Are You The Author Of Your Life?
Are You The Author Of Your Life?
PLUS: The 30-Minute Investment That Could Change How You Think
October 18, 2026
“Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain’t no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction - you go alone. With a machete in your hand and the fear of God in your heart.”
\- Ursula K. Le Guin
At PPL, we define high agency as a commitment to taking full control of your actions and accountability for the outcomes.
Sounds so simple, right? But simple doesn’t equal easy.
There will always be a huge temptation to find excuses for not assuming high agency.
I write this not from a position of judgement, but from experience.
I was fortunate to work with and for some brilliant people in my career. However, there was one noticeable exception and it took a huge toll on me.
I found myself in a situation where I witnessed behaviours I deemed unacceptable and fundamentally opposed to my own values. A situation where the gap between the claimed company culture and the reality was a chasm.
For a long period I was angry at that individual at the root of this.
Then, as I worked on myself, I realised I was angry at myself.
Angry, because I’d been silent when I should have spoken up. Angry, because I told myself stories to justify letting things go.
The worst kind of burnout feels like betrayal. I was betraying myself.
High agency is about acceptance. About understanding that in a world where there is always the ability to construct an excuse, you need to assume ownership.
Ultimately I let that situation take a toll on me. I stayed there for too long. That was my choice, no-one else’s. It only changed when I accepted it was on me.
That led to action. It led to taking back control. When I called out that behaviour for what it was, it was like reclaiming my sense of self.
I’ll never forget that feeling of empowerment.
I’ll never relinquish it again.
There are no free rides. The only question is whether you grip the steering wheel, or opt for the passenger seat.
THE PROOF
When I work with our Elite Performance Advisor Kevin O’Connor to stage our ‘How To Lead With A Special Forces Mindset’ sessions, they take most participants by surprise.
They come in expecting to hear the former Special Reconnaissance Regiment Team Leader talk about exceptional feats of endeavour.
Instead they learn about the power of collaboration, vulnerability and failure.
Failure can be a great teacher if you embrace it.
Kevin led teams on domestic and international surveillance and counter-surveillance operations. But he fell at the first hurdle the first time he tried for Special Forces.
It taught him the power of high agency.
Kevin’s army career started at the age of 20 and was characterised by high performance - graduating top of his class in the Paratroopers, then being promoted within 18 months, which is exceptionally rare.
It meant that when he went for Special Forces selection, he and those around him expected him to sail through.
The first stage was a baseline march on the first day of the Special Forces Briefing Course. In Kevin’s own words, it’s there just to immediately root out the ‘dreamers’, before things get serious.
He failed.
He’d been carrying a back issue going into the test and at first the story he told himself, as well as family and friends, was that this was the cause.
But the more he reflected on the situation, the more he realised the true cause was complacency.
After years of success, he had thought mindset would be enough and failed to prepare properly.
The shame stayed with him for months. But the experience was the making of him.
He vowed to take full control of his actions and accountability for the outcomes.
He went on to become a Team Leader in the SRR.
High agency in action.
THE SCIENCE
Kevin’s failure was the same event however he chose to interpret it. The difference was his sense of control.
Neuroscientists have observed that difference in the brain. In 2014, Rutgers University researchers Jamil Bhanji and Mauricio Delgado scanned 30 people playing a game designed to feature lots of setbacks.
Some setbacks felt avoidable, because the right move got you through. Others felt random.
In reality, they were all pre-set and equally frequent.
What the researchers discovered is that people were more likely to persist where the setbacks felt controllable.
Brain scans of the participants showed that in those situations, a region involved in learning from outcomes reacted, and the stronger its reaction, the more likely someone was to carry on.
By contrast, when faced with a setback that felt uncontrollable, a different region of the brain that weighs up how you feel and decides how to respond was involved.
It’s a limited study, so it should be judged in context, but the key takeaway was that when a setback feels controllable, you have a greater inclination to correct your mistakes and persist.
THE APPLICATION
So many people say they take responsibility and ownership. As a leader, you’re already doing that far more than most.
The key is consistency - applying it in all facets of your life, rather than allowing it to be dependent on how you’re feeling or the particular dynamics of a situation.
The trouble is that most of this happens by default, as we’re frequently operating on autopilot. Agency slips out of our hands in the language we use, and we rarely notice.
That’s where metacognition, which we covered recently as another core capability, comes in.
That ability to monitor, evaluate and direct your own thinking is what takes you off autopilot. High agency is what happens next.
High agency is a compound concept, which is why it’s hard to pin down neatly.
At PPL, we break it into three parts: responsibility, influence and capability. Here’s what it looks like in action:
Responsibility
Autopilot version: “My team didn’t sort it out despite my instructions.”
High Agency version: “Ultimately this is on me. What could I have done better to set them up to succeed?”
Influence
Autopilot version: “That’s just how this organisation works. Nothing’s going to change.”
High Agency version: “What can I change, given how this organisation works?”
Capability
Autopilot version: “I can’t do that.”
High Agency version: “I can’t do that yet.”
Maintaining high agency is trainable but tough.
Repetition is what changes your brain, and ownership is a behaviour you can rehearse and reinforce - the more you do it, the more you become it.
Accept that progress is never linear - aim for perfection and you’ll end up frustrated.
Just keep showing up, as that investment in yourself will pay off massively.
Manfred Kets de Vries of INSEAD wrote a brilliant essay recently on ‘The Good-enough Life’. In it, he says:
“Perhaps the good life begins when we become the authors of our lives rather than actors reciting lines handed down by ghosts.”
Time for you to pick up your pen?
Go well.
J
LIVE BETTER, LEAD BETTER
The best content I researched this week:
1. I’m breaking with tradition here, for all the right reasons. George Mack’s essay on high agency had a profound effect on me when I read it last year, and I return to it frequently. You should as well, so I’m resharing. It’s a 30-minute read. Just remember: it’s what you do after that matters.
Share this with a fellow leader - we’re stronger together.
If this was forwarded to you, join hundreds of other top-level executives and entrepreneurs by subscribing here.
The Prime Performance Program
