‘High Agency’ is the hottest word to be successful in technology

They called themselves “self-denial”. Then it was “ruin”. Now everyone in the technology group has a new self-description of the choice: “High Agency”.

Over the past year the high agency is done Aspirational features feature of Silicon Valley. At the beginning of last year, the Brandwatch analytics site revealed that there was a 500% increase in X, Reddit and other social media pages. Not one but two podcasts entitled “High Agency” have not started, one dedicated, the other for the venture. At LinkedIn, a wide range of sectors, from solar to cryptocurrency, are suddenly looking for applicants with high agencies. And in substances, technology culture essays are educating readers on how to capture their high agency qualities, which are said to be possessed by technology elites and the best athletes.

It is a certain feature mainly for people who start their companies, take opportunities that others miss, and never get “no” for an answer. People with high agencies are rich, successful or on their way to be both. They are action -oriented and find opportunities where others see road obstacles. “The senior agency is actively going after what you want without expecting the circumstances to be perfect,” the technology entrepreneur Andrew Yeung recently explained.

It is no coincidence that the term has increased in popularity as Elon Musk has extended its strength and impact on the federal government and beyond. The head of Tesla, Spacex and Neuralralin is the personification of the High Agency. The pioneer of Ai Emad Mostque recently praised Musk as “the most holistically intelligent person, with high agency I know”. It’s not only the success of Musk in business, which has made it the richest man in the world, is ORDER It develops business, namely with an ethics to “follow your intestine, critics are cursed.”

America has a superiority for phrases that can inspire the next generation of business leaders and offer a model for them to follow.

Get Musk’s Twitter Purchase in 2022. When the Technology Entrepreneur offered to get the private platform for $ 44 billion – a price so swollen that it would have violated the task of trusting the board to refuse it – he was mocking a lot for the effective placement of a giant pile of money. on fire. But the deal helped him make him one of the most talked about figures in America, placing him in an unprecedented course as Donald Trump’s leading adviser.

It was, as defined, a classic action by the High Agency.


The “High Agency” was established in 2016, when Eric Weinstein, then the managing director of Peter Thiel’s investment firm, referred to him during a podcast organized by my self-help guru. In the formulation of Weinstein, an approach to the world’s high agency is “constantly looking for what is possible, in a kind of a way of makgyverish one way”.

America, as we saw Weinstein, was coming out of a period of “Lower Agency, superstar, timid, scared a kind of social aspiration” that began around 1970, but the key to prosperity, he argued, was in making space for “Our Marginal Citizens with the Greatest Ability, and in search of unusual types of personality that are irrelevant and dedicated enough to make things happen and do things really.”

Weinstein’s formulation that people with high agencies are somewhat built differently, and thus enjoy a superior status for simple dead-has been a central part of how others now use the term. “The filthy secret of hard drugs is that a small minority of people with high super-disciplined agency can really treat them,” billionaire capitalist Marc Andreessen in Tweet in September. “But then they sell them as something that everyone can handle, which is extremely devastating.”

America has long been for phrases that both can inspire the next generation of business leaders and offer a model for them to follow. Over the decades, Buzz’s speeches such as grit, type A, or even girlboss have served as “a common language that people can gather,” says American Reed, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania school. “They allow people to self-election in that group, or not. It is a way to identify your tribe that gives more clarity about your role and how you are expected to act in a particular situation.”

Today, the “High Agency” is gaining ground as a key quality that employers are looking for. Mike Basso, the general manager of a recruitment firm, has seen recent technology employment using the phrase more often. Employers who once focused on an applicant’s experience and intellect now want to know if a candidate possesses more intangible quality.

“High agency is someone who can take control of their destiny,” Basso says. “You’re looking if they take ownership or blame others for the project failure.”

The “High Agency” is gaining ground as a quick marketing word and as a key quality employers are looking for.

Basso recently saw a candidate with 15 years of experience fallen by consideration for a sales position leader. The employer, Basso says, was dismissed by the applicant’s complaints about the restrictions they felt in their previous work, which the employer saw as a sign of someone who was too slow to take action, very focused on granting permission to do something before doing it. No, in other words, the type of person with senior agency required work.

When Austin King, the Omni cryptocurrency network collaborator, first heard the phrase a few years ago, he immediately thought of a determinant moment during his old year at Harvard. When King left school for three weeks to travel to Korea to meet some luminaries in the crypty space, his grades suffered and his professors were angry. But the trip proved vital to collecting funds for his first start and setting his career.

“We live in a world where if you operate with high agency, you can form the world as you want to see it,” King says. He now appears for the “High Agency” quality when he hires.

The senior agency has also become a marketing speech – one intended to convey a certain level of exclusivity and prestige. Last year, when a software engineer in San Francisco announced plans to build a “walking utopia” called Esmeralda, modeled on a college campus, he was set as a development where “creative people with high agencies” can rub the shoulders and accompany.

Not everyone, however, is sold in phrase-or the type of single-minded direction, damaged by the rules he defends. When Luigi Mangione was accused of killing the General Director of the United Health Insurance Giant, many on social media noticed that he seemed to be the poster’s son for senior agency: an advanced diploma in computer science, a zeal for rock climbing and other forms of danger- taking, someone “has used to crush it in all things”, as a tweeted an observer. Mangione, a Reddit user suggested, “is a good case study of non-conformity and the wrong senior agency.”

Weinstein, the man who created the term, admitted that the senior agency is not without its weaknesses. But after all, he argued, the risks are worth the rewards.

“These are my people,” he told Ferriss. “And they are hard to deal with, and I do not always enjoy them. But I think without them, it’s not a lot of football team. I think one of the US is still over, let’s let We say, a competitor like China is that we tolerate the middle finger. “


Dan Latu It is a real estate reporter in Business Insider.