Agency 2
Predicting your predictions
People often respond to difficult advice with stories about those who succeeded despite ignoring it. I have spoken to a fair number of smokers in my life, and in our many arguments against the dangers of smoking, I'm almost always told about someone's grandfather who smoked every day into his nineties, or someone who lived a perfectly healthy life and still died young.
Resisting the urge to expatiate on why it’s unwise to base your life on outlier outcomes and survivorship bias; I will mention that, while the future is uncertain, the decision to “play it safe” is not an assurance of the desired outcome, but it at least reduces the odds of the undesired outcome. No lifestyle can assure longevity, but longevity practices greatly improve the odds of you achieving it.
The goal isn’t to ensure an outcome, the goal is to stack the odds in your favor. And this principle applies far beyond physical health
Here are a few facts:
The divorce rate in America sits at approximately 2.4 divorces per 1,000 people, or roughly 40 to 45% of all marriages.
Dr. John Gottman’s study shows that couples who dedicate just 6 hours a week to specific relationship habits (like stress-reducing conversations at night, weekly dates etc) see a massive spike in relationship stability.
Research indicates that only about 8% to 14% of people successfully achieve the goals they set for themselves.
A study by Dr. Gail Matthews at Dominican University found that people who actively write down their goals and formulate action steps are 42% more likely to achieve them than those who merely think about them.
Different fields arrive at the same conclusion. Whether it’s marriage, health, or achievement, intentional habits consistently outperform hope.
In my older article, I defined agency as: the ability to influence — or the sense of control over — the outcome of one’s life irrespective of the circumstances that surround said life.
I go further:
Agency is the deliberate practice of stacking life's probabilities in your favor, to believe that predictions are primarily a function of choice, and not a deduction from statistics.
Active intentionality in habits greatly reduce the likelihood of an undesirable outcome, and this is the heartbeat of agency; the ability to exercise control over the uncertain factors of your life, by narrowing the scope of your predictions to maximize certainty.
Agency is the refusal of probability becoming prophecy; it is the decision to bend luck through deliberate choice, rather than surrender to statistics or chance.
Great read.