Personal agency isn't about skills or working around obstacles. It grows when you build things and iterate on them. As you get better at making, others notice, and you start to believe you can actually change things.
Chapters
Before, it was very easy to always say, well, I will never be able to do this because insert skill issue. We're realizing that even if you have the skills at your fingertips, the thing that matters is agency. I don't think agency is very evenly distributed in the world. One day you wake up and you realize the world is made up by people no smarter than you. I think if you tinker and if you make things, then you are now on this treadmill of just creating. And then you're like, oh, it's actually not that hard to learn how to make that chair in my office. Or let me tweak it a little bit. So just do that versus, I think when a lot of people hear agency, they think of themselves as they're in this big machine and they're like, oh, okay, I'm going to circumvent my terrible boss or manager or whatever so that I get X, Y, and Z. It's like, no, no, no, just start by making things. And usually when you get better at making things, at some point people pay attention and it just really awakens you to the idea that you can just change things.