Definition
Agency is the felt and exercised capacity to act on the world by deliberate choice rather than to be moved by it. A person with high agency experiences themselves as the author of their behavior; a person with low agency experiences life as something that happens to them.
In Robert Greene's framing, agency is not a fixed personality trait but a posture that can be strengthened. It grows when a person owns their decisions, including their mistakes, and shrinks when they habitually assign cause to circumstance, other people, or luck.
Why it matters
How it works
Agency operates as a self-reinforcing loop. Each time a person makes a deliberate choice and accepts its consequences, they accumulate evidence that their actions matter, which makes the next deliberate choice easier. The reverse loop is equally strong: each time discomfort is explained away as someone else's fault, the muscle of initiative weakens. Greene argues that the practical lever is attention — noticing where you reflexively surrender control and reclaiming it in small, concrete ways.