Why I picked this one up
I've bought somewhere around 800 to 900 books on personal development over the last decade — Amazon alone, not counting Kindle or audiobooks or the ones I grabbed off a shelf before Amazon made that irrelevant. After that many books, you start seeing the same five ideas repackaged with a new cover. The Five Second Rule is a great TED talk stretched to 220 pages. Most business books could be a blog post.
The Power of Agency wasn't that. Brian Johnson (of Optimize) had mentioned agency a few times, and I realized I'd never actually heard the word used this way — not once, in any of the hundreds of books I'd read. I know agency as a real estate disclosure term. This is different. This is the whole operating system.
Agency is the response, not the event
The core definition: agency is your ability to actively create your life, not based on what happens to you, but based on how you respond to what happens.
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The example that stuck with me was death. Someone loses a spouse, a parent, a partner, and spends the rest of their life in the sorrow — replaying it on their own deathbed. I'm Irish. We do wakes. There's mourning, sure, but there's also a room full of people celebrating that the person existed at all. Same event. Completely different response. That's agency in one sentence, and it applies to a bankruptcy, a breakup, a bad credit score, a missed promotion — same logic every time.
The negative feedback loop is real, and it's mechanical
The book lays out a loop I recognized instantly: you compare yourself to someone on social media, you feel like you're not enough, that creates anxiety, anxiety kills your ability to execute, so you distract yourself with Netflix or food or scrolling, which feeds the comparison loop again. Repeat daily.
I don't look at it as a character flaw. It's a loop, and loops can be broken at any point in the circuit. The book's fix for the entry point is blunt: control your stimulus. Lose the phone when you don't need it, limit social media, take notes by hand, let yourself be bored occasionally. I leave my phone at work on purpose — not because I'm disciplined, but because the loop can't start if the stimulus isn't there.
The gap between what happens and what you do
This is the one I use daily now. There's a gap — sometimes a fraction of a second — between a stimulus and your response to it. Alarm goes off: gap. Reach for the phone, or don't: that's the response. Bankruptcy, divorce, a bad diagnosis: gap, then response. Most people never notice the gap exists, so they default to the reaction that requires the least effort.
I apply this literally every morning. My phone isn't next to my bed. The alarm goes off, there's a gap, and in that gap I get up instead of snoozing. It sounds small. It isn't — that's the same muscle you use when the market turns against you or a deal falls through.
Move, because your brain runs on it
The book's second directive is simply: move. Not for vanity, for brain function. Blood flow makes your brain perform better, and a better-performing brain makes better decisions, faster — which is agency in physical form. I stand at my desk and hit 12,000 to 18,000 steps most days, sometimes 20,000. You don't need my number. Get to 8,000 or 9,000 and you'll feel the difference in how clearly you think by 3pm.
Who should read this
If you're a high performer who's already doing the obvious stuff — training, working, showing up — but still feels like you're reacting to your life instead of running it, this is the book. It's not a self-help pep talk. It's a mechanism: notice the loop, control the stimulus, find the gap, choose the response. I gave it a 4.7 out of 5, and I don't hand those out often.
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