WHEN YOU'RE BUILDING YOUR LIFE

9. Be a High Agency Person

"We don't get to choose the circumstances we're born into. We always get to choose what they mean."

Dear Kids,

If I could hand you only one word from this entire next stretch of letters, it would be this one — agency. Everything that comes after about luck, about risk, about leverage, about the small choices that build a life — every one of those letters grows out of this one. So I want to spend it on a single parable I keep returning to, and on what it taught me to do with the cards I was actually dealt.

There were two brothers who grew up under the same roof, raised by the same father — a man broken by alcohol. The nights were loud, the house tense, and the boys learned early to walk softly around their father's moods. They breathed the same air, watched the same chaos unfold, and counted the same footsteps coming up the stairs.

When they became men, their lives could not have been more different.

One brother grew up angry. He turned to the same bottle that had taken his father's peace — and, in time, his own. His own kids learned the same quiet, the same held breath at the sound of a key in the door. When people asked him why his life had turned out the way it did, he said: "Because my father was an alcoholic. What did you expect?"

The other brother grew up determined that the line would stop with him. He never kept a bottle in the house. He came home at the same hour every evening so his children would never have to listen for his footsteps the way he had once listened for his father's. When people asked him the same question — why he had become who he was — he gave the very same answer: "Because my father was an alcoholic. What did you expect?"

I've always loved that story, kiddos, because it says something simple. We don't get to choose the circumstances we're born into. We always get to choose what they mean. That's it. That's the whole thing. That's agency — the quiet, steady power to decide what story you'll tell about your own life.

Both brothers had the same starting point. One saw his father's failure as a fate. The other saw it as a warning. The difference between them wasn't luck or genetics. It was a choice — repeated so many times, in so many small moments, that it eventually became a person.

Coming back to Frankl. There's a passage of his I keep returning to: Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. I read it for the first time in college and didn't fully understand him. I reread him a few years ago in Beijing, in the Schwarzman common room well past midnight, when the building had gone quiet and I had nothing left to do but sit with the page — and the line landed differently. Frankl wasn't writing a self-help book. He was writing an existence proof. If a man in a camp could still choose his response, the rest of us are out of excuses. That single passage is the floor underneath every other letter in this book.

The comfortable lie

As you grow older, you'll notice how many people never learn this. The world today makes it especially easy to surrender your agency — to the economy, to your upbringing, to "the system," to how you happened to feel that morning. There's a quiet comfort in believing your circumstances are responsible for your condition. It removes the weight. It lets you off the hook.

But comfort isn't the same thing as freedom. I've noticed how often people say, "I can't help it, that's just how I am." The truth is, that's not how you are — that's who you've decided to remain.

I'm not above any of this. There are mornings I lie in bed and find myself blaming the weather, blaming the schedule, blaming a bad night's sleep for the things I won't do. The trick I keep trying to teach myself is to catch the excuse forming and choose to be amused by it instead of obeying it.

When I think back to the moments that shaped me most, they were rarely the big ones — the schools, the jobs, the public choices. They were the small ones. Waking up before dawn to train when the world was still asleep. Finishing the last mile of a run in the rain when every part of me wanted to stop. Keeping a promise to myself that no one else would have known I'd broken.

Each of those moments was a quiet vote cast for the kind of person I wanted to become. Over time, those votes accumulate into the only person you ever actually get to vote for.

Self-esteem is a reputation you earn with yourself

They say self-esteem is the reputation you have with yourself. I've found that to be exactly true. You can't lie to yourself about who you are — your body knows, your spirit knows. Every time you say you'll do something and then actually do it, you build a little more trust with yourself. Every time you make an excuse, you erode it a little. That's the entire ledger.

This is why agency is more powerful than people give it credit for. It isn't about outcomes. It's about identity. It's about deciding, in advance, that you are the kind of person who takes responsibility for whatever the world gives you — and then proving it to yourself, quietly, until you start to believe it.

The world will always offer you an excuse. The weather will be bad. People will disappoint you. Luck will fail you. There will always be a reason to wait, to postpone, to stay in bed. Agency is what lets you say, I'll do it anyway.

Who to keep close

When you look for friends, kiddos, look for the high-agency ones. The ones who, if you were stranded in a foreign country or locked in some third-world jail at 3 a.m., would find a way to get you out. Legally or not. Those are the people you want beside you — the ones who refuse the word impossible as a complete sentence.

And just as importantly, be careful of the people who always have a reason but never have a result. The ones who build invisible cages out of their own excuses, then invite you to live inside with them. It's hard to build a great life surrounded by people who have surrendered theirs.

I think often about what it means that I have a few friends — Jack, Mudit, others — who would, without question, get on a plane for me. Not because they're rich, or unbusy, but because their answer to can it be done has been trained, over years, to start with yes. That defaults like that don't develop by accident. They're chosen and then practiced.

Being high-agency doesn't mean pretending the world is fair. It means taking ownership in spite of the fact that it isn't. It means saying: even if the odds are against me, even if the system is broken, even if I was handed a difficult start — I will still find a way.

People love to talk about luck and timing and opportunity. We'll get into those in the next few letters in detail. But the simplest truth I can give you up front is this — luck favors motion. The people who move, who try, who keep showing up, are the ones the world tends to meet halfway.

Naval Ravikant once said that if he were reborn into a hundred different universes, he'd want to know that in ninety-nine of them, he'd still succeed. That's the kind of person I want you to become — not someone who got lucky once, but someone who would have made it work in nearly every life they were given.

Don't waste your time trying to predict what will happen. The tarot cards, the fortune tellers, the influencers selling you the next big trend — ignore them. Invest your time instead in becoming someone who can thrive regardless of what happens.

A counterargument worth taking seriously

I want to be honest with you about the limits of this idea, because it can be misused.

The argument against agency is usually some version of: but the system really is rigged. The starting line really is uneven. Telling poor people to just try harder is cruel. And that argument is right, as far as it goes. The two brothers grew up in the same house. The brilliant students I worked with in Chengdu didn't choose where they were born. Some of what shapes a life is, plainly, not up to the person living it.

What I'm telling you isn't that circumstances don't matter. It's that within whatever circumstances you actually have, your share of the work is the only thing you control — and underestimating that share is the most expensive mistake I've watched people make. Pretending you have less power than you have is just as much a lie as pretending you have more.

The moment you stop waiting for life to be fair, you start to live freely. You stop staring at the path, hoping it'll get smoother, and start training the legs that have to walk it.

Ryan Holiday's The Obstacle Is the Way is the modern Stoic version of this, and I picked it up at a corner bookstore in SF during the Homebase YC batch — read most of it on a friend's couch in the Mission, in a week where every conversation with my co-founders felt like a wall. The reframe in the title is the whole book: the thing standing in your way is the way. The bad boss is the training ground. The failed project is the actual education. The constraint you're cursing is the muscle you didn't know you were building. I'm wary of Stoicism-as-aesthetic — it's become a kind of bro genre — but the underlying move is sound. If you treat every obstacle as a curriculum instead of a catastrophe, you stop having a "bad year." You only have years of varying difficulty in which you are quietly compounding.

Throwing off the covers

Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations about mornings when the cold bed tempted him to stay under the blankets.

"At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I am going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm? 'But it's nicer here…' So you were born to feel 'nice'? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Do you not see the plants, the birds, the ants, spiders, and bees all doing their own work, putting the world in order as best they can? And you will not do your own work — you will not run to do what your nature demands?"

That line has stayed with me, kids. Because so often, the choice that changes everything is exactly that small. Whether you throw off the covers. Whether you step out into the cold. Whether you do the thing you said you'd do, even when it would be easier not to.

That's how you build a life worth respecting — not through grand gestures, but through thousands of small acts of discipline that compound, quietly, into strength.

So when you read this one day, I hope you become people of agency. People who act when it would be easier not to. Who move forward when the path is uncertain. Who take responsibility when others reach instinctively for an excuse. I hope you find friends who are high-agency too — the ones who will move mountains with you, and for you. But most of all, I hope you never build your own prison out of fear, or doubt, or laziness, and then mistake it for a fate you were handed.

I'm still working on this, by the way. I'm 28 writing this, and I still wake up some mornings reaching for an excuse. The difference between who I am now and who I was at 20 is that I notice it sooner — and I cast the small vote anyway.

So, my kiddos — when the morning comes and the bed feels warm and the world feels heavy, remember Marcus. Remember the two brothers. Remember that the only difference between the life you live and the life you watch yourself fail to live is the next small choice.

Throw off the covers. Step into the cold. And begin again.

Love,

Dad