Purpose & Agency · Lesson 1 of 2

What is worth doing?

Tools can expand what you can do. Only you can decide what is worth doing.

6 min read · Free — no account needed to read

For most of history, the hard question was "how?" As tools make more things possible, the harder question becomes "what — and why?"

Values are what you are unwilling to trade away. Purpose is the direction that makes effort feel worth it. Neither can be handed to you by a model; they come from your own experiences, relationships and choices.

Agency is the belief — backed by practice — that your choices shape what happens. It grows every time you decide something, act on it, and own the result.

See it happen

A new tool halves the time that a recurring part of your job takes.

The read that arrives on its own

Excellent — you can now get through twice as many of them.

The same situation, with this idea

You decide what the freed hours are for before they fill themselves up. Two go to the part of the work you are worst at, one goes to leaving on time on Thursdays. Then you defend all three.

What changed

The time was going to be allocated either way — by you, or by whatever happened to arrive next. Deciding in advance is the whole difference between a tool that changes your week and a tool that simply raises the volume of it.

The takeaway

Tools can expand what you can do. Only you can decide what is worth doing.

Easy to take the wrong way

Waiting for a big answer before you allocate anything. This works at the scale of a Tuesday afternoon: "what are these two hours for?" is the same question as "what is worth doing?", asked somewhere you can actually answer it.

Try this

Finish the sentence: "If AI took care of half my current work, I would spend that time on…"