Defining a personality type with examplesfrom @douggrindstaff

Transcript

You woke up tomorrow in a jail cell in a foreign country, who is the first person you would call? There's actually a name for that type of person. You could drop them in a city where they don't know anyone, give them a problem they've never dealt with before, and somehow by the end of the day they found the one person that can help them. That's a high agency person. And if you're wondering whether this could be you, ask yourself this question. How do you respond when you're told something is impossible? Is it the end of a conversation or is it the beginning of one? I've started noticing there are some very specific ways you can spot it in people. They're aggressively resourceful and they always seem to know someone who knows someone. If they don't know what to do, they figure it out. They're the epitome of you can just do things. They're also unusually hard to put in a box. No meet some rank dude and find out he's obsessed with French literature or some investment banker who spends every weekend restoring old sailboats, they have no problem walking away from a prestigious job that everyone else is impressed by because they realize they don't actually want the life that comes with it. They're also just great people to call when you're stuck. You can go into a conversation convinced your situation is totally hopeless, and thirty minutes later you're fired up again. Because one of the defining characteristics of high agency people is that they seem to think there's always another way. Another question, another approach, another person they can talk to. Charlie Munger had one of my favorite examples of this. After a failed eye surgery left him blind in one eye, he was stuck facing the possibility that he could eventually lose his eyesight completely. And for a man who spent the better part of his life an avid reader, that's about as bad as it gets. But when asked how he would potentially deal with not being able to read anymore, his response was basically, well, I've always want to learn braille, and I think that's the best way to understand high agency. It's having this near unreasonable confidence that whatever happens, you'll just figure out your next move. And if you immediately thought of someone while watching this, send it to tier. Because they're probably the person you're calling from that foreign jail cell anyway.