High Agency: The Most Important Trait Nobody Talks About
In 1997, two brothers from New Zealand moved to China with almost nothing. They were 18 and 19 years old. They slept on factory floors, lived on a dollar a day, and built a toy manufacturing operation by a river because they could not afford to pay for one that already existed. Nick Mowbray sent emails to every retail buyer he could find—not once, but every single day—until Walmart finally replied with two words: “Send sample.”
Today, ZURU Toys is the largest privately held toy company in the world. The Mowbray brothers are billionaires. And the trait that got them there has a name that Shaan Puri calls “an early buzzword about to go mainstream.”
The name is High Agency. And it may be the most important personality trait that nobody teaches.
What Is High Agency?
George Mack, the British writer and thinker who has spent nearly a decade developing this concept, offers an image that captures it precisely. Imagine two people stranded on a desert island. One person takes the wood around them and builds a boat. The other person spells out HELP in the sand and waits to be rescued.
Both people face the same circumstances. One creates a solution. The other waits for permission.
The concept has a darker test. If you were thrown into a prison cell in a country where the rule of law does not apply, and you had one phone call to make, who would you call? That person is probably the highest-agency individual you know.
The term itself came to Mack through Eric Weinstein, the mathematician and podcaster. But the closest prior framing belongs to Paul Graham, who described the best founders as “relentlessly resourceful.” High Agency builds on that foundation and extends it into four tenets: an internal locus of control, intentionalism about outcomes, resourcefulness in execution, and a bias toward action over deliberation.
The components matter less than the result. High agency people do not accept constraints that others treat as fixed. They find the door that everyone else assumed was locked.
The Evidence: Case Studies from MFM
Theory is cheap. The podcast has documented specific people whose behavior illustrates what agency looks like when applied at scale.
Nick Mowbray: The Highest Agency Person in the Room
Shaan Puri has called Nick Mowbray the most high-agency person he has ever encountered. The evidence supports the claim.
When Mowbray and his brother Mat became significant Tesla shareholders, they did what most investors would never consider. They installed cameras outside Tesla’s Fremont factory to monitor production levels in real time. They were not willing to wait for quarterly reports. They wanted to see the cars coming off the line.
The behavior seems extreme until you remember this is the same person who built a diaper brand—Rascal + Friends—while recovering from surgery. Most people use sick leave to rest. Mowbray used it to launch what became one of the fastest-growing diaper companies in the market.
Blake Scholl: Supersonic Jets from a Spreadsheet
Blake Scholl dropped out of high school. Then he got into Carnegie Mellon through a special program designed for dropouts. He joined Amazon in 2001 specifically because he wanted to learn from Jeff Bezos. He built an automated system that created Google Ads for Amazon’s entire catalog—a project that most engineers would have deemed impossible.
Years later, Scholl wanted to build supersonic passenger jets. The Concorde had been grounded. Every expert in aviation said the economics did not work. Scholl built a spreadsheet and proved they were wrong.
When he needed customers, he did not hire a sales team. He went to a Virgin Galactic event and asked Richard Branson’s team for something unusual: not money, but permission to put the Virgin logo on his prototype. The implied endorsement opened doors that direct asks never could.
At Y Combinator’s Demo Day, most founders showed slides. Scholl displayed an actual jet engine and a model airplane. He raised money from people who could see and touch the future he was selling.
The Reddit Founders: A Train Ride That Changed Everything
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian were students in Virginia when they heard that Paul Graham was giving a talk at Harvard. The distance was considerable. The effort required to attend was not trivial. They took a train to Massachusetts just to hear Graham speak.
They applied to Y Combinator and got rejected. But Jessica Livingston, Graham’s wife and YC co-founder, vouched for them. They got a callback. They shipped Reddit in three weeks. They created thirty fake accounts to seed the initial content and establish the culture they wanted.
The fake accounts are the detail that sticks. Most people would have waited for real users to show up organically. Huffman and Ohanian manufactured the appearance of activity until the reality caught up.
George Mack: Taking Over Times Square for a Blog Post
When Mack finished writing his handbook on high agency, he faced a marketing problem. How do you promote a post about taking action without taking extraordinary action yourself?
His answer was to rent a billboard in Times Square. For a blog post. The move was expensive and arguably unnecessary. It was also perfectly aligned with the message. The medium was the proof.
Mack also sniped the domain highagency.com. The previous owner had held it for ten years. When the registration lapsed, Mack was watching. He grabbed it within hours.
How to Spot High Agency People
Mack has developed a checklist for identifying high agency individuals before they have achieved visible success. The indicators are behavioral rather than credential-based.
Weird teenage hobbies. The ability to go against social pressure as a teenager—the hardest time to resist conformity—predicts the ability to do so as an adult. If someone pursued unusual interests when the cost of being different was highest, they are likely to pursue unusual paths when the stakes matter more.
Unpredictable opinions. When you cannot guess someone’s political views from their profession or background, they have exercised agency in forming their worldview. The person whose beliefs never surprise you is probably importing them wholesale from their environment.
Energy distortion field. Some people leave you more energized than when you arrived. Mack calls them “treadmill friends” as opposed to “sofa friends.” The former make you want to run. The latter make you want to sit.
Willingness to spend their own money to move faster. Shaan Puri observed that when an employee pays out of pocket to accelerate a project—buying equipment the company has not yet approved, taking a cab instead of waiting for reimbursement—they are revealing that they cannot tolerate being blocked. The trait is rare and diagnostic.
Hacked a real-world system. Y Combinator asks applicants to describe a system they have exploited for personal benefit. The question sounds like an invitation to confess wrongdoing. It is actually a filter for resourcefulness. People who have never found a loophole have probably never looked for one.
How to Develop High Agency
The encouraging news is that agency is not entirely fixed. Mack argues the case simply: if it is possible to decrease someone’s agency—and abusive relationships, institutional bureaucracy, and learned helplessness clearly do this—then it must be possible to increase it.
The frameworks matter more than the motivation.
Theory of Change vs. Theory of Action. This distinction comes from Aaron Swartz, the programmer and activist. A theory of action starts with identity: “I am a blogger, so I will write about this topic.” A theory of change starts with outcomes and works backward: What result do I want? Why does that matter? How would I achieve it? Why that method? How would I start today?
The difference seems semantic. It is not. Action-first thinking leads to busywork. Change-first thinking leads to leverage.
Break the Speed Bar. Shaan Puri wanted a piano. The normal timeline for such a purchase might be weeks—research, visits to stores, delivery scheduling. Puri called the store owner after hours, scheduled delivery while still browsing, and had the piano in his home within 24 hours.
The lesson is not about pianos. It is about assumptions. Most timelines are negotiable. The question is whether you are willing to mobilize all your resources toward a single goal simultaneously rather than sequentially.
Treat Obstacles as Predictable. Most projects fail for reasons that are entirely foreseeable. The vendor will be late. The key employee will quit. The market will shift. Mack recommends writing a “letter to self” before starting any significant project—a prediction of every obstacle likely to appear.
The value is psychological. When a predicted problem arrives, it feels like a known element of the game rather than a personal betrayal. Shaan references a Tony Robbins framing: the master greets the plateau by saying, “Ah, I thought I’d be seeing you soon. Hello, my old friend. You’re here. I was expecting you.”
Decisions as Experiments. If you have been deliberating about a choice for two years, you could have tested the answer ten times in that period. Agency means treating decisions as experiments to run rather than puzzles to solve. The data from action beats the speculation from analysis.
The Cultural Gap
Mack is British, which gives him an unusual vantage point on agency differences between cultures. He calls it “getting Ted Lassoed”—a reference to the American television character who succeeds through optimism that his British colleagues find naive.
The pattern, as Mack describes it: a Brit with twice the intelligence encounters an American with ten times the agency or confidence. The American achieves five times more.
The claim sounds like national stereotyping until you examine the evidence. The top universities are split between the United States and the United Kingdom. The entrepreneurial output is not split at all. American university spinoffs dwarf their British counterparts by a factor of five or more.
DeepMind began in London. The company that turned AI into a commercial revolution—OpenAI—is in San Francisco. The ideas were comparable. The agency to execute was not.
The Evolution: From High Agency to Generative
Shaan Puri has suggested that “high agency” may already be evolving into a broader concept: generative. A generative person takes a seed of an idea and blooms it into stories, frameworks, and multiple businesses. High agency is the willingness to act. Generativity is the capacity to create entire worlds from that action.
The trajectory mirrors the buzzword lifecycle that MFM tracks obsessively. “Contrarian” was the previous era’s term for independent thinking. High agency runs where contrarian walked. Whatever comes next will need to do even more.
For now, the concept serves a purpose. It gives a name to the trait that separates people who wait to be saved from people who build the boat.
FAQ
Can high agency be learned, or is it genetic?
The evidence suggests both. There is clearly a spectrum, and some people appear more naturally inclined toward action than others. But Mack’s argument is compelling: if agency can be decreased—through bad relationships, institutional training, or repeated failures—then it can be increased through the opposite inputs. Environment shapes behavior. Behavior, practiced, becomes trait.
What is the difference between high agency and just being aggressive?
Agency is directed toward outcomes, not dominance. An aggressive person might push harder in a negotiation. A high agency person might realize the negotiation itself is unnecessary and find a different path entirely. The distinction is between force and creativity.
How do I hire high agency people?
Ask about weird teenage hobbies. Ask what they could give a one-hour talk on without preparation—the answer reveals what they have explored deeply enough to internalize. Ask about a time they hacked a real-world system for personal benefit. The specificity of the answer matters more than its impressiveness.
Is high agency the same as being relentlessly resourceful?
Paul Graham’s phrase is the closest prior concept. High agency adds the explicit emphasis on locus of control and intentionalism. The terms are nearly interchangeable in practice, though Mack’s framework includes more tactical detail about how to develop the trait rather than simply identify it.
What is the prison test?
If you were stuck in a third-world prison and had one phone call to get yourself out, who would you call? The person you would trust with that call is probably the highest-agency person in your life. The test is clarifying because it strips away credentials and focuses on capability under constraints.
Sources & Episodes
- The Top 0.1% Of Ideas I’ve Stumbled Upon On The Internet — George Mack’s original breakdown with Shaan Puri
- The Most Valuable Skill For Any Founder — Deep dive with George Mack on his handbook, Times Square launch, and case studies
- The insane story of Blake Scholl - Boom Supersonic founder as high agency exemplar
- Reddit IPO: 8 Startup Lessons For Any Entrepreneur Starting Out — Huffman and Ohanian’s train ride and fake accounts
- Y Combinator CEO Shares How They Turn Wild Ideas Into Real Companies — Gary Tan’s cold-calling origin story
- Our Best And Worst Investments of 2025 — Nick Mowbray as highest agency person
- Business as a sport, Surge AI, and Waymo vs. Robotaxi — Evolution from High Agency to Generative
Related: George Mack | Shaan Puri | Paul Graham | Relentlessly Resourceful | Nick Mowbray | ZURU Toys | Blake Scholl | Boom Supersonic | Y Combinator | First Believer | Engineering Serendipity