I used to be a high-performing robot - by Cate Hall

Agency is having a moment. In the past couple years, it’s become a kind of catch-all buzzword—used to explain everything from startup success to personal reinvention to parenting style. Some of this discourse is genuinely useful. Some of it is insufferable. And there are real criticisms to be made. But two of the most common ones miss the mark. One is that agency is simply a rebrand of success—that talking about it is just another way to glorify people who are already getting ahead, a pretend explanation for why some people win and others lose that obscures the real origin in luck. The other is that agency, even if real, isn’t a concept that can be actioned, but rather a fancy label for a fixed trait like intelligence or height. My life is a testament to the fact that neither is true. Agency is not the same as success, and it’s not innate. It’s something you can learn. I understand why people feel otherwise. A lot of people talking about agency today are the sorts who dropped out of co

Agency is having a moment. In the past couple years, it’s become a kind of catch-all buzzword—used to explain everything from startup success to personal reinvention to parenting style. Some of this discourse is genuinely useful. Some of it is insufferable. And there are real criticisms to be made. But two of the most common ones miss the mark. One is that agency is simply a rebrand of success—that talking about it is just another way to glorify people who are already getting ahead, a pretend explanation for why some people win and others lose that obscures the real origin in luck. The other i