Like many people, I discovered Cate Hall through her substack essays about agency. They were insightful and funny, so I kept following her. Then came more content here and there, a TEDx talk, and finally the book. So, as an already warm lead, I clicked Amazon’s buy-now-with-1-click button on release day, which put the book on my Kindle after a few minutes (It always amazes me that it REALLY is just one click).
The book is about agency and how to train yourself to be more agentic in all areas of life. It has exactly the style you would expect from a popular substack writer - short punchy chapters, conversational tone, and lots of personal examples. The book’s biggest value doesn’t come from novel ideas :) C’mon, it’s always been about taking your ass into the wild. But Cate managed to bring those scattered insights together, think them through carefully, and turn them into actions that proved useful in her own life.
I recommend you read the full book (I binged it over a few days), and here I share some highlights along with my thoughts on them.
They would rather be hypothetically good at songwriting - talented in their imaginary world - than be bad on the way to becoming good.
As long as you never test yourself, your imaginary potential stays with you. The moment you step forward and try something, potential converts into a result, and that result can be mediocre. Turns out you’re not that special. So inaction can be a safeguard to protect the fantasy of your own greatness.
Our lives are composed of routines and habits that are leftovers - the solutions we adopted the first or fifth time we were exposed to a problem.
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Is there a better way to do it?
It’s fascinating how rarely we question things we do every day. From what we eat to how we work, from what we keep in our homes to how we train. This simple question, “Is there a better way to do it?”, can reveal so much bullshit and so many useless things we carry around. It doesn’t necessarily have to produce gigantic insights or make you completely rethink your life. But even the smallest things eventually compound.
When we treat rejection as an existential hazard, we are limited to a predictable existence.
Hearing no brings a predictable unpleasant feeling. That’s it. But getting a yes can open up infinite possibilities. And if you’re used to hearing no and keep asking, even if you don’t learn something from every rejection, eventually getting a yes becomes a numbers game. So the fountain of infinite yeses is in your tolerance for hearing infinite no’s.
You only know where the line is if you cross it sometimes
Force yourself to stretch beyond what you think of as your capacity
Training close to your limits and progressive overload gradually expand your capacity and let your body adapt to higher standards. The same applies to other parts of life. It’s important to challenge yourself and set the bar high (Shoot for the sun to reach the moon). But as in training, effort is only the first part of progress, the second is recovery.
“Wait a minute. It can’t be quite that difficult. It must be very easy. I’ll stand back, and I’ll just treat it very lightly. I’ll just tap it, boomp, boomp and there it was!”
When you assume that a given task will be hard, you are limiting yourself before you begin.
Cate quoted Richard Feynman here.
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Try to accomplish goals with as little effort as possible, because there are endless good uses for your time.
Today the grind is highly glorified, and yes many tasks require long hours of focus and brain melting work. But not all of them. So it’s better to approach each task with the feeling that it can be done quickly and easily. If that is true, you’ve saved your energy for other important things. If not, you can still sprinkle in some grind. Sort of Parkinson’s law for effort: the task expands to take as much effort as you expect it to take.
Start behaving like a chef when you’re just a cook. Assume that you’re aiming for a future that will hold you to a much higher standard, even if you’re not currently held to that standard. People who behave like this - who perform as if they are already an admired success in their field - have a funny way of ending up there.
Sort of fake it till you make it, but instead of focusing on who you want to be, focus on what that person would do and how they would approach their work. Hold yourself to a higher standard.
If you half-ass everything in your life because you’re waiting for a great opportunity to showcase your genius, pretty much nobody will think “there goes a latent genius” instead, they think “ah there person who likes to half-ass it”
You can’t save your skills and competence for some imaginary better tasks. If you’re not exercising them every day, if you allow yourself not to care because the task looks ordinary, your standards eventually rust. What if the biggest opportunity of your life is disguised as work you seem not to care about? It may sound contradictory to the earlier idea of accomplishing goals with as little effort as possible, but it isn’t. The way I read it: don’t waste your grind on things that can be done with ease, but maintain high standards and integrity even when the task is simple.
My willingness to commit is how I distinguish these “it would be nice” options from what I’m actually serious about.
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People wait to feel committed rather than deciding to make a commitment.
Immediately reminded me of Want Now
Which of the hundreds of problems right in front of me would be the most meaningful and interesting for me to work on right now?
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You don’t need to know in advance how big an impact you’re going to make. You only need to know the next step that makes sense.
You probably won’t come up with an ideal plan grand enough to satisfy all your desires and exciting enough to finally get you moving. Think of a direction that seems interesting to explore, come up with the easiest starting step and go (The Chemical Brothers - Go). We rarely end up where we thought we would.
The gods will offer you chances. Know them. Take them.
Cate quoted Charles Bukowski. Take it.
The book won’t give you a completely new philosophy of life. But if you have been waiting for the sign or permission to take responsibility for your actions, if you want to increase your surface area of luck, if you think that you need to be more agentic, or if you just want to spend a few evenings in good company… the buy-now-with-1-click button is waiting.