There’s a phenomenon in the corners of the internet I frequent. Every few months, someone writes a viral post about how to be more agentic, more ambitious, or more skilled, and everyone nods along in agreement.

Two that stood out to me are Nick Cammarata’s tweet earlier this year: “I hate how well asking myself ‘if I had 10x the agency I have, what would I do’ works” , and Dan Luu’s essay from a few years ago arguing that becoming the 95th percentile in any skill is actually pretty easy—if you simply care enough and try. Heck, I even wrote my own: “things I tell myself to be more agentic”.

It feels like everyone wholeheartedly endorses the idea of being 10x more agentic, of getting better at everything. How could you not want that?

And yet… the vast majority of us, after reading these revelatory posts, sharing them, and perhaps even bookmarking them for future reference, just go back to our normal lives, operating at our usual levels of agency. Revealed preferences tell a different story for most of us, placing us somewhere in percentiles 1-94.

Is it really that these ideas—prompts like “what would I do with more agency,” or getting feedback and making a deliberate practice plan—are so groundbreaking that they just never occurred to anyone before these posts hit this corner of the internet? Or is something else at play, keeping nearly everyone from pursuing constant improvement at the highest levels?

Take any task you’re working on. If someone told you that doing it 2x better, or 10x faster, or with a tenth of the resources would stop something catastrophic from happening, or they would give you $1,000,000, you’d probably figure it out. Or if a friend was working on the same goal but was much more ambitious or diligent than you and checked in with you every day (or every three hours); or if you hired a tutor, or someone who merely follows up with you with the right prompts to hold you accountable—you’d find a way to do better than you currently are. We all intrinsically know what to do or what it takes. It’s the prompting us to think like this and the motivation and mindset of applying this thought to every hour of every day that’s often lacking.

I recently read the new book about SpaceX, Reentry, which left me with the simple takeaway that the way to reconcile Elon Musk’s corporate achievements with literally all of his public actions showing him to be a deranged doofus is the observation that his companies are built off a single algorithm—hire very smart male engineers who believe the work they are doing is spiritually important, and then interrupt their normal workflows on a constant basis, demanding they: “do this 10x better/faster/with less? Or you are fired, or the project fails.” With this group, with this mission, this algorithm works.

If my boss came to me and said the big project I’m working on that was scheduled to be completed next quarter was actually now due in one week, and it was on me to do everything possible to get it done, yeah, maybe I could stomach the request once. But if it happened every quarter (for my current job), while it may work for Musk and SpaceX, I’d just quit.

I’m reminded of when I used to work at a large law firm and had to bill 6-minute increments of my time. It wasn’t the long hours or the difficult work, or unhappy and constantly stressed colleagues that made me want to quit; it was having to make every 6 minutes a dedicated effort worth billing one client for—and my brain never feeling it had the freedom to relax. I will never go back to working in any job where I need to docket my time in such a way. Musk’s algorithm might build rockets, but I don’t want to live in that kind of pressure cooker.

And the thought of always pushing to improve in such a way or be much more ambitious feels a lot like that. It’s this relentless drain on my soul.

Okay, but what about something I really care about and would benefit from?

I really enjoy blogging, which I mostly do because I enjoy thinking through these ideas, sharing them with people who find them interesting and can help improve my ideas (or benefit from them themselves). Which is to say, while I love writing this, I would be happier if instead of the small number of people who currently read it, it reached orders of magnitude more.

So how would I get to 95% in blogging? Or what does the 10x agentic version of myself who is trying to get my blogs read by more people look like?

Well, for starters, I could install an ability to subscribe to my blog. Or create a Substack. Or get a Twitter account. Or begin sharing drafts with an editor or others for feedback. Or spend my spare time doing writing exercises. Or create writing commitment goals. Or post the blog on more link aggregation websites (or create sockpuppet accounts/ask friends to upvote my content). I could send my blogs to key people to read (or ask people kindly to reshare the blog)—or befriend higher-status people with this sole motivation in mind.

If I’m able to come up with these ideas, why don’t I actually do them…? Some of them seem like good ideas but take something I do for fun and in a hobby-type way and make it feel icky. Some of them seem like they would be miserable to do. And others seem like only a psychopath would be capable of doing. But I’m going to be honest—as I wrote them out, some of them seem like ideas that I obviously should be doing and this prompt really works.

What’s really interesting to me, though, is how different levels of ambition change the way your strategies for a given action might look. If I want this blog to be read by 2x the number of people versus 100x, the strategies to achieve those goals would be very different. When brainstorming what actions you ought to take, it’s likely worth considering the entire range of 2-10-100x before honing in on what you actually want to do. I’m curious whether the ideas that seem 10x but feel really icky in my head (ie creating sock puppets, mercilessly spamming my blog, building friendships with people who have larger audiences and explicitly requesting they reshare my posts) are actually more impactful than the more practical, realistic incremental improvements—like hiring an editor, sticking to a schedule and asking a few peers for feedback.

In my own experience, moving from Canada to NYC and spending much more time immersed in the world of high-agency, big-thinking internet nerds made ambition feel more default, in this raw, gut-level way. I genuinely feel much more ambitious than I did a few years ago (and no more psychopathic)

Maybe the takeaway from this is that these prompts really do work and are effective, but the framing of being 10x more agentic or 95th percentile isn’t really to get you to those levels, but to inspire ideas that will enable you to be 1.1x more agentic, or 5 percentile points better.

More than that, they’re like a mirror: they show you what you’re actually apathetic about, and maybe that’s the point—not to fix it all, but to figure out where you’re okay letting it slide.