, even when it’s exhausting. They ask: given my specific situation, what’s actually the best move? Not what would most people do, but what should I do?

Through observation and experimentation, I’ve identified what seems to enable this kind of original thinking:

1. Belief in possibility: Before you can chart a new path, you have to believe new paths exist. This often comes from seeing cracks in the current system – inefficiencies that suggest better ways of doing things.
2. Something to protect: Whether it’s a vision, a value, or a person, having something you care about more than social approval provides the motivation to push through resistance.
3. Internal locus of control: The conviction that your actions meaningfully influence outcomes. Not that you control everything, but that you control enough to matter.
4. Tolerance for ambiguity: New paths don’t come with clear markers. You need to be comfortable navigating by instruments rather than landmarks. Computational stamina: The willingness to keep recalculating when circumstances change, rather than stubbornly sticking to an outdated plan.

The email to Singapore wasn’t my first attempt at creating opportunities from thin air. It was the first one that worked spectacularly, but it was preceded by dozens of smaller experiments – starting small projects, testing the boundaries of what was possible within existing structures. This is how agency develops: not through grand gestures but through progressive calibration. Each small experiment teaches you something about how the world actually works versus how you’ve been told it works. The data accumulates. Your private map becomes more accurate.

The key is keeping the experiments small enough that failure is informative rather than catastrophic. You’re essentially running A/B tests on life strategies.

After years of thinking about agency, I’ve come to see it not as a personality trait but as a skill – the ability to navigate using multiple coordinate systems simultaneously. You need to understand the conventional paths well enough to know when and why you’re deviating from them. You need your own internal compass calibrated clearly enough to maintain direction when external landmarks disappear. Most importantly, you need the wisdom to know when to trust which navigation system. Sometimes the beaten path is beaten for good reason. Sometimes it’s just beaten.

That email to Singapore worked not because it was bold, but because it was precise. It demonstrated that I understood both maps – the conventional one that said undergraduates don’t email professors out of the blue, and my own that said this specific professor might value this specific approach from this specific person.

Agency isn’t about ignoring the rules. It’s about understanding them well enough to know which ones are load-bearing and which are merely decorative. It’s about developing your own sense of physics – what moves are possible, what resistance you’ll encounter, what energy you’ll need to reach escape velocity.

Most of all, it’s about recognizing that the world is more elastic than it appears. The structures that seem fixed are often just very persistent suggestions. And sometimes, with the right approach at the right angle, they bend.

The question isn’t whether you have agency. It’s whether you’re willing to do the work to discover where yours lies. The territory is vast, mostly unmapped, and waiting.