What is high agency? An "I know it when I see it" idea: the person you'd call if you were stuck in a 3rd world jail cell. It's a tricycle of three skills - clear thinking, bias to action, disagreeability. Low agency is the default setting (tribal brain + factory-worker education).
Five lines of "high agency software": (1) there's no unsolvable problem - if it doesn't defy the laws of physics, it's solvable (Shannon/Thorp hacking roulette); (2) there's no way - everyone's way is different (Nadal/Djokovic/Federer warmups); (3) there are no adults - kill your gurus, heroes are deeply flawed (Jobs, Mozart, Newton, Tesla); (4) there's no normal - normal is forgotten, only weird survives; (5) there's only now - finite nows, Kevin Smith's "he died screaming".
Case study: Wilbur Wright - face smashed in, bedridden, mother dying - from "Man won't fly for a million years" (NYT) to first flight, Dec 17 1903.
Five low agency traps + escapes:
The Vague Trap - hides from agency by never defining the problem; hours of thinking without thinking clearly (thoughts as fuzzy emotional GIFs). Escape: get thoughts out of your head - write, draw, whiteboard, talk to a smart person, walk with a specific question. Refine into the simplest, clearest, most specific language. Fix vague questions first: "What career should I choose?" → "What does my dream week look like hour by hour? What's the gap between now and that?"
The Midwit Trap - mistakes simplicity for stupidity; overcomplicates what could be done in one hour. The less-clever guy on the left often has more agency than the midwit in the middle, because he can't bullshit himself. Escape: invert - ask what the guy on the left would do. "Become a better writer" → the midwit researches keyboards and coffee routines; the simple guy just writes, consistently, about things that excite him.
The Attachment Trap - too attached to past assumptions to see new options; last-principles thinking (assumptions treated as facts, then hunting evidence for them). "The three most powerful mind-altering drugs: DMT, meth, and momentum." Escape: "What would I do if I had 10x the agency?" - imagine an evil identical twin with glasses and a moustache and 10x your agency; his ideas break the assumptions open (bribe the bouncer, get in the back door, contact the owner...).
The Rumination Trap - frozen in "what if it goes wrong?" loops; the perfectionist stuck on the Netflix home screen with no zero-risk option. "Stress primarily comes from not taking action over something you can have some control over" (Bezos). Escape: when ruminating, answer "How can I take action on this now?" and reframe decisions as experiments - 60% sure moving to New York beats 40% staying? Book the ticket and test the hypothesis; in 5 years of rumination you could have collected living data from 7 cities.
The Overwhelm Trap - level 0 vs level 100 contrast paralyzes; "where do I begin?!". Video games solve this by chunking into levels small enough not to overwhelm but big enough to be addictive. Escape: "What's the smallest first step?" Level 1 is always easy (write down everything I could possibly do), level 2 builds the rest of the game, and suddenly you're on level 3.
Turning bullshit into reality: pick a value, dump 10 concrete actions, pick the scariest one, list micro-steps, do them, repeat daily. Plus tools: high agency flow chart, Swedish House Mafia Technique (lock the smartest people in a room), Story Razor (which option makes the best story?), Derek Sivers' "ask for help by predicting the answer" technique, "a change of perspective is worth 50 IQ points" (Rolls Royce parking story).
Bonus library: James Cameron photocopying USC film dissertations while driving trucks, 6-year-old Cole Summers building companies, crack-addict urgency / burn-the-boats incentives (Musk's $12M ticking clock), Rudolf Vrba escaping Auschwitz soaked in gasoline.