I feel pretty happy with this post in hindsight! Nothing major comes to mind that I’d want to change.
I think that agency is a really, really important concept, and one of the biggest drivers of ways my life has improved. But the notion of agency as a legible, articulated concept (rather than just an intuitive notion) is foreign to a lot of people, and jargon-y. I don’t think there was previously a good post cleanly explaining the concept, and I’m very satisfied that this one exists and that I can point people to it.
I particularly like my framing of “identify what’s holding you back and do something about it”. That’s a key mental move, that I hadn’t cleanly articulated to myself before writing this.
But beyond just explaining what agency is, what I really want to achieve is to help the reader build agency. On this front, I think this post is OK, but not great. I try to make things concrete, have exercises, and walk people through how to link things to their goals, which is significantly better than a lecture-style post. But also, getting people to do anything after reading a post is really hard, and I don’t know how to solve this problem, nor can think of good examples of someone solving the problem very well. Which is really sad! I think that having it be shorter, and maybe having separate posts cleanly focusing on specific mental moves on agency, might improve it.
I think this post could in theory be turned into a good workshop, and that that would be much more effective. I had vague plans to do this, but just never got round to it!
Self-Review
I feel pretty happy with this post in hindsight! Nothing major comes to mind that I’d want to change.
I think that agency is a really, really important concept, and one of the biggest drivers of ways my life has improved. But the notion of agency as a legible, articulated concept (rather than just an intuitive notion) is foreign to a lot of people, and jargon-y. I don’t think there was previously a good post cleanly explaining the concept, and I’m very satisfied that this one exists and that I can point people to it.
I particularly like my framing of “identify what’s holding you back and do something about it”. That’s a key mental move, that I hadn’t cleanly articulated to myself before writing this.
But beyond just explaining what agency is, what I really want to achieve is to help the reader build agency. On this front, I think this post is OK, but not great. I try to make things concrete, have exercises, and walk people through how to link things to their goals, which is significantly better than a lecture-style post. But also, getting people to do anything after reading a post is really hard, and I don’t know how to solve this problem, nor can think of good examples of someone solving the problem very well. Which is really sad! I think that having it be shorter, and maybe having separate posts cleanly focusing on specific mental moves on agency, might improve it.
I think this post could in theory be turned into a good workshop, and that that would be much more effective. I had vague plans to do this, but just never got round to it!