2025 08 20

Free chair (free advice). Chicago, Illinois. December, 2022. © Clayton Hauck

Agency. It’s something that, when I look back, seems to account for quite a lot of my success through the years. I don’t think it’s even something I’ve actively worked to improve. Maybe it’s luck, maybe it’s learned, probably it’s a bit of both.

I’m not going to write some big in-depth blog post about how valuable agency is today, but instead I’d like to link to two things I ingested that both made me feel slightly better about our mostly-automated futures and felt like valuable calls to actions in a way that might help me improve on myself (and perhaps you, too).

First, a recent favorite thinker of mine, Cate Hall, dedicated her Ted Talk to the subject. You can watch that talk here.

Second, a web search of the quote she mentioned in the talk led me to this blog post, which does a nice job of summing things up from a tech perspective.

And now I get back to getting shit done… how agentic of me.

-Clayton