Your Agency is your Alpha ✨

General
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TLDR

  1. Agency is the ability to produce an intervention that creates a particular effect
  2. Agency is the ability to manifest realities you want & avoid ones you do not want.
  3. Your Agency is your Alpha

Your Agency is your Alpha

Agency:

  • action or intervention, especially such as to produce a particular effect.

Agentic:

  1. able to express or expressing agency or control on one’s own behalf or on the behalf of another.
  2. (psychology) Having to do with performance, or achieving status.
  3. (psychology) Having agency; able to make independent decisions in pursuit of a goal [source]

Almost all projects I’ve seen been a part of since joining the web3 space I’ve seen a consistent trend: The contributors who are the most agentic are the ones who are the most successful. By success I mean building long term relationships in the space, repeatedly creating value, & just generally not flailing out.

It’s too bad its so much energetic investment to be agentic! Otherwise everyone would do it. Being agentic is tough. Being agentic means being agile. It means working through bullshit. It means running through OODA loops for fun & profit. It means taking responsibility for your own actions & your own output. It’s being strategic. It’s investing in learning, sensemaking, and pattern recognition. It’s the struggle but it’s also what comes after the struggle. It’s having a bias towards action. It’s about being persistent. It’s about knowing when to rest. It’s so much more but at the same time it’s way simpler than all of that.

It’s also being able to laugh at yourself.

76ms9u

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Reminds me of this Bono quote
quotes-world-malleable-bono-480x480

Many times things you want to see in the world - can end up strictly in your hands to see done. Scary in ways, but remarkable in other ways when you commit to see it happen. whatever it takes.

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Interestingly, for our contexts here, agency is more a social phenomenon than individual. This means we can design social systems that are net more agentic than the system they replace. In other words, agency is not a zero sum game.

I maintain a glossary of concepts bandied around in our contexts, if only because “wisdom begins with the definition of terms.” That appeals to my pedantry :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:. Here’s the entry for agency.

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great post, read a similar twitter thread a few days ago and really started seeing this truly energies in messy dao discords and hackathons https://twitter.com/george__mack/status/1068238562443841538

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Not sure this Twitterer actually understands how sociologists define agency. He claims it’s a personality trait. It is not. Personality will be in the mix, but equally one’s personality is shaped by one’s environment including the degree of agency one is used to.

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