How to be more agentic — Cate Hall

Cate Hall treats agency as a learnable skill ("manifest determination to make things happen") rather than an innate trait. She has used it to compensate for aging relative to peers and has achieved outlier results in law (Supreme Court advocate), poker (world #1 female), business (art/perfume companies), and pandemic response (Alvea — fastest startup to clinical trials).

Agency is about finding real edges: things you are willing to do that others aren’t, often because they are annoying or unpleasant. These edges often hide behind a cloud of aversion.

Concrete Hacks

Court rejection. Ask for things that feel unreasonable so your sense of “reasonable” stays calibrated. In careers, aim to get rejected from most things you apply for early on; deliberately court rejection to decouple “no” from surprise and dejection.

Example: an email along the lines of “I’m planning to start something similar to yours; would you consider letting me run yours instead?” One recipient may think you overstepped; another led to a much cooler joint organization.

Seek real feedback. Overpowered. Use anonymous forms to remove social friction. Put the link in your bio (Hall gets a few comments a week). Most feedback is neutral or positive; the painful honest ones are the valuable ones.

Increase surface area for luck. When entering a new field, meet as many people as possible doing related work, even without obvious benefit. Relevance is a poor proxy for usefulness (enthusiasm and breadth of the other person matter more). Many of Hall’s best collaborations came from almost-random meetings.

Assume everything is learnable. Agency itself is learnable. So are confidence, charisma, warmth, tranquility, optimism. The plan for charisma is boring but effective: read books, watch many hours of charismatic people, adopt habits.

Love the moat of low status. Learning new skills requires a period of being visibly bad. Crossing the moat visibly (asking questions, collaborating) accelerates learning. Hall’s famously bad poker hand in a big tournament (news stories) became a fond memory once she realized she had gained unflappability.

Don’t work too hard. Grinding kills creativity and big-picture thinking. Burnout is the ultimate agency-killer — reduction in agency is often the first detectable sign.

Hall now keeps boundaries (offline by 6pm most nights, rigorous Sunday Sabbath) that would have shamed her earlier self. Rule: never take instructions on how hard to work from someone who has never burned out.

Agency is an all-purpose intensifier. No one is born with it; everyone can learn it; it is never too late.

(See the 2026 book note in the raw.)

Placed under Dispositional in the generalist reading list: a-reading-list-for-generalists-dylan-bowman.