The Future Must Be Led By High-Agency Individuals

Growing up in Nigeria, I found myself repeatedly asking the same questions: Why is it like this? Why is no one fixing this? How can so many people simply ignore the obvious problems around them?

Over time, the answer became painfully clear. It’s never just one problem. It’s a tangled web—the product of decades of neglect, compounded errors, and deferred responsibility. Fixing any one issue often means confronting not just the visible symptoms but the deeply embedded root causes. And untangling that mess is far more complex than most realize.

But through all the complexity, one truth stands out: The only real solution is to cultivate a generation of high-agency individuals. This isn’t meant to be an inspiring soundbite. It’s a brutal reality.

What Does it Mean to Have High or Low Agency?

High agency is the ability to recognise obstacles, adapt to reality, and act independently to shape outcomes—even when the environment is chaotic or stacked against you. It’s not simply about ambition. It’s about exercising ownership over your life, making strategic decisions, and pushing through resistance without waiting for perfect conditions.

Low agency, on the other hand, is the tendency to see circumstances as fixed, paths as predetermined, and responsibility as external. Low-agency individuals often wait for permission, for better leaders, for better systems—always reacting, rarely initiating.

If you operate with low agency, you:

Get trapped in systems that are crumbling.
Rely on others to solve your problems.
Become vulnerable to exploitation, manipulation, and despair.
Face long-term stagnation—both personally and professionally.

If you operate with high agency, you:

See opportunities where others see dead-ends.
Build resilience against failure and volatility.
Create leverage—over your career, your relationships, your environment.
Become a force that reshapes your world rather than one passively shaped by it.

High Agency Isn’t Always Obvious

It’s crucial to understand: Being high-agency or low-agency isn’t always visible on the surface. You can hold a PhD or multiple Masters Degrees—and still be low agency. You can have accolades, titles, and technical mastery, yet still lack the ability to lead, adapt, or self-direct at scale.

Low agency isn’t about what you’ve accomplished. It’s about whether you can act autonomously without waiting for permission, encouragement, or validation. Low-agency individuals might execute tasks flawlessly, but they’re like sophisticated AI systems:

They can follow intricate instructions and get the job done.
But without constant direction, they struggle to generate meaningful, independent action.
They need structure and supervision to function at a high level.

Low-agency people need others to tell them how to think, what to believe, and how to lead their lives. They are dependent on external validation and guidance to make decisions, rather than creating their own path.

High agency, on the other hand, is about self-management at scale. It’s about seeing the broader picture over time and across disciplines. Making things happen without being externally controlled. It’s not about titles or accomplishments—it’s about ownership. It’s about owning your actions and their outcomes, regardless of what the world thinks you’ve achieved.

Why High Agency Is So Rare

In the short term, it’s exhausting. You will face more friction, more responsibility, and less sympathy. But in the long term, it’s the only path that compounds power, freedom, and meaning across decades. And it’s also one of the hardest paths a person can take, far harder than following the systems and templates society offers.

Because to have high agency—the ability to see problems, make independent decisions, and act decisively—you need more than desire. You need knowledge, stamina, and relentless personal growth. And here lies the first major challenge: knowledge acquisition itself is painful.

To build the capacity for real, independent action, you also need a wide stockpile of skills:

Cognitive flexibility
Logical reasoning
Emotional discipline
Spatial intelligence
Strategic foresight

And you won’t get all of these from classrooms. You won’t get them from motivational videos or reading endless self-help books. Some come from academic study, yes. Others come from playing competitive sports, solving difficult problems, failing at businesses, pushing yourself past exhaustion, and exposing yourself to loss, criticism, and chaos—over and over again. You need to willingly confront hardship and complexity if you ever hope to grow.

Why Most People Stay Low-Agency

The reason most people remain low-agency isn’t because they are lazy or unintelligent. It’s because their systems of development failed them. Take a closer look: In Nigeria, hundreds of thousands of graduates leave university every year, hoping a job will appear—relying on family members, connections, or luck.

But the society they enter is no longer the one their mentors knew. The rules have changed, but the system didn’t teach them how to think independently. It taught them how to follow paths. So they face the modern world with outdated maps. And without the skills to redraw those maps themselves, they get stuck—disillusioned, frustrated, vulnerable to depression, and often tempted into self-destructive coping mechanisms like substance abuse. And from there, the cycle repeats.

Building True High Agency: What It Actually Requires

High agency isn’t about being “motivated.” It’s about building undeniable proof over time that you can move the world through force of will, skill, and strategic thinking. It’s about seeing what others don’t see—because you have the cognitive ammunition they lack.

For example: An average engineering graduate thinks: “I heard some companies are hiring. My friend got a job there—maybe I’ll be lucky too. God help me.” Meanwhile, a high-agency engineering graduate thinks: “With my engineering skills—plus my understanding of government policy, business, and finance, I can already see ten different ways to create real value. If one path doesn’t work, the skills and experience I gain will help me pivot and capitalize on the next opportunity.”

This difference is invisible at first. But over 5–10 years, the gap between high- and low-agency individuals becomes unbridgeable.

High agency requires:

A relentless appetite for multidisciplinary learning
Regular exposure to real-world feedback (not just academic theory)
A willingness to embrace painful, humbling failures
Ruthless self-reflection and course correction after each setback

This is why you cannot “cram” your way into high agency. Reading 10 books a week won’t help if you’re not living, acting, failing, recalibrating, and learning at every step.

Why High Agency Is the Only Sustainable Path Forward

If you’ve read this far, it says something important: You’re already not like most people. You could be scrolling TikTok, gossip blogs, chasing cheap dopamine, drinking to forget, or numbing yourself with distractions. Instead, you’re here—consuming hard truths.

Maybe this is your first step toward agency. Or maybe you’ve been on this path for a long time, sharpening yourself against harder and harder truths. Either way: you’re playing the real game now.

Now here’s the bigger truth: Societies don’t collapse because of political failure alone. They collapse when too many individuals outsource responsibility for their lives. “The destruction of a culture begins with the individual.”

If you decide today to pursue real high agency, you still won’t change Nigeria overnight. But you will change the gravitational field around you:

You will influence your family.
You will raise more capable children.
You will inspire peers without even meaning to.
You will set a precedent that ripples out further than you can imagine.

One person plants a seed. Ten years later, ten others follow. Ten years after that, one hundred more. In thirty years, you have a culture shift. But it all begins with you today. Refusing to settle for what the system gave you.

The Hard Reality

We often overestimate what can be fixed in four years under a “good government,” and we underestimate what a generation of truly capable individuals can accomplish over forty years. You’re not going to fix the country next election cycle. You’re not even going to fix yourself this year.

But over ten years of deliberate learning, deliberate building, and deliberate action, you will become the kind of person who moves society. And at the end of the day, that’s all legacy ever was: A torch passed from flawed individuals to slightly better individuals over and over again until something great emerges.

You can play a hundred different games in life—but if you want real freedom, real success, and real meaning, cultivating high agency is the only one that matters.