agency & ambition9 quotes

“We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—even of silence—by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn’t ‘attack’ anything; a weasel lives as he’s meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.”

“Assume you will achieve your goal, even if it requires multiple attempts. Take it on faith that the world is more pliable than feels true. Refuse to accept your brain’s first-order response that you probably can’t achieve goal X because of restrictions Y and Z. Instead, approach restrictions Y and Z with a puzzle-solving mindset, relishing the challenge of discovering how to work around them.”

“If you would like to become the author of your own life, regardless of the plot, more agency is the key.

Agency entails a radically different way of relating to the world.

Rather than avoiding failure and rejection, agentic people see these as the inevitable costs of personal progress, and opportunities for learning. Rather than assuming that everything worthwhile has been done already, they assume that many great ventures are postponed out of inertia and fear. Rather than taking it for granted that the experts have it under control, they expect that something more can be done, and that they can be the ones to do it. They choose to believe that everything is learnable, even traits and skills often believed to be innate, like charisma or curiosity.

And, fundamentally, they take responsibility. They act on the world, rather than the world acting on them.”

“Today the human ambition is to be a creator. There are great creators, middling creators, and small creators, but everyone has the desire to be a creator. And it seems to me, once again, that to understand what is, is not something that stirs the ambitions of our contemporaries. They are more interested, one might say, in what is not. Rousseau, the great master of the modern in this matter, said, “Only what is not is beautiful.” For me, fundamentally, the opposite is true: only what is interests me. And this is perhaps the reason why, at least since I became an adult, I have not been able to be on the left, because the left prefers to imagine a society that is not, and I have always found the society that is more interesting than the society that might be.”

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issue from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can begin it, boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.”

“The life you want is built in the margins of the life you have.”

“The irony of modern life is that those of us with the means to really, truly live, who can afford to take risks and strike out on our own and blaze our own paths, are the least likely to do it, because we are seduced by the comforts of the apathetic life, and we don’t have to go above and beyond to make ends meet. So we continue existing, not living, and the clock keeps ticking.”

“You have to understand. The longer you wait to build skills, the harder life pushes you to settle for something beneath your potential capabilities. Education is a race against premature convergence.”

“A man can’t just sit around.”