Cultivate Agency, Not Skills
When AI hands everyone the skills, agency becomes the only differentiator — and you build it by making things.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
Schoening argues that once an AGI-adjacent model can supply almost any skill on demand, the trait that separates people who thrive from those who fall behind is agency — the belief that the world around you is malleable and that you can just change it. Because agency is unevenly distributed, it is also the highest-leverage thing to deliberately develop. The path he prescribes is not scheming around your boss or org, but the ancient human loop of making, tinkering, and building until you internalize that things are made by people no smarter than you.
Origin
Schoening's own framing, anchored on a Steve Jobs quote he cites as the thing he cares most about: that one day you realize the world is made up by people no smarter than you. He also credits learning a version of this from Brian Chesky at Airbnb.
Core principles
- 01Skills are becoming commoditized by AI; agency is not
- 02Agency is the same trait that separates founders from non-founders
- 03The world is malleable — things around you were made by people no smarter than you
- 04Making things, not gaming the system, is the on-ramp to agency
- 05Agency compounds on a treadmill: make something, get noticed, realize you can change things
How to run it
- 1
Adopt the malleability premise
Internalize that everything around you — phones, apps, org roles, processes — was built by ordinary people and can therefore be changed. Schoening's litmus: in 6-9 months you could figure out how to build most things around you from scratch.
Pro tip Go for a walk and deliberately look at how man-made things are constructed; ask how you'd rebuild each one.
- 2
Start by making, not scheming
Pick something concrete and tinker with it — code, a chair, a home-cooked meal. The point is to get on the 'making treadmill' where creation becomes a reflex, not to route around a bad manager to extract a promotion.
Pro tip Treat any small act of creation as tinkering; a home-cooked meal counts as a rep.
Watch out Most people hear 'agency' and picture circumventing their boss to get X, Y, Z — that is the wrong model and produces nothing.
- 3
Rewrite your role instead of asking what it is
Stop asking 'what does it mean to be a PM/designer/engineer?' and instead change the role to how you think it should work. Schoening's examples: an employee who became the team's #1 recruiter because that's what the org needed; another who moved from PRDs to Figma to building prototypes directly.
Pro tip Ask 'do I drive this company like it's stolen?' — act with founder-level ownership even without founder title.
Watch out People who cling to a fixed job definition ('really, what is my job?') will have a much harder time as roles merge.
- 4
Let attention and feedback reinforce it
As you get better at making things, people start paying attention, which awakens you further to the fact that you can just change things. Ride that loop rather than waiting for permission.
In the wild
An employee asked Schoening whether he'd hire him into the first ten people of a hypothetical startup; told no because a PM wasn't needed early, he replied he'd work on his skills to be hireable in the first five — moving from writing long PRDs, to working in Figma, to asking why he couldn't just build the prototype and do the thinking there.
→ He reshaped his own role toward building rather than documenting — a concrete demonstration of high agency.
A design/engineering blurring employee became Notion's number-one recruiter — going out to find people the org needed — because he wanted to affect change and didn't care how it happened, stepping outside his day-to-day mandate.
→ Cited by Schoening as a clear signal of above-average agency at Notion.
Common mistakes
Treating agency as gaming the system
Many people interpret agency as circumventing a bad manager or org to extract a personal reward. Schoening says the real move is upstream: just start making things, and the leverage follows.
Waiting for a defined role
Asking others to tell you exactly what your job is cedes agency. The high-agency move is to change the role to what you think it should be.
Is it for you?
Best for
Individual contributors and managers in AI-forward teams who feel their skills are being commoditized and want to stay valuable
Not ideal for
Contexts where reliability and coordination matter more than individual initiative, or anyone who reads it as license to ignore craft and rigor
From the transcript
“the thing that matters is agency and I don't think agency is very evenly distributed in the world”
“One day you wake up and you realize the world is made up by people no smarter than you.”
“the biggest throughine I've found is making”
“no, no, just start by making things”
From the episode
Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era
Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion)