Building Agency: From Notes to Action

Originally published from raw entrepreneurial notes

Agency isn’t just a buzzword—it’s the fundamental difference between those who shape their reality and those who get shaped by it. After months of building products, freelancing, and navigating the entrepreneurship landscape, here are the patterns that keep surfacing.

The Agency Formula

The clearest framework I’ve found: Agency = Judgment × Action

You need both. Great judgment without action is just sophisticated procrastination. Frantic action without judgment is just expensive thrashing. But when you combine good explanatory mental scaffolding with deliberate, diligent action—that’s where transformation happens.

The Productization Mindset

Here’s what clicked for me: You are a product. Not in a dehumanizing way, but in the most empowering sense possible. You can be refined, improved, marketed, and sold. You can generate value that people will pay for.

The traditional path says: get credentials, find a job, trade time for money. The agency path says: identify problems, build solutions, capture value. One makes you a replaceable cog; the other makes you irreplaceable.

Leverage Changes Everything

Naval’s framework hits different when you’re actually building: You get paid for giving society what it wants but doesn’t know how to make yet. This isn’t theory—it’s the operational reality of every successful product I’ve built.

The key insight: leverage comes in multiple forms:

• Code: Write once, run forever
• Media: Create once, distribute infinitely
• Capital: Money working instead of you
• Labor: Other people’s time and skills

The magic happens when you combine these. A software product (code) promoted through content (media) funded by customers (capital) built with contractors (labor) = compounding returns.

The Local-to-Global Strategy

Start where you are. Master your local market first. I’m building products on Guam not despite the small market, but because of it. You can test faster, iterate cheaper, and build real relationships before scaling globally.

The pattern: dominate locally → extract principles → apply globally.

Agency in Practice

Real agency looks like:

• Building products that solve your own problems first
• Charging for transformations, not time
• Creating systems that work without your constant input
• Saying no to opportunities that don’t compound
• Optimizing for optionality over security

It’s not about hustle culture or grinding 80-hour weeks. It’s about working on the right problems with the right leverage at the right time.

The Network Effect

Your peer group determines your trajectory more than talent or effort. Surround yourself with other agents—people who build, ship, and iterate. Avoid the trapped mindset of those who’ve accepted their local minima.

Great times of volatility are great times for the agentic. While others wait for permission or perfect conditions, agents experiment, fail fast, and compound learnings.

Practical Next Steps

1. Audit your current situation: What problems do you uniquely understand?
2. Build something small: Solve it for yourself first
3. Find your first customer: Sell the transformation, not the product
4. Reinvest profits: Into better tools, faster feedback loops, or more leverage
5. Scale what works: Double down on success, abandon what doesn’t

The Meta-Game

The real insight: everything is a system that can be understood and optimized. Your health, wealth, relationships, skills—all systems with inputs, processes, and outputs. Agency is about taking responsibility for optimizing these systems instead of hoping they’ll improve by accident.

Don’t give up. Be agentic.

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This post distilled from hundreds of raw notes taken while building products, freelancing, and learning to think like an entrepreneur. The messiness of the process is part of the point—agency emerges from action, not from perfect planning.