the pivotal conversation about taking agency

there was one conversation that changed everything. my mentor at a signal-processing-workflow sat me down and asked me how my day was. i said 70%. productive? yeah probs. and then he dropped it:

"it should be up to you. i feel intuitively that taking agency would be much better."

i didn't fully get it. i'd been doing things because people told me to do them. not really thinking that critically, just acting. the whole day felt weird — like i was operating on autopilot while someone else drove.

his response was basically: that's the point. "i make you do things, and you think about agency, and you understand your agency through experience." the discomfort of being directed was supposed to wake me up to the fact that i wasn't directing myself.

the core idea

"you should take agency and care about your growth, and if any org says you shouldn't, then you should probably leave."

when i asked why he cared about my acceleration so much, the answer wasn't what i expected. it wasn't pure altruism — though he did say he has a personal philosophy that there should be more good people in the world. it was also practical: the hiring bar was so high that even slightly increasing the chance of finding exceptional people was a worthwhile investment. i might be a potential deep hire, or i might pull in other potential deep hires.

but the real insight was about the-stocks-metaphor:

"acceleration is much better than position. we have grown so much. if we started over with nothing, we could get back to this in 2-3 months."

what changed

after this conversation, things shifted. i started dropping stuff from my todo list that wasn't important. for the first time, i was really prioritizing. before, i thought prioritization just meant getting rid of actions caused by fear and pleasure. but actually there was much more — especially the question of "great, i'll do work the entire day; what kind of work?"

if i care about growth so much, why was i reflecting on a math camp that was mediocre compared to this? why was i going to some finance essentials program? why was i working on my own stuff while at a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity?

the agency talk wasn't just about doing things proactively. it was about understanding that i was the one who should be deciding what mattered. nobody else could do that for me — and the discomfort of having someone else direct me was the proof.

the aftermath

all the new ideas felt overwhelming at first. two senior people were setting the tone with words like "exceptional" — but they didn't really care about exceptional work, just exceptional activity. exceptional engagement with growth.

the place was a growth machine. and this conversation was when i started understanding that the machine only works if you grab the wheel yourself.