How High Agency People Can Get What They Want Out of Life

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1:29Stay you. Visit VitalProteins.com to learn more and where to buy. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio. Well, on the surface, Kate Hall's career sounds pretty great. Yale Law, two top clerkships, a prestigious job at a Washington, D.C. law firm working on Supreme Court cases. She leaves law at 31 to play professional poker and become the top ranked female poker player in the world.

2:05It sounds pretty good. And then the pandemic hits. Right. She becomes a co-founder of a pandemic drug company. She leads a foundation that decides the best use of philanthropic moonshots.

2:16Carol Massar:It sounds really, really great. And yet, as she writes in her new book, there's a second version not included in the conference bios. The burning out in college, leaving law because she couldn't handle the lifestyle, quote, losing her mind in the form of drug-induced psychosis and years of, quote, devastating drug addiction, excuse me, years of devastating drug addiction that left her unable to get a job. So we can see that her life was not just, as some would say, all success. And that's just the first two pages of her new book. Kate Hall is the author of the new book. You Can Just Do Things, How High Agency People Get What They Want Out of Life.

2:56She joins us from Berkeley, California. Kate, good to have you. We have the new book right here. It's on our desks. It's on our desk right here in the studio. It's up behind us. For people who are not familiar with the story, I gave sort of the CliffsNotes version. But give us a little more detail, and then I want to talk to you about high agency versus low agency and how we can shift those characteristics around. Great. Thank you. Thank you both so much for having me. I'm really excited about this. So the book draws on my experience, which you sort of alluded to, of a life with a lot of high highs and low lows.

3:30I have had this sort of non-traditional career track that has gone all over the place in the last decade in particular, along with a very low bottom of about three years of serious drug addiction. The book is, it draws on both of those sets of experiences. So it attempts to be a how-to that is based not only on my experience sort of switching careers multiple times, but also in particular my experience of clawing my way back out of this total pit that I was in during addiction. And I think that that process of getting unstuck can be a source of a lot of wisdom and general advice as well.

4:17Carol Massar:You know, when you look back, do you see a moment like, is the highs what ultimately led to the lows? Like, when you think about the course of things, I do a lot of looking back at life. And I'm just curious, as you look back, is it just extremes that maybe were part of your life that, I don't know, that would have happened no matter what, and that the highs are why you hit some lows? Oh, I think that there's definitely a relationship between them. I have a tendency toward extremity. Moderation has never been my strong suit. So I think to some extent, the same mindset that caused me to go after a lot of things that I wanted in life in a sort of single-minded way and led to a lot of my focus was also the kind of, unfortunately, single-minded focus that I brought into addiction as well.

5:16And so there is this running theme that I think you correctly identify of just being kind of an extreme person. I do think that there are unhealthy aspects of that, and there are also healthy aspects of that. And the book is, to some extent, my attempt to draw lessons out of the healthy parts of it while hopefully not doing so with the unhealthy parts of it. Well, I want to talk a little bit about this concept of agency because it takes center stage and is this sort of theme, this thread that runs through the book. First, just distinguish for people high agency versus low agency when it comes to a personality trait or a characteristic.

5:56How do you define those things? So my favorite definition of agency is the capacity to both see and act on degrees of freedom that other people overlook. So it is sort of a dual capacity to notice ways in which we have more freedom than we might immediately appreciate and also having the courage to act on that freedom once it is recognized.

6:21Carol Massar:You know, it's interesting, you know, and going through your book of like how we see the world. And sometimes we're like, well, this is just the way it is, or this is just the way I am. And then there's, I mean, we are, there's a deluge of self-help stuff, right? To get us out of this. From someone who had to, who had success, extreme success, and then had to deal with being at a real low. And a lot of people don't come out of that low. And we know that. What is your advice to people when it comes to kind of dealing with life and what it throws at us? And what do we say? Well, yeah, that is just the way.

7:01Carol Massar:Like, what's your advice? I think one general piece of advice is, I think you hit on this with your question a bit, is that often the aspects of self-help or self-development that are most comfortable and intuitive to us are not the ones where we have the most to gain from focusing on those precisely because we have already sort of naturally gravitated toward those aspects of self-help. So I think a general problem for self-help and why it is often not actually helpful for people is that people tend to gravitate toward the forms of advice that are already sort of flatter the way that they are naturally and to ignore forms of advice that require a radical departure from the way that one has been living.

7:51And so I think like the first piece of advice for anybody who is really trying to change some aspect of themselves is to sort of grapple with that reality about self-help and commit to doing things that may make them uncomfortable in service of having a more ambitious, exciting life. Well, that's, I think, the crux of why a lot of people feel stuck. And you address this in the book. What's a way that people can get unstuck? Because I think to a lot of people, it seems really daunting. Okay, maybe change jobs, move to a different place, make an adjustment to their life in some sense that has to do with their family?

8:32A lot of people out there feel stuck. What's the way to get out of that? Yeah. I think that the zero to one is a lot harder for most people than the one to 10 of changing your life. The first difficult part is what I refer to as admitting that you know the question. Most of us have one or multiple questions that we strategically avoid asking ourselves because we know that we might not like the answer. That might be, is this marriage still working for me? Am I in a career path that I don't endorse? And so one of the things the book does is it tries to sort of systematically walk through some of the things that people might be avoiding asking themselves and cause them to ask themselves those questions.

9:20And then like once you have admitted to yourself that you know what the question is. The next step is like, okay, from this point in my life, now that I have awareness of this, how do I begin taking action? Even though it may feel like I'm a decade into this career, I'm a decade into this marriage, how does one actually get unstuck? And a thing that I found helpful for this in getting out of addiction is this mindset that I developed. Many people have developed similar mindsets or ways of talking about this at different times, but my frame on this is the crisis manager, which is basically just like an alter ego that you invent.

9:58You pretend as though you've been parachuted into your own life and you're not responsible for whatever mess you find yourself in. You're merely responsible for identifying like the next best action and taking that small action that will help get you out of your current rut. And I think focusing on, sorry, go ahead. No, no, no. Finish your thought. Please, please. I just think focusing on that incremental progress rather than the course of avoidance or failure that has landed you in a position that you're very unhappy about is the thing that was most helpful for me in recovering from addiction.

10:32Carol Massar:We've heard a lot about, I feel like, in terms of how you moved forward after that. Kate, I think anybody who's listening is like, how does, you know, you went to Yale Law School, like Tim, you know, you, you know, became a professional poker player, you created a drug company, like you have done some really remarkable things. We've only got a couple of minutes and this is maybe not fair to ask, but how do you go from that to being a devastating drug addiction for three years? I mean, I love the question. It's something I don't get asked a lot, surprisingly. And it's something that I kind of cut out of the book on the recommendation of my editor.

11:14Um, but the answer is basically I was a, um, a materialist atheist for most of my life. And then through the course of using psychedelics had a spiritual experience that was truly life altering for me. Um, I consider it like the dividing line in my life. Like there's a before and after that experience. And I became so singularly focused on the occurrence of this event in my life that I became obsessed with like chasing it and replicating it. And that worked for some period of time. And then it slowly worked less and less as I think other people before me have also experienced. But it was really this like chasing of a sense of a higher purpose that got me hooked in the first place.

12:03And then that I had a really hard time letting go of. That's sort of what kept me in addiction for as long as I was.

12:13Carol Massar:Wow. I'm glad we asked and thank you for answering. 30 seconds left here. We've got the book. You can just do things. What's a final message you want to leave with us? And I apologize, there's not more time. Yeah, no. I think the final message would be agency has a bad reputation for being something that you're either born with or not. I think I've had both high and low periods of my life and my early life was actually pretty low agency. I'm convinced that agency is learnable by basically anybody. And this book is my attempt to sort of systematize the learning of agency. And so I hope even if it doesn't intuitively appeal to people that they will check it out.

12:59Carol Massar:And we definitely have and we will. Kate, thank you so much. Appreciate being so frank and honest with us. Kate Hall. Her book, You Can Just Do Things, How High-Agency People Get What They Want Out of Life.

13:36the world of something like HIV is possible. Population growth is so enormous in Africa.

13:40Carol Massar:Listen to Next Africa on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.