The Unseen Danger in Trump vs. Harris

A quick litmus test.

How many times in the last 48 hours have you seen a headline, post, or meme about the elections that made you worried or angry?

You’re being bombarded, and it’s robbing your agency.

Agency is your personal power to get things done and make things happen. It's your power to refuse to be victim and let others control your life.

99% of the political memes you see have been put there to waste your time and energy.

They distract you with facts or quotes that might not even be accurate or true. Then they take it out of context to make a point that doesn’t really matter when you think about it.

Political posts are conditioning you to feel like a victim. They play off your concerns and emotions so they can offer up their candidate as a savior/hero who is going to bring down retribution on your enemies.

You should be really pissed off about this, because they’re manipulating your emotions just to get more clicks and engagements. And they’re literally stealing from you. They’re robbing you of the success and happiness you deserve in your life.

They’re transferring your agency to another person, a figurehead who's actually robbing you of your personal power.

Politics should be external. They should be about what you want for the rest of the world and what you think fairness and Justice look like. It’s beautiful to care about this, but don't forget how powerful you are to create the changes you want in your personal life.

Please go out and vote. The wrong elected official could potentially create a world of pain and misery with one bad policy choice.

But don’t lose sight of your personal power, your agency.

Before you doom scroll through the next batch of political memes, commenting like it’s going to change anyone’s mind, try something new. Work on helping the world and improving your own life. Here are a few practices to get you started:

1. Produce as much of your own food and energy as you can

2. Have meaningful conversations with the people around you

3. Start your own business, even if it’s just a small side hustle

4. Exercise every day, or at least move around

5. Learn practical skills and put them to use

6. Volunteer for something

7. Never stop learning—especially history, philosophy, and psychology

8. Dedicate time every day to discovering and executing your own, unique life’s work

9. Build upon your strengths to attain success and fulfillment; work on your weaknesses for happiness and growth

Now let’s work some of these practices into a powerful, purposeful adventure.

Where Does Your Agency Come From?

Imagine you're finally laying down in bed after a long hard week. You’re exhausted and look forward to a good night's sleep at last.

But two hours later, you wake up because one of your kids has a high fever and severe abdominal pain. They have appendicitis.

No matter how tired you feel, there's no question that you're going to get them to a hospital. Even if your car doesn't start.

If you had to carry your child barefoot through the snow, you would do it.

If both of your legs were broken, you would call every person you knew and convince someone to take you and your child to the emergency room.

That's the proof of what agency can do. If you want something badly enough, if something absolutely has to happen no matter what, you’ll make it inevitable.

Agency is like a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets.

If you've had a rough life and you've dealt with emergencies where you've had to push yourself to your limit, you have an unshakable confidence in your ability. You almost laugh at snowflakes who complain about little things that you would just deal with no matter how hard or unpleasant.

Adversity makes you stronger, or at least it makes you way more confident about your strength. 

I don't wish these tough life lessons on anyone, but I do want to give you a workout that will strengthen your agency muscle.

A Workout for Your Agency Muscle

The secret to building your agency muscle is simple, and based on three principles.

First, the fortitude and resourcefulness that you build up through the worst times of your life is a power you can also create and cultivate during the best times. You can draw upon these strengths to achieve extraordinary audacious goals.

Once you have the steel in your spine to carry a child through the snow, solve a complicated problem when you're scared and exhausted, or  face down a criminal or a bully…

 You can tap into that same power to buy a home, write a symphony, or spend a year traveling.

Second, Knowing it and believing it is the hardest part. Adversity forces you to go beyond your chosen limits, and being forced to do it proves that you can.

This is where you build your agency muscle.

Third, and most importantly, when there’s no adversity forcing you to test your limits, you can create an artificial, positive adversity. 

Adventure is the way you create positive adversity.

Adventure is a struggle. But you’re not struggling to avoid some dire consequences. You’re striving to achieve something extraordinary that you have chosen for yourself.

Here’s a simple way to create adventure in your life:

1. Choose an ambitious, audacious goal--possibly without even knowing how you're going to make it happen. 

2. Act as if it simply has to happen. Do something every day, no matter how small, to make it happen. 

3. Review your overarching goal every day, and brainstorm reasons why it has to happen and inevitably will.

97% of human history is our heritage as hunter-gatherers. Every day was an adventure and a challenge.

Your mind and body are hardwired to climb swim, build tools and shelter, create artwork, and handle wave after wave of new problems and situations.

By applying these skills intentionally, our ancestors built pyramids and cathedrals eventually rockets and space shuttles.

You have all that same capability bursting through every cell in your body.

What are you going to do with it?

That wraps it up for this week.

If you’re enjoying these rants, lessons, and tools, I would love to hear from you.

If you’re not, I would like to hear from you even more.

Reply to this email and tell me what you think, what you’d like to see in the future, or just to drop me a line about your cat.

I don’t always have the time to reply to your message, but I read every one of them.

Jacob