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Whose permission are you waiting for?
Tl;dr: Agency, the ability to act without waiting for permission, is a skill you can build, not always a trait you have to be born with. I grew up in Belarus, one of the least agentic places on earth, and learned it in my twenties through cheap living, fast failures, and asking myself one question again and again: whose permission am I waiting for? This post covers my top takeaways from the books that shaped my thinking, along with the stories behind them. With extra funding coming into the movement soon, I think we can all benefit from more agency to make sure we absorb it effectively.
I recently went on the Euzoia podcast with Christoph to talk about agency: how to build it, how to use it in your career, and how to cultivate it in your team. I read two books on the subject in the two weeks before recording, so this post is my attempt to distil the best of what I’ve learned from the books, blog posts, and doing it the hard way.
I was born and raised in Belarus, probably the least likely place to cultivate agency. It’s a rather conservative society where I was told that sticking out was a bad thing. I asked too many questions. I raised my hand too often.
I wasn’t agentic as a teenager either. My mum picked my university, and my job was to study hard. But growing up with few opportunities taught me something useful: if I wanted a different life, studying hard wouldn’t be enough. I’d have to act. The skill came later, built deliberately through my twenties, one slightly too big risk at a time. Each job change was a bigger bet than the last, and each one paid off in learning even when it didn’t pay off in outcomes.
If you take one thing from this post, it's that agency can be learned. Which means the only question is whether you’re practising.
Jay Yang’s book You Can Just Do Things defines agency as permissionless action, and this reframe has been the single most useful one for me.
When I started Hive, the first thing I wanted to build was a movement newsletter. My immediate instinct was to seek blessing. Who am I to write a movement newsletter? So I emailed movement leaders asking for feedback before launching. Nobody had time to reply. Eventually one person wrote back: “I don’t have time to look at it, just publish it.” So I did. People signed up immediately because it was useful. Now, over 5,000 people receive it every two weeks, and it’s one of the main ways our movement stays up to date. There are no adults in the room. There is no permission slip coming.
Same story with executive coaching. I assumed I needed a pricey certification, twenty years of experience and grey hair. Then my own executive coach pointed out I had eight years of management experience and had been coaching people informally for years. My colleague Kevin built me a website, which meant I had to publish it. People booked sessions. That was it.
Notice what happened in both stories: I was looking for permission, and what I needed was a push from another agentic person. Nobody is agentic alone. Surround yourself with people who will say “just publish it.”
This one is from Cate Hall’s new book You Can Just Do Things: choose projects with high expected value, not fail-safe ones. It’s better to attempt things with a 5% chance of success and huge upside than things with a 95% chance of success and modest upside. But that maths only works if you can tolerate a lot of failure.
Our first funding applications for Hive were rejected. The first rejection took me a month to recover from. After applying for more funding and getting rejected, I seriously wondered whether I should quit. My co-founder Cam stayed confident we’d get funded eventually, and we did.
Now I recover from small rejections in minutes and big ones in a day. That recovery speed is the skill. You will never stop feeling the sting; you just get faster at getting back up. I wrote more about this in my post on managing difficult emotions at work. Rejection is the price of ambition, and if you’re never rejected, you’re not asking for enough.
Jay Yang, the author of the book You Can Just Do Things (yes, it has the same name as Cate Hall’s book), calls this “don’t burn the boats”: bold action doesn’t require destroying your safety net. Build a foundation so you can take risks without desperation.
My version: in my twenties, we lived with my husband’s mum, then house-sat for two years, deliberately keeping my expenses minimal so I could take impactful jobs that paid less or might disappear in months. I’m also not very attached to status, which helps. Many people lock themselves into a lifestyle their job funds, and then every risk feels existential. Cheap living and an emergency fund are a platform for agency. If you already have a lifestyle that’s hard to replicate on a small budget, you may benefit from doing side projects until the income can replace your normal job.
Being agentic has a failure mode, and I know because I’ve lived in it. When Cam and I started the Hive Slack community, we generated ten ideas a week and acted on most of them, while both working other jobs. Needless to say, the quality wasn’t always the best, and we both felt overwhelmed. My team still gives me feedback that I sometimes launch projects without asking how they fit with everything else we’re doing and whether we have capacity to take them on.
Agency means resisting the status quo, and that takes energy. Spend it on everything, and you burn out or get nowhere. The question that saved me: what amazing goals am I not reaching because I refuse to prioritise? Hyper-focus on the highest-impact work, and ring-fence a few hours a week for pure exploration so the founder brain has somewhere to play. That’s partly why this Substack exists.
At Hive we call it doocracy, and it’s written into our onboarding. When someone does something unprompted and useful, we tag it publicly: well done, #doocracy. People see the behaviour rewarded and copy it.
The founder failure mode is bulldozing over your team with your own agency until they conclude that agency is your job, not theirs. Coaching helps by anchoring on the person’s own goals, pointing to the moments they’ve already shown agency, and asking what they could do unprompted this week. But it has to be person-led. You can’t force agency on someone against their will, because the whole point is that it comes from them.
My most popular post ever is about how I learn languages. I felt guilty writing it because it wasn’t “impactful,” and it got 20 likes in my usual circles. Then someone in the language-learning community reshared it and over 4,000 people liked it. Many of them subscribed and now read my career and advocacy posts.
You cannot predict which seeds grow. Cate Hall suggests starting a blog as the first step she’d take if she ever had to find another job again. The more you write in public, the more people get to know you and your work, and the more opportunities will come your way.
Five questions to consider this week, adapted from Jay Yang’s Permissionless Reflection:
Unofficial work that gets you hired - my most popular post about how to apply agency to get a job
Hi, I’m Sofia Balderson. I lead Hive, a global community for people working to end factory farming. This is a link post from my Substack, Notes from the Margin to share the messier, more personal reflections that don’t fit in formal updates. If you care about leading, belonging, or building something that matters (especially from the edges), feel free to subscribe here.
