I’m extremely biased when I say this: the most underrated skill in the world is thinking clearly.
Most people confuse agency with personality. They think someone who acts decisively, who doesn’t wait for permission, who makes things happen, is just born with a certain “drive.” They do this analysis and stop there. And that’s exactly why they never develop it for themselves.
You see, strong agency has very little to do with how loud you are, or how confident you seem. It has everything to do with how your brain processes decisions.
Here’s what I mean.
A person with strong agency doesn’t get stuck weighing irrelevant variables. They have a built-in filter. When faced with a choice, their brain naturally isolates the core variables. Is this good for me? Does it move me closer to my goal? Can I afford the downside? They answer those three questions quickly, and then they act. The rest is noise to them.
Most people, on the other hand, are running a completely different mental program. They’re not trying to solve the problem. They’re trying to manage their own anxiety. So they ask different questions: What will people think? What if I fail? What if I look stupid? What if there’s a better trade-off later?
This isn’t about being timid. This is about poor cognitive processing. You are literally using your mental energy to calculate things that don’t matter. Your brain is slow because it’s doing unnecessary work.
A person with a good head knows that, in most cases, the correct decision is obvious within five minutes of honest thinking. The other 99% of time spent worrying about it is just mental masturbation—a way to avoid the discomfort of committing to an action.
Let me give you a concrete example from an area where most people are completely irrational: money.
I’m extremely biased to classify a car as a thing you should avoid buying unless absolutely necessary. And if you must buy one, never spend more than one-tenth of your net worth on it. And I mean your liquid capital, not your assets. If you have 200,000, don’t buy a car for more than 20,000. If you have 100,000, don’t buy one for more than 10,000. If you don’t even have 100,000, you shouldn’t be buying a car at all.
I know this sounds extreme. But watch the logic.
The less money you have, the harder it is for you to make money. That’s a fact. You’re not in the wealth-building phase yet. You’re in the capital-accumulation phase. Buying a car is one of the worst moves for someone in that phase. It’s a depreciating liability that sucks cash out of your life every single month. And I’m not even talking about the emotional cost of dealing with maintenance, insurance, and parking.
But most people don’t think this way. They think: I need a car to get a better job. I need a car to look successful. I need a car to be happy. These are not rational decisions. These are anxiety calculations dressed up as logic.
A person with a good head sees this immediately. They see the false premise. They see the hidden cost. And they say no. Not because they’re frugal, but because their brain has correctly determined that this trade-off doesn’t make sense.
The same logic applies to relationships, career moves, and daily habits.
How many people stay in a bad job not because they can’t find another one, but because they can’t stand the five minutes of awkwardness in a resignation meeting? How many people stay in mediocre relationships because they can’t bear the weeks of loneliness before finding someone better? How many people waste their twenties chasing status symbols because they can’t handle the reality that everyone around them is doing the same thing?
These are not emotional problems. These are cognitive failures. Your brain is calculating the wrong variables. It’s prioritizing short-term emotional comfort over long-term structural gain.
Strong agency is just the result of a brain that has been trained to calculate correctly.
And the good news is, this is trainable. It’s not a fixed trait. You can learn to run better mental software. The first step is to stop pretending that agency is some mystical personality trait. Start treating it like what it really is: a sign that your brain has figured out what matters and what doesn’t.
You don’t need more confidence. You need better thinking.
So clean up your mental processing. Stop worrying about things that don’t matter. Start acting on decisions that are actually good for you.
The person with strong agency isn’t special. They just have a better head for the game.