Episode summary
How High Agency People Can Get What They Want Out of Life | Bloomberg Businessweek
Bloomberg Businessweek Daily
· · 12 min · Hosts: Carol Massar, Tim Stenovec · Guests: Cate Hall
Summary
Cate Hall argues that agency is the skill of seeing and acting on possibilities other people miss, and that it can be learned rather than treated as an inborn trait. Her book, You Can Just Do Things: How High Agency People Get What They Want Out of Life, uses her own path as evidence: Yale Law, clerkships, a Washington law firm, professional poker, a drug company, and then a severe collapse into addiction. Hall says the same intensity that helped her pursue ambitious goals also fed her lowest period, so the book tries to separate healthy extremity from destructive compulsion.
Hall’s core advice is that people get stuck because they avoid the questions they already know they should ask, such as whether a marriage or career still works for them. She says self-help often fails because people gravitate toward advice that flatters their existing habits instead of forcing uncomfortable change. The way out, she argues, is to start with the smallest next action and treat yourself like a “crisis manager” parachuted into your own life.
Hall says her addiction began after a psychedelic experience that she describes as a spiritual dividing line, because she became obsessed with chasing and replicating it. She presents agency as something that can be built by almost anyone, not a fixed personality trait.
Key takeaways
- Cate Hall says agency means seeing and acting on degrees of freedom that other people overlook.
- Hall argues that people often stay stuck because they avoid asking the questions they already know are there.
- She says effective self-help requires discomfort, not advice that merely flatters existing habits.
- Hall describes a “crisis manager” mindset as focusing only on the next best action.
- Hall says agency is learnable and not just an inborn trait.
Notable quotes
“agency is the capacity to both see and act on degrees of freedom that other people overlook”
“people tend to gravitate toward the forms of advice that are already sort of flatter the way that they are naturally”
“you pretend as though you've been parachuted into your own life. And you're not responsible for whatever mess you find yourself in”
“agency is learnable by basically anybody and this book is my attempt to sort of systematize the learning of agency”
How the episode opens
Bloomberg Audio Studios podcasts radio news. — You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenc on Bloomberg Radio. — Well, on the surface, Kate Hall's career sounds pretty great. Yale Law, two top clerkships, a prestigious job at a Washington DC law firm, working on Supreme Court cases. She leaves law at 31 to play professional poker and become the top ranked female poker player in the world. It sounds pretty good. And then
The pandemic hits, — She becomes a co-founder of a pandemic drug company. She leads a foundation that decides the best use of philanthropic moonshots.
It sounds really, really great. And yet, as she writes in her new book, there's a second version not included in the conference bios. the burning out in college, leaving law because she couldn't handle the lifestyle, quote, losing her mind in the form of drug induced psychosis, and years of quote devastating drug addict addict addiction, excuse me, years of devastating drug addiction that left her unable to get a job.
So, we can see that her life was not just, as some would say, all success.
And that's just the first two pages of her new book. Kate Hall is the author of the new book, You Can Just Do Things: How High Agency People Get What They Want Out of Life. She joins us from Berkeley, California.
Kate, good to have you. We have the new book right here. It's on our desks.
Uh it's on our desk right here in the studio. It's up behind us. For people who are not familiar with the story, I I I gave sort of the Cliff's Notes version, but but give us a little more detail, and then I want to talk to you about like high agency versus low agency and and how we can shift those characteristics around.
From the episode’s captions: roughly the first two minutes, lightly cleaned. Keep watching on YouTube →
Topics
- high agency
- success planning
- productivity
- career development
- personal agency
Companies and tickers mentioned
- Bloomberg
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Summary, takeaways and quote selection by Octagon. Quotes are short excerpts; the full conversation is in the episode.
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