I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
At the heart of agency lies a willingness to question defaults. To be agentic, you have to treat “how things are supposed to be done” as just one option among many.
Or, no, that formulation isn’t deep enough. When I think about friends of mine who struggle to be agentic, the problem isn’t precisely that they do the default thing; it’s that they fail to understand their problems and the solution space. They act in incoherent or ineffective ways because their mental model of the situation is too limited to show them a way out. They are not attuned enough to figure out what they want and how the world works. To be agentic, you have to really look at the problem and at the solution space and accept the responsibility of learning what is necessary to make the problem go away.
If you forget about how your problems are “supposed to be solved” and just look at the goal—what is the shortest path from here to there? What is the fastest way to get the information you need to find that path?
If you have a clear understanding of the goal, there are often paths that lead there that are much shorter than the default path. A good question to ask is: what is the simplest solution that could possibly work?
Henrik Karlsson, On agency
I was talking to an old friend a few weeks ago and he said, “I want to find true happiness. I don’t think I’ve ever been truly happy.”
I realized at that moment that I felt truly happy, globally happy with my life as I was living it.
What a wonderful state to have reached! I am truly happy! And the crazy thing is, I felt this before I met someone that I fell in love with. I was already truly happy, then I found (what appears to be) true love. I have everything, don’t I?
Well, not quite. I feel worried that while I am truly happy right now, living the life of an artist and writer (and skier, once winter arrives), I may not be able to sustain my current lifestyle indefinitely, for the 40+ more years I could be around. I was thrust into retirement earlier than I had planned. I worry for my financial situation. While I probably have enough to never have to work again, I feel anxious about that. What if I need expensive long-term care? What if one of my children needs significant financial help? What if my retirement portfolio craters?
It doesn’t escape my notice that one reason my friend is not truly happy yet is because he’s working a job he despises. And yet he is already quite wealthy. He doesn’t have any faith in his ability to succeed without keeping the job and continuing to work until he has even more built up. There’s something about our culture that creates a fetish about saving enough for retirement.
I may be thinking about my life according to this same default, which says: Work-work-work until you have a large nest egg upon which you can live for the rest of your days, even if that is likely to be decades. Oh and make sure you’ll never have to dip into your principal! Because that needs to both fund your long-term memory care as well as be ready to be passed down to your children.
Perhaps I haven’t evaluated my problem and the solution space well enough.
Here’s what I’m assuming:
- Problem/goal: How do I plan for and achieve a traditional retirement
- Solution: Work at a full-time job with benefits until I am fully confident I will never run out of money once I retire
What if instead I had the goal of living my current lifestyle just for the next five years. And then revisiting?
My life is likely to change in the next five or ten years in ways I can’t predict right now. I could be diagnosed with a terminal disease, or my Bitcoin holdings could soar in value, or I could decide to sell my house. It’s easy to think that my life is going to stay static. This is the end-of-history illusion. It doesn’t make sense to live my life right now as though five years from now things will be just the same, except that I’ve got less money due to spending some to live on.
And the more I throw myself into writing and painting (and skiing) the more likely my life will change in ways that support my never returning to corporate work. I’ve already sold one painting and won a cash award in a show. Maybe there’s a path where I make money from my creations rather than from my technological prowess?
Maybe the question I need to ask myself isn’t, “Can I afford to live like this forever?” but rather “What would it look like to live this way on purpose, for now?”
I want to treat my current life—this season of happiness, love, creativity, and freedom— not as a fragile, unsustainable blip, but as a reward for all I’ve done and gone through to arrive here now.
The simplest solution to achieving my goal of continuing to enjoy my current lifestyle is likely to do just that. And trust in myself that when I need to, I can adjust.