Most skills will be irrelevant in 10-20 years.
Well, maybe... That's what everyone's saying at least, and it definitely feels that way.
But if you are a high agency individual, that doesn’t matter. Why? Because you aren’t dependent on a specific skill for your success. You aren’t a specialist. You didn’t focus your mind - preventing you from learning outside of that focus - on the status of a high paying job or degree. You have a vision, and you understand that in today’s world, you can acquire any skill or any knowledge to achieve the life you want.
Unfortunately, if your parents did not cultivate the skill of agency in themselves, they probably did not pass it off to you. And unless you have deliberately (and painfully) gone through the process of relearning, you have some work to do before you feel in control of your future.
With that said:
The most important skill to learn that will be relevant now, in 10 years, and until you die is agency. Because if you can set your own life direction, do what is required to achieve it, and avoid the infinite number of temptations and distractions in today’s world, you will never be at risk of replacement (and if you do get replaced, it doesn’t matter, because you can quickly adapt).
I want to share 5 ideas on what agency is, why it matters more than ever, and how to practice it so you can get what you want in life.
## I - Agency is the ability to iterate without permission.
> It is only those who are in constant revolt that discover what is true, not the man who conforms, who follows some tradition.
– Krishnamurti
– Krishnamurti
To understand what a high agency individual is, it is helpful to consider what it is not.
Agency is not mechanical conformity.
Conformity is when your mind is still connected by an umbilical cord to society.
Conformity is a stage of cognitive development where your mind operates entirely through cultural programming, judging truth based on popularity and acceptance by others rather than through your own direct experience or independent investigation.
If you really think about that, you understand that this is the greatest threat to living a good life.
When you are born, your mind is like a new computer. There is a base operating system, but the hard drive has nothing on it. For the first 20 years of your life, you do not think independently. And that’s okay. Nobody does, no matter how independent you think you are, because most of the time that’s just another form of conformity.
In the Spiral Dynamics and 9 stages of ego development models, they show that around 50% of the population is at the conformist stage of development. Meaning half the population lacks the cognitive development for genuine agency.
Conformity stems from survival. Humans don’t only survive on the physical level like animals (reproducing genes), but on the psychological level (reproducing beliefs, ideas, and information).
If you work a job, you have a low degree of agency in that domain of life because if that job were to go away, your survival is at stake. So you must conform.
If you have hard-set beliefs that bind your identity to a specific religion or political party, you do not have a high degree of agency, because your ideas of good and bad originate from your culture, rather than personal scrutiny and discovery.
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