Agency > Intelligence
I had this intuitively wrong for decades, I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment/media, obsession with IQ etc. Agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce. Are you hiring for agency? Are we educating for agency? Are you acting as if you had 10X agency?
Grok explanation is ~close:
“Agency, as a personality trait, refers to an individual's capacity to take initiative, make decisions, and exert control over their actions and environment. It’s about being proactive rather than reactive—someone with high agency doesn’t just let life happen to them; they shape it. Think of it as a blend of self-efficacy, determination, and a sense of ownership over one’s path.
People with strong agency tend to set goals and pursue them with confidence, even in the face of obstacles. They’re the type to say, “I’ll figure it out,” and then actually do it. On the flip side, someone low in agency might feel more like a passenger in their own life, waiting for external forces—like luck, other people, or circumstances—to dictate what happens next.
It’s not quite the same as assertiveness or ambition, though it can overlap. Agency is quieter, more internal—it’s the belief that you *can* act, paired with the will to follow through. Psychologists often tie it to concepts like locus of control: high-agency folks lean toward an internal locus, feeling they steer their fate, while low-agency folks might lean external, seeing life as something that happens *to* them.”
First mistake SMEs make with AI: over engineering.
Your v1 doesn’t need 10 branches, APIs, and a dashboard.
It needs to work once.
Ugly workflows > beautiful vaporware
SMEs think AI is only for big companies.
Truth: small teams need it more.
1 workflow saving 10 hrs/week matters way more when you have 12 employees, not 12,000.
The real breakthrough that put AI agencies on steroids is no code tools. It enabled anyone with a laptop and an internet connection to build powerful systems without writing a single line of code.
EVERYTHING I’VE EVER GOT IN LIFE WAS BECAUSE I CLIMBED CRINGE MOUNTAIN.
YOU SWEAT, YOU SHAKE, YOU LOOK STUPID. AND THEN ONE DAY, IT BREAKS OPEN.
AND SUDDENLY YOU’RE THE ONLY ONE WITH A VIEW.
Storytelling isn’t about your hero’s journey.
It’s about making the reader the hero.
no : “I switched careers and now run a $10k/month AI agency.”
yes: “You can build an AI agency and scale to $10K/month using this exact playbook.
The shift: from look at me → this could be you
When I started building with AI tools (Lovable, Cursor, Vo, ChatGPT) I thought they’d ‘do the coding’
Instead what I learnt:
LLM’s co-pilot human intelligence, not replace it. ‘Vibe coding’ can get me a demo app but will it get me one that works in production? Questionable.
You test it on 50 - 100 real support questions.
Turns out it nails accuracy 80% of the time but only 40% of the answers sound human.
Now you know exactly what gap to close to survive production.
The sweet spot:
• Use AI tools for prototyping, boilerplate code, API calls, increasing productivity
• Lean on fundamentals for depth: debugging, scaling, production-ready code.
Both together > either alone