How to Think Your Way Out of Any Problem

This is a comprehensive guide to high agency and the mind behind it.

"High agency" has been a trending term for a while now. It shows up in LinkedIn hiring threads, self-improvement podcasts, and of course, it’s all over tech Twitter. It's become one of those phrases people nod along to without ever defining. And when a concept gets that popular, it usually gets diluted into nothing.

George Mack knows this all too well. He popularized the framework in the first place. With over a year spent writing High Agency in 30 Minutes, he's watched his idea spread, mutate, and sometimes get butchered. And although he credits Eric Weinstein with the original concept, the framework people actually use is all Mack's. Here he is on Modern Wisdom, breaking it down:

High agency might be the idea everyone knows him for. It might be the one that could change your life the most. But it's not the only reason George Mack is one of the most interesting minds writing today. This issue is a tour through his best work yet.

The question that took years to answer.

Mack spent years stuck on a single social phenomenon: What separates the people you'd call in a crisis from the ones who couldn't get themselves out of a paper bag?

He looked for patterns in gender, age, wealth, job title, politics, and all the intersections between. Nothing held up. The difference just wasn't visible on paper. Agency is more of an ethereal thing.

"Are they happening to life or is life happening to them?"

That's the line he landed on. High agency people act on the world. Low agency people get acted upon. Simple to say, but living it out is no small feat.

But Mack goes further than the self-help version. He references physicist David Deutsch's argument that agency isn't a mindset, but physics: "Out of the six to seven million species on Earth, human beings are the only ones capable of agency in the known universe," Mack explains. The clothes you're wearing, the heating in your building, the fact that anyone can survive winter in NYC at all. Agency built it. "It's agency all the way down."

His core belief follows from there: all problems are solvable with enough knowledge, as long as they don't defy the laws of physics.

The tour starts here.

High agency is the signature idea, but Mack's work takes his theory even further.

Turn ideas into action. The most useful section of High Agency in 30 Minutes is probably "Turning Bullshit Into Reality," a seven-step process Mack says he used to win the highagency.com domain auction and land a launch-day billboard in Times Square. He says to write a value you care about, write 10 specific actions that align with it, then pick the scariest one. List the smallest incremental steps it would take to get it done. Do them now. Then repeat tomorrow.

The essay also maps four traps that kill agency, each with an escape question.

The Vague Trap: "Define the problem in simple words out of your head."
The Midwit Trap: "What would the guy on the left do? Find it via inversion."
The Attachment Trap: "What would I do if I had 10x the agency?"
The Overwhelm Trap: "What's the smallest first step I can take?"

Here’s his thesis take on the whole thing: "Optimism states the glass is half full. Pessimism states the glass is half empty. High agency states you're a tap."

Kill your gurus. Mack's best-performing essay is "The Adults Don't Exist" on his Substack. In it, he says, "Don't put any adult on a pedestal. Kill your gurus. A more useful belief: The 'adults' aren't going to save you — they don't even exist." The people you're waiting for permission from are making it up as they go. So are you. The difference is whether you admit it and act anyway.

See what others miss. Mack's biggest post on X answers the question: "What is ignored by the media but will be studied by historians?" He lists 25 observations about shifts happening now that we're too close to see clearly. It’s top-tier pattern recognition in real time.

Cut through complexity. His Razors thread collected 35,000 likes and later expanded into 18 Useful Razors and Rules. It’s like a cheat sheet of mental models you can use to make better calls faster.

Escape the busy trap. Mack argues that busyness is often a defense mechanism, and basically a way to avoid the work that actually matters. His essay, The Busy Trap, forces you to ask whether your calendar is full because you're productive or because you're hiding from something harder.

Engineer your luck. His essay "How to Engineer Luck" breaks down luck as a system you can influence. He dials in specific behaviors that increase your surface area for opportunity.

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Agency can be trained.

If high agency were purely innate, Mack's body of work would be interesting, but functionally useless. You'd read it, nod along, and stay exactly where you started. But there's evidence that agency responds to training, essentially like a muscle.

In 2017, a team of researchers led by Francisco Campos and Michael Frese ran a randomized controlled trial in Togo with 1,500 microenterprise owners. They wanted to know what actually moves the needle for small business owners in developing economies. One group received no training at all. Another went through a traditional business program covering financial basics and marketing fundamentals. The third group got something called personal initiative training. That meant no spreadsheets and no marketing funnels; just a curriculum designed to build a proactive mindset and teach entrepreneurial behaviors.

Two years of follow-up surveys showed that the control group stayed flat, while traditional training raised profits by a modest 11%. But the group trained in personal initiative saw profits jump 30%. The personal initiative training program paid for itself within a year.

In the program, the entrepreneurs learned a way of thinking. They learned to anticipate problems, take ownership of outcomes, and act before conditions were perfect. Those are the same instincts Mack describes when he talks about people who "happen to life."

The study suggests that if you're low on agency, you can't blame your wiring. You can build it. The real question is whether you'll put in the repetitions.

1) Run the jail cell test on yourself.

If you were stuck in an impossible situation, would you call yourself for help? That gap between who you are and who you'd want in your corner is exactly where the work begins.

2) Reality-check yourself this week

Pick one thing you've been putting off. Write down ten actions that would move it forward, then circle the one that scares you most. Break it into steps small enough to start today.

3) Ask the trap questions out loud

When you're stuck, name the trap. If you're overwhelmed, ask what the smallest possible first step is. Mack's escape questions work because they force specificity. Vagueness is the enemy of agency.

4) Stop waiting for the adults

The people you assume have it figured out are improvising just like you. Mack's point in "The Adults Don't Exist" is that no one is coming to permit you or show you the way. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you start moving.

5) Treat agency like physics

Mack's argument is that all problems are solvable given enough knowledge, as long as they don't violate the laws of physics. The question isn't whether something is possible, but whether you're willing to figure out how.