The High Agency Playbook: Using AI to Protect Your Zone of Genius

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I was 17 years old.

I sat at a kitchen table my mom bought at a garage sale.

I hand-wrote 17 letters to college baseball coaches.

No connections. No money. No roadmap. I packaged those letters with VHS tapes of me hitting and fielding.

I told those coaches exactly what I wanted and exactly what I lacked. My family was broke.

Whoever reduced that burden the most was going to get a power-hitting right-handed catcher.

That moment at the kitchen table has a name.

George Mack calls it High Agency.

High agency is not optimism. It is not confidence. It is not even intelligence.

High Agency is a state of being that separates the people who figure things out from the people who wait for instructions.

...but here is the problem. Most people treat high agency like a personality trait. You either have it or you do not.

That is a lie. High agency is a state. And the fastest, most reliable way to access that state consistently is what I call Easy Mode.

The Three Wheels of High Agency

George Mack describes high agency as a tricycle. It has three wheels. Clear thinking. Bias to action. Disagreeability.

Remove any one of those wheels and the whole thing stops working.

Think about the person you would call if you were stuck in a third-world jail cell. That is the high agency person in your life.

They are not the smartest person you know. They are not the most credentialed.

They are the one who would figure out how to get you out.

When I sent those 17 letters, I was not the most talented baseball player in New York.

I was not the best student.

...but I was willing to figure it out.

I was willing to be misunderstood. Coaches do not get letters like that. I knew if something broke along the way, I could fix it.

The three wheels were turning.

Most people I coach have one wheel spinning. Maybe two on a good day. They can think clearly about their business. They might even have the disagreeability to go against the grain.

...but without the bias to action, those other two wheels are decorative.

Or they have the bias to action and the clear thinking, but they fold the moment someone pushes back.

They become agreeable. They soften their position. They take the safe route.

Sustaining all three wheels consistently over time is nearly impossible for most people today. The reason is not talent. It is not intelligence. It is not even discipline.

The reason they cannot sustain high agency is because they are playing the wrong game. They are playing hard mode.

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Hard Mode Drains Your Identity

I want to tell you what the opposite of high agency feels like.

It feels like a dull, nagging sensation. A low-grade disconnection from who you are.

It is that voice in the back of your mind creating doubt, shame, and guilt because you know you are not doing the work that matters.

It translates physically...

• Death scrolling Instagram at 2 PM on a Tuesday.

• Reorganizing folders on your desktop at nine o'clock at night.

• Spending hours on emails that have no real value.

• Scheduling calls with no real purpose so you can look busy.

I lived this.

For months. Maybe longer than I want to admit.

There was a season in my career where I took a job with a big title and more money than I had ever seen. I was miserable from day one.

The work did not match my wiring. The culture did not match my values. But the paycheck kept showing up and I kept telling myself the money was worth it.

The CEO eventually looked at me in a board meeting and asked a question that broke me.

"Haven't you realized by now that you were a vanity hire?"

His comment hit me like a bomb...because he was right.

Not because I lacked capability. I got the job because I was capable.

He was right because I had voluntarily walked away from work I had built, work I loved, work that lit me up.

I traded it for a dump truck full of money. That is a low agency reason to pick a job.

Money without alignment is a trap. It buys comfort while it erodes identity.

Hard Mode does not drain your energy alone.

Hard Mode drains your identity.

When you are disconnected from your identity, you cannot operate within the high agency framework. None of the wheels spin. You cannot figure it out because you do not know what you are trying to figure out. You cannot fix what breaks because your energy is too depleted to even diagnose the problem.

This is the low agency trap.

Easy Mode Makes You High Agency by Default

High agency is a state of being. The fastest way to access that state is Easy Mode.

Easy Mode is not about doing less. It is not about doing easy stuff. It is about doing the work you were built to do. The work that creates energy instead of consuming it. The work where your output is disproportionate to your perceived effort.

When you are in that zone, high agency is not something you have to manufacture. It is the default.

Take March 2020. The zombie apocalypse hit upstate New York and shut everything down. I had launched my digital insurance agency, Rogue Risk, seven days before the world closed. I had lit $40,000 of my retirement savings on fire to get the business off the ground.

Every other insurance agency in the country scrambled. They tried to wedge their analog processes into digital systems. They operated from fear.

We did everything different.

We embraced the game on the field.

Consumers were sitting at home on YouTube learning everything they could about anything they were interested in. That included commercial insurance.

So we went full force into educational YouTube videos on commercial insurance products. Not pitch videos. Not sales videos. Educational content where we helped people understand their options.

We were not trying to sell. We were trying to help them solve a problem. By the time they called us, they were already sold. They understood their coverage gaps. They knew what they needed. All we had to do was connect their problem to the right product.

Was I braver than every other agency owner? No.

Was I smarter? Certainly not.

I was operating from my Easy Mode. I was creating. I was educating. I was building frameworks.

All three wheels of the high agency tricycle were turning automatically.

I was figuring it out. I was willing to be misunderstood. People thought I was insane for making YouTube videos about commercial insurance. When things broke, I fixed them because I had the energy to diagnose the problem.

Easy Mode does not make you more productive alone. It makes you high agency by default.

The Real Play for AI

There is a conversation happening everywhere about AI right now. Most of it misses the point entirely.

Most people are using AI to go faster. Faster emails. Faster content. Faster reports. Faster presentations.

That is the low agency move.

If you are in hard mode, disconnected and depleted, and you give that person an AI tool, you do not get a high agency person automatically. You get a low agency person trying to produce work slop at machine speed.

The real play is using AI to protect your Easy Mode.

AI was built to protect the work that looks like cheating to everyone else. It eliminates everything that pulls you away from your zone of genius.

I run this podcast (Finding Peak).

We do over 200,000 downloads a month. One of the biggest drains on my time was managing inbound guest requests.

Every week, 90 to 120 minutes were gone...

• Analyzing requests.

• Scoring them.

• Crafting responses.

• Handling follow-ups.

• Getting calendar invites out.

• Attaching Riverside links.

All of it is necessary. None of it requires my specific genius. Most of it causes me physical pain to endure.

So I built a workflow inside my AI Chief of Staff. I call him Max.

Every inbound request gets scanned and scored. If it is an eight to ten, Max automatically sends an acceptance email, a welcome email, and a calendar link. Once the guest books, Max goes into Riverside, creates a studio, pulls the link, jacks it into the calendar invite, and sends a confirmation email with onboarding materials.

If it is a five or below, Max automatically declines lightly and professionally. Every request gets cataloged in a database.

I put 90 to 120 minutes back in my pocket every week. That is one workflow.

Those minutes do not go into a void. They go back into creating. Into writing. Into building frameworks for my coaching clients. Into prepping for the next podcast episode. Into the work that only I can do.

The work that creates energy instead of consuming it. The work that compounds over time because it comes from my zone of genius, not from obligation.

A person in their Easy Mode with an AI layer protecting their zone of genius is not merely more productive.

They are operating at full high agency consistently.

By default. Without having to manufacture it through willpower or discipline.

That is the difference between using AI as a speed tool and using AI as a protection layer. Speed without direction is chaos. Protection of your zone of genius is high agency infrastructure.

Back to the Kitchen Table

That 17-year-old at the kitchen table had no safety net. No mentor. No one to show him how anything was done. He figured it out anyway because he had no other option. He was broke, alone, and determined.

You have something that kid never had.

You can build an AI assistant that knows you. It knows your work. It knows your goals. It knows your life story. It knows how to help you fill the gaps in your knowledge. It knows how to send you to the right resources.

With an AI assistant built around your Easy Mode, you are not alone.

The only question left is whether you are willing to do what that kid did. Get clear on who you are and what you want. Get clear on the work you were built to do. Build the systems that protect it.

Go be that unreasonable son of a bitch you were meant to be.

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This is the way.

Hanley.

P.S. I help founders and executives generating more than $10M in revenue find their Easy Mode. Click here to learn more.