Are you almost agentic?
Choosing goals and completing them, builds my agency muscle.
Do you consider yourself agentic?
Like… are you the master of your own destiny, do you choose your own path, that sort of thing.
Most of the time, I don’t feel agentic. I get stuck in the routine. I’ll be sipping on a post-work beer with friends. Spontaneous plans bubbling through our conversation, most of them cheeky. Instead of grabbing adventure by the horns and picking something awesome to do, or even just following along and joining in their adventure, I’ll lean back into my routine. Someone has to feed the dogs tonight, right? Could’ve made arrangements, but didn’t.
Lacking the motivation to do anything grand, because I know it’ll exhaust me. It’s stupid and I feel dumb because of it. Fear and routine make bad bedfellows.
However, I’ve come to learn that agency is a muscle to exercise. To stretch, flex and burn. Of the examples that come to mind, let me tell you of my favourite. Let me tell you about the Doom guy.
If you walk up the stairs, hook a right then left to enter my office. You’ll be faced with a larger-than-life pixel art project that hangs on the wall there. Shades of brown and orange, it’s the face of an old video game character from my childhood (DOOM, 1993) and kind of a running joke with my colleagues.
Every day I go to work, I get to see this art project in all of its glory. Hand cut and painted polystyrene blocks. With the recent addition of a light fixture, it’s even a little dramatic.
Finishing stuff is hard. The excitement starts high and slowly fades as time goes on. If we don’t finish soon, then we enter the dip. That part of the project where it sucks, it’s messy, we’ve forgotten why on earth we want this. Just plain sucks. And typically, I jump to the next project. Abandoning it to lie and waste away. Until there’s no reason to finish it.
Not with Doom guy.
Now I can’t recall what made me decide to, but I wasn’t going to start any new projects until this one was done. There were some weeks where I sort-of gave up, where I failed to mix the colours and botched up batches… three times. Where cutting the polystyrene blocks was getting sloppy and sloppier. Where I wished, but resisted, the urge to start the awesome new map idea that was in my head.
My decision to abstain from the new, left me no choice. In fact, it edged me on. Pushing through that dip, I eventually got to the glue up stage, getting excited as the face slowly emerged.
I hung it up and at that moment… it was done. And the world was my oyster.
Completing it gave me a feeling that if I set my mind to it, I could get anything done. My agentic muscle was pumped 💪.
Two things make this cool.
It got completed.
I chose this random-ass goal myself.
Completing things is like reaching the destination you set out for. Now there’s nothing wrong with going off course. A good wandering about, swimming 🏊♂️, climbing tall mountains ⛰️, and abseiling into an abyss 🧗🏼♂️. These things are healthy, powerful even. But if you never reach that destination, you haven’t completed it. You may find other adventures, but not that one. Completing things is binary, it is or it isn’t complete.
This unreached destination remains a half thought, hard to use or to talk about, harder still to feel confident that you can reach destinations, that you choose. It’s lacking the agency part.
If you make a claim beforehand, you’re setting yourself up to succeed or fail. It’s risky, its a bet with life. There are stakes with that.
There is an art to choosing goals. Walking a 5km is easier than running a marathon. Harder still is a marathon under three hours (ask Casey about it) !
I make no claim to know the right goals to choose.
A couple months ago, I was working part-time on a startup idea, while trying to juggle my day job, and the other usual stresses of life. Like buying a house, handling a deceased estate, hosting dinner clubs, just existing. It got to the point where I burnt out my motivation. Waking up, I couldn’t be bothered to do anything. Not great.
So I took a break. And afterwards, I knew I needed to get back into things. Restarting my startup made my gut churn, so I decided to choose a smaller goal, with the intent of achieving it — come hell or high water.
Building a journalling-note-taking-AI app, isn’t particularly novel, but it is something I want for myself. To raise the stakes a little, I added a few constraints, one of them is documenting the journey. Which is what I’m doing now.
While it can be frustrating — I’m currently on my 8th, 9th 10th draft — the desire to build the next feature helps pull me through this phase.
Doom guy isn’t my greatest achievement, or the thing I’m most proud of, but it is my favourite achievement. It’s the one that told me I have legs and they can take me anywhere.
So to answer the question about almost agentic. You might be achieving goals, knocking them back like a sorority girl on Tequila Tuesday, but they might not be your goals. Or you might be choosing your directions, but not completing them. You need both to be the master of your boat.
Being agentic, is pushing on the frontier of life, it’s swapping out your city car for an off-roader. You can still follow the well paved roads, established by others, but you can just as easily veer off into the vast unknown.
So without further ado, let me jump back into building the next feature of this product: The timeline view of my notes. Thanks for reading :)
And thank you
Mak for all the feedback!—
The long-ass list below is the log of my work so far. You’ll notice its more ideas than prototypes. This is mostly to keep a personal record of things, but you’re welcome to peruse them :)
Socrates Method prototype: https://socrates-method.replit.app/
Timeline view demo (so far): https://infinite-journal.replit.app/
Week of January 1–5, 2025
Idea: Use OCR and Dropbox document scanning to get handwritten A5 notes into the journal
Idea: Use context markers to guide the topic of the note
Week of January 6–12, 2025
Idea: Use a timeline view to leverage our sense of time to recall notes (e.g., I’m sure I wrote that thing a week ago)
Idea: Review feature for filtering notes in the timeline by topic
Idea: A Socratic Method feature to challenge user thoughts with AI-driven questions
Built: A working prototype of the Socratic Method feature on Replit
https://socrates-method.replit.app/
Week of January 13–19, 2025
Idea: Core principle of Infinite Journal: helping users discover what they truly want
Idea: Capture emotional snapshots to remember what you felt like at that time
Week of January 29–February 4, 2025
Built: Updated Socrates app, UX improvements and added Topic buttons
Built: Initial Infinite Journal Timeline view on Replit
Idea: Topics can be arbitrary queries. Queues instead of lists
Idea: Metadata layers to separate human from generated content. Overlay filesystem
Week of February 5–11, 2025
Built: Added Chunks (later removed) to Timeline view on Replit app.
Idea: Store non-crafted notes to add (e.g., Zoom calls, emails)
Idea: Keep provenance of data. Maybe include financial journaling?
Built: Linked Replit app to Dropbox for data. Polished UI
Week of February 12–18, 2025
Idea: Pricing model: More you pay, more access to code you get
Idea: Use JSONL for embeddings and store in Dropbox
Idea: Consult, refresh, build, test, publish. Like an AI Operating System
Week of February 19–25, 2025
Idea: Obsidian as the platform for Timeline view and searching?
Idea: Git-like commits for capturing, immutable, append-only. Jump start feature
Doom Guy is the duuuuuuuuude!