We talk a lot about which skills to build — coding, writing, data analysis, prompting AI. The skills debate is everywhere. But it's the wrong conversation.
Most skills will be disrupted, automated, or devalued in the next 10–20 years. That's not fear-mongering — it's just the rate of change. The question isn't which skill to acquire. It's whether you have the underlying capacity to keep acquiring whatever skill the moment demands.
That capacity has a name: Agency.
To have agency is to be the subject of a sentence, rather than its direct object. It is the tendency to act, rather than wait to be acted upon.
— Devon Eriksen
What Agency Actually Means
Agency isn't just action. It's an undying commitment to iteration — acting, observing what doesn't work, adjusting, and continuing without being seduced back into comfortable conformity. If you are a high agency individual, skill disruption doesn't threaten you. You have a vision, and you understand that you can acquire whatever skill or knowledge is required to achieve the life you want.
The Enemy: Conformity
Conformity is when your mind is still connected by an umbilical cord to society — judging truth based on popularity and acceptance rather than through your own direct experience. It's the operating system most people run on, installed during the first 20 years of life, and never questioned.
In the Spiral Dynamics and ego development models, approximately 50% of the population is at the conformist stage of cognitive development. Half the population lacks the cognitive development for genuine agency. Not a moral failing — a cognitive stage. But the wrong stage for what's coming.
The cruel irony: even "high agency" as a social concept can become a form of conformity. In the tech world, everyone talks about being high agency — making it just another tribal badge to wear, rather than a capacity actually developed.
5 Traits of a High Agency Person
- They iterate without permission. They don't wait to be assigned, approved, or given a signal to start. When it fails, they adjust and act again.
- They treat life as one giant experiment. They expect to fail — because failure is just data. The low agency person blames everyone. The high agency person asks: what did I learn?
- They believe in the difficult. Low agency people were trained to believe escape is impossible even when it isn't. High agency people identify the difficult and move toward it.
- They are context creators, not content creators. AI can generate content. It can't generate context — a vision, a throughline, a personality. Content without context is noise.
- They understand barriers have collapsed. You have access to any knowledge required to achieve whatever you want. Most people do nothing with it. That was always the point.
The AI Question
"AI will generate so much content that human creators won't stand a chance." This is the fear. It's also the wrong frame.
High agency people with genuine vision will outpace everyone else by 10x precisely because AI has removed most barriers to execution. If you can think clearly about what you want and why — the how is almost trivially accessible. But that's the prerequisite: thinking clearly. Agency.
AI is a tool. Tools need someone with a vision to use them. The person with a coherent worldview will always outcompete the person prompting AI to generate viral posts.
The skill isn't coding. It isn't prompting. It isn't writing or design. Those are vessels. The skill is the willingness, and the capacity, to figure things out, move without permission, iterate without comfort, and build toward a vision that only you can fully define.
Source: The Most Important Skill to Learn in the Next 10 Years