They were called “autonomous”. Then it was “disruptors”. Now, everyone on the whole technological has a new self-desigiting of choice: “High agency”.
In the past year, the large agency has become THE Ambitious character of Silicon Valley. At the beginning of last year, the analytical site that Brandwatch revealed that there was a leap of 500% of the mentions of the sentence on X, Reddit and other social media sites. Not one but two podcasts entitled “High Agency” were launched, one dedicated to AI, the other to entrepreneurship. On LinkedIn, a wide range of sectors, from solar to crypto, suddenly searches for high agency candidates. And on substitution, the tests of technological culture are readers of schooling on how to resume their qualities at high agency, which would be possessed by the technological elites and the best athletes.
It is a trait mainly assigned to People who start their own businessesSeize opportunities that others are missing and never take “no” for an answer. High agency people are rich, successful or about to be both. They focus on action and find opportunities where others see roadblocks. “The big agency is to actively pursue what you want without waiting for the circumstances to be perfect”, Andrew Yeung technological entrepreneur recently explained.
It is not an accident that the term increased in popularity at the very moment when Elon Musk has extended its power and influence to the federal government and beyond. The head of Tesla,, SpacexAnd Neural is the personification of the high agency. Ai Pioneer Emad Mostaque Recently rented Musk as “the smartest and most intelligent person I know”. It is not only the success of Musk in business, which made him the richest man in the world, it is the path He leads business, namely with a philosophy of “follow your instinct, critics are damned”.
America has a penchant for sentences that can inspire the next generation of business leaders and offer them a model to follow.
Take musks Buying Twitter In 2022. When the technological entrepreneur proposed to take the private platform for $ 44 billion – such an inflated price that he would have violated the commission’s fiduciary obligation to reject it – he was largely ridiculed to have Indeed set fire to a giant battery on fire. But the agreement helped make him one of the most discussed figures in America, putting him on a path to an unrivaled power like A chief advisor to Donald Trump.
It was, by definition, a classic movement at high agency.
“High Agency” was invented in 2016 when Eric Weinstein, then Managing Director of Peter Thiel the investment company, referenced it during an appearance on a podcast organized by the Tim Ferriss self-assistance guru. In the formulation of Weinstein, an approach to the high agency in the world is “in constant research of what is possible, in a kind of MacGyverish”.
America, as Weinstein saw, emerged from a period of “societal aspiration” with a low agency, Supersafe, shy and frightened “which began around 1970. But the key to prosperity, he made To be worth, was in space for “our marginal the citizens of the greatest capacity and the search for unusual personality types which are irreverent and sufficiently committed to make things happen and really do things. “”
The formulation of Weinstein – that people with high agency are in a way built differently and thus enjoy a status superior to simple mortal – was a central part of the way the others now use the term. “The dirty secret of hard drugs is that a small minority of super disciplines at high agency can really manage them”, the billionaire capitalist Marc Andreessen tweeted in September. “But then they sell them as something that everyone can manage, which is brutally destructive.”
America has long shown a penchant for sentences that can both inspire The next generation of business leaders And offer them a model to follow. Over the decades, fashionable words like Grit, Type A or even Girlboss have served as a “common language that people can rally,” explains American Reed, professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “They allow people to self-select in this group, or not. It is a way to identify your tribe which gives more clarity on your role and how you expect to act in a particular situation.”
Today, “High Agency” is gaining ground as a key quality that employers are looking for. Mike Basso, the CEO of a recruitment company, has seen recent hires of technology using the sentence more often. Employers who have focused on the experience and intellect of a candidate now want to know if a candidate has more intangible qualities.
“The big agency is someone who can take control of his own destiny,” explains Basso. “You are looking for if they appropriate or blame others for the failure of the project.”
“High Agency” is gaining ground both as a word in marketing fashion and as a key quality that employers are looking for.
Basso recently saw a candidate with 15 years of experience in consideration for a sales station. The employer, says Basso, was put off by the plaints of the applicant concerning the limits he felt in his previous job, that the employer considered as a sign of someone who was too slow to act, too focused on doing so . Not, in other words, the type of person with high agency the work required.
When Austin King, the co -founder of the Crypto Startup Omni Network, heard the sentence for the first time a few years ago, he immediately thought at a decisive moment during his last year in Harvard. When King left school for three weeks to go to Korea to meet several lights in cryptographic space, his notes suffered and his teachers were furious. But the trip turned out to be essential to collect funds for his first startup and establish his career.
“We live in a world where if you operate with a large agency, you can shape the world as you want to see,” says King. He now leads qualities of “high agencies” when he hires.
High Agency has also become a word in marketing fashion – one intended to transmit a certain level of exclusivity and prestige. Last year, when a San Francisco software engineer announced his intention to build a “Utopia accessible on foot“Called Esmeralda, shaped on a university campus, it was presented as a development where” creative and high agency “could rub shoulders and socialize.
However, not everyone is sold on the sentence – or the type of dynamism of resolved rules which he advocates. When Luigi Mangione was accused of the murder of the CEO of the United Healthcare insurance giant, many on social networks noted that he seemed to be the poster for a large agency: an advanced computer diploma, a zeal for climbing and other risk forms, someone “used to crush it in all things”, as an observer tweeted it. Mangione, a Reddit user, suggested: “is a good case study for non-conformism and the big agency that went wrong.”
Weinstein, the man who invented the term, admitted that the large agency was not without drawbacks. But in the end, he argued, the risks are worth awards.
“These are my people,” he told Ferriss. “And they are difficult to manage, and I do not always appreciate them. But I think that without them, it is not really a football team. I think that one of the things that the United States has finished still , let’s say , A competitor like China is that we tolerate the middle finger. “”
Dan Latu is a real estate journalist at Business Insider.