Episode Summary
I was 17 years old, sitting at a kitchen [music] table my mom bought at a garage sale. No dad in the house, stepfather working 12 hours a day, on the road, construction crew. >> [music] >> My mom was busy with my little sister. It was just me. I handwrote letters to 17 [music] different college baseball coaches, packaged them up in VHS tapes me hitting, fielding, whatever I could get at the time. And in every single letter I said the same thing that that most 17-year-olds would never have the nerve to say. I said, "I'm a power-hitting right-handed catcher. I finished 29th out of 325 kids in my class. >> I want to study science or engineering. If this is the kind of kid that you want on your team, here's the deal. My family is broke. I cannot pay for college. Whoever reduces that burden the most, essentially whoever gives me the most money, that's where I'm going." No hedge, no performance, no pretending that I had options that I didn't have. 17 letters, 17 years old, 17 VHS tapes. Total clarity about what I needed and what I was offering if they were to offer me a scholarship to go to that school. When the University of Rochester letter arrived, I opened it and immediately, immediately flipped as fast as I possibly could to the acceptance part. And once I saw that, immediately went to financial aid package. 90% covered. I started crying. Legitimately crying. Right there, again, >> alone, crying at a kitchen table that my mom bought at a garage sale, because I was going to college. I didn't know it at the time, but there's a name for what I had done. There's a name for what happened at that kitchen [music] table. George Mack calls it high agency. High agency is one of those ideas that once you see it, once you learn it, you cannot unsee it. It it burrows into your brain. It's not optimism and it's not confidence. It's not even intelligence. Mack describes it as a tricycle, three wheels. Clear thinking, bias to action, disagreeability. Remove any one of those wheels, and the whole thing stops working. The person you'd call, that person, that friend, that family member that you'd call [music] if you were stuck in a third world jail cell, that's the high agency person in your life. Not the smartest person you know. >> Not the most credentialed. The one who would actually figure out how to get you out of a third world jail. That 17-year-old at the kitchen table, he was not [music] the most talented baseball player in New York. I can promise you that. He wasn't the best student. [music] He had no connections, no money, no roadmap. But what I was willing to do was figure it out. [music] I was willing to be misunderstood because that letter was weird. Coaches don't get letters like that. >> And I knew that if something broke along the way, I could fix it. I didn't have a a name for the three wheels that George Mack calls high agency, but >> they were turning all the same. So, here's the problem. Most people might have one wheel, maybe two on a good day spinning for them. [music] And almost nobody, nobody, especially today, can sustain all three consistently over time. The question is why? I want to tell you what the opposite of high agency [music] feels like. Not theoretically, from the inside. From my own experience. It feels like that dull nagging sensation, a low-grade disconnection from who you actually are. That voice in the back of your mind creating doubt, shame, and guilt. Because you know you're not doing >> the work that matters. And it translates physically. That's scrolling Instagram at 2:00 p.m. on a Tuesday when you should be doing something productive. Reorganizing folders on your desktop at 9:00 at night, spending hours on emails that have no real value and should never even have been read in the first place. Scheduling [snorts] calls with no real purpose, just to have meetings on the calendar so that you can look busy. I lived this. There was a season in my career, in my life where I took a job, a big title, more money than I'd ever made or seen before, and I was miserable from day one. The CEO eventually looked at me in a board meeting and he said, "Haven't you realized by now that you were a vanity hire?" Now, part of me is flattered by that, but the high agency portion hated it because it broke me inside. What could have been seen as a compliment, though honestly was not given as a compliment, I took it as its intended purpose, which was an absolute insult [music] in so much as you might be sitting in this room, but your voice is not appreciated in this room. And frankly, what what really broke [music] me was that he was right. Not because I wasn't capable, I got the job because I was capable, but because I had voluntarily walked away from work that I had built, that I loved, that I had spent years putting together to get a dump truck full of money. That is a low agency reason to pick a job. That is what hard mode does to high agency people. It doesn't just drain your energy, it drains your identity. And a person without a clear identity, I know for me when I don't feel connected to my identity, you cannot operate in any regard of the high agency framework. None of the wheels are spinning for you. You can't figure it out because we don't know what we're trying to figure out in the first place. The idea of being misunderstood because we're lost on some thread from who we actually are and we can't [music] fix what breaks because we're too depleted, our energy is too drained to even diagnose the problem. This is the low agency trap. And low agency, in the terms that I use and coach, is hard mode. Hard mode doesn't just make you tired, it makes you low agency. So, here's the argument I want to make for you today. High agency, George Mack's concept, is not a personality trait, it is a state of being. And the fastest, [music] most reliable way to access that state consistently is what I call easy mode. Not easy work. Easy mode is not about doing less, and it's not about doing easy stuff. It's about doing the work that you were built to do, the work that creates energy instead of consuming it. The work [music] where your output is so disproportionate to your perceived effort. The work where you look up and 3 hours have disappeared. The work that to everyone else looks like cheating. When you are in that zone, that high agency easy mode zone, it's not something you have to manufacture. It's the default. So, let me show you what that looks like in practice. It's March 2020. The zombie apocalypse had just hit upstate New York and shut everything down, and I'd launched my business, Rogue Risk, >> and a digital insurance agency, 7 days before the world closed. 7 days, not a great time to start a business. I just lit >> $40,000 of my retirement savings on fire cuz that's what it took to get the business off the ground. And while every other insurance agency in the country was scrambling, trying to wedge their analog pre-zombie apocalypse processes into systems that might work, trying to figure out how to do business the way they had always done it, but now in the completely digital environment, >> we did everything different. We embraced what was actually happening, the the [music] game that was happening on the field in front of us. A massive move to digital media, digital education, consumers who were sitting at home on YouTube learning everything they could about anything they were interested in were also searching for topics related to our business, which was insurance. And we wanted to be there for them. [music] So, we went full force into educational YouTube videos on commercial insurance products. It was thrilling, let me tell [music] you. But, it's what we sold. And not all of them were sales videos, not pitch videos, educational videos. We weren't trying to sell our customers. >> We were trying to help them solve a problem. They watched the videos, they got educated, and if they wanted, they could solve that problem on their own because they now understood their options. And by the time they called us, they were already sold. All we had to do was connect their problem to the right product. This was wholly different from the way the rest of the insurance industry operated. Was I [music] braver than every other insurance agency owner in America? No. It had nothing to do with bravery. Was I smarter? Certainly not. Was I operating from my easy mode? Was I creating? Was I educating? Was I building frameworks and systems while everyone else was operating from fear trying to wedge analog into digital? I was in my zone. All three wheels of the triangle were turning automatically >> in that moment. I was figuring it out. I was absolutely willing to be misunderstood. People thought I was insane for making YouTube videos about commercial insurance. "Those people will never buy from you," they would say. And when things broke, I fixed them >> because I had the energy to diagnose the problem because I was operating in my easy mode. Easy mode doesn't just make you more productive, it makes you high agency by default. >> Now, here's where this gets important for right now, this moment, [music] for 2026, for the age of AI because there is a conversation happening >> everywhere about AI, and most of it is missing the point entirely. Most people are using AI to go faster. Faster emails, faster content, [music] faster reports, faster presentations. And I want to be direct with you here. That is the low agency move. Unequivocally and undoubtedly. If you are in hard mode, disconnected, depleted, reorganizing folders, writing emails that don't that shouldn't even exist, and you give that person an AI tool, you don't get high agency person automatically. You get a low agency person trying to produce work slop at machine speed because they feel like that's what they're supposed to be doing. The real play, the one no almost no one else is executing, is using AI to protect your easy mode. This AI was built to protect your easy mode, to protect that thing that when you do it, it looks like cheating to everyone else. AI protects easy mode. Not to produce more, to eliminate everything that pulls you away from your zone of genius, where you produce disproportionate results, results that look like cheating to everyone else. Let me show you exactly what I mean. I run a podcast, Finding Peak. It's part of this YouTube [music] channel. We do over 200,000 downloads a month. And one of the biggest drains on my time, one of the things that was consistently pulling me out of my easy mode, was managing inbound guest requests. Every week, >> 90 to 120 minutes gone. Analyzing requests, scoring them, crafting responses, handling follow-ups, getting calendar calendar invites out, attaching Riverside links, sending onboarding materials. All of it is necessary to the process. None of it requiring my specific genius. And certainly most of those administrative tasks are outside of my crazy ADHD brain's zone of genius, for sure. Like most of them actually caused me physical pain when I have to endure endure going through all of them, even though they are necessary. So, I build a workflow inside of my AI chief of chief of staff. [music] I call him Max, maximum effort, that handles my entire process. Uh he's built on Open Club, by the way. Every inbound request gets scanned and run through a scoring system. Score of an eight to 10, Max [music] automatically sends an acceptance email, and then a welcome email, and then [music] a Calendly link that's included. Once the guest books, Max goes into Riverside, creates a new studio, pulls the link, [music] jacks it into the calendar invite, and then sends a separate confirmation email with onboarding materials in it. Score of six to seven, Max flags it for me with a summary and asks for my call. Basically, lets me make the decision there. >> Score of five or below, Max automatically declines, politely, professionally, every single [music] request, accepted or declined, then gets cataloged in a dashboard. [music] Every single request, accepted or declined, then gets cataloged [music] in a database, so Max can reference whether that person has reached out before, what their score was, and what the outcome was. So, for uh posterity. 90 to 120 minutes, an hour and a half to two hours, [music] every week, back in my pocket. And that's just one workflow. That's just one. My zone of genius is creating, not [music] managing inbound guest requests. But here's what I actually want you to hear out of this diatribe. It's not about the time. >> It's about what that time unlocks, because those 90 to 120 minutes >> don't go into a void. They go back into creating, into writing, into building frameworks, into working with my coaching clients, into prepping for my next podcast, into work that only I can do. >> They go back into my easy mode. And a person in their easy mode, with their AI layer protecting that zone of genius, just you're not just more productive. You're operating at full high agency consistently, by default. That, my [music] friends, is the unlock. Now, I want to come back to that kitchen table. Rod Salewood, handwritten letters, VHS tapes in Manila envelopes, a 17-year-old who had no safety net, no roadmap, no one to show him how anything was done. He figured it out anyways, not because he was special. I certainly [music] am not. But, because he had no other option. You have something that kid never [music] had. You, today, you can build an AI assistant that knows you, knows your work, knows your goals, knows your life story, >> [snorts] >> knows how to help you fill the gaps in your knowledge, knows how to send you to the right resources, whether those are real people or digital tools, or something that you haven't even discovered yet. Today, with an AI assistant built around your easy mode, you are not alone. That 17-year-old at the kitchen table who had to figure it out by himself, he had no other [music] option. But, you do. The only question left is whether you're willing to do what he did. Get clear on who you are and what you want. Get clear on the work that you were built to do, and then build the systems that protect it, and then go be that unreasonable son of a that you were meant to be. My friends, this is the way. And by the way, if you want to go deeper on easy mode, how to find yours, [music] how to audit where you actually are spending or wasting your time, and how to build the AI layer that protects it, I'm writing a book on exactly this. It's called easy mode. There's tons of resources associated with it. There's a link in the description, and if this video connected with you, I would love for you to share it. It's the best way to to help this channel, help this work, help teach more people about easy mode. I love you for being here. If you've ever had that that garage sale kitchen table moment in your life, you understand what I'm talking about, and I love you [music] for being here. I'm out of here. Peace.