Hard choices
📪 The Optimal Agent Newsletter #050
Take Action:
Leave the safety of your current path.
Why It Matters:
If you want to achieve Agency and you’re not yet there, you’ll need to make hard choices — exchanging what is for what could be, trading the routine and comfort of your current path for the risk (and reward) of a new one.
How To Do It:
Know where you’re going. Establish your goal. What lifestyle, career, or avocation will you make a reality? Define it with as much precision as you’re able. Where will you live, how will you spend your day, who will be there with you?
Make a clear-eyed inventory of what needs to be done. Identify the actions that will bring you closer. What do you need to do in order to reach your goal? Do you need to free up time? Bring new people into your life? Abandon others? Do you need more cash? New skills? What self-imposed roadblocks are stopping you? How will you erase them?
Acknowledge the risks. Shine a light on your fears. List every risk you’re taking, then list what you can do to mitigate those risks without abandoning your goal. I’m a big fan of Tim Ferris’s fear setting exercise for this purpose.
Make the hard choice. Once you know where you’re going, what must be done, and how you’ll reduce risk, the only thing left — the hardest thing — is to act. Go with courage, knowing the reward of Agency lies on the other side of your choice.
The Inspiration:
Nims Purja began his career as a soldier in the British military’s Brigade of Gurkhas, preceded in the unit by his three older brothers.
Later becoming the first Gurkha in the British Navy’s elite Special Boat Service (and refusing a subsequent invitation to join the Special Air Service), Nims veered from the defined path and left the family business — abandoning a 16-year military career, the promise of a lifetime pension, and the financial security of a special forces paycheck to become a mountaineer.
“Elite combat wasn’t enough. I wanted more of a test.”
His Project Possible 14/7, an attempt to summit the world’s fourteen 8,000-meter-plus peaks within 7 months (including Everest, K2, and Annapurna) required him to put a £55k mortgage on his home and raise £121k via GoFundMe
A Netflix documentary on Project Possible, 14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible, launched Nims into the public consciousness and paved the way for a book deal, giving him the fame and resources to launch his Big Mountain Cleanup initiative — fixing the polluted mountain environments he’d left the military to explore.
Explore More:
Listen: O.A. Podcast Episode #50: Agency in Action: Running a Successful Business from an Airstream — where Patrick and I speak with Jonathan and Blakley Fletcher of Digital Barbell on doing the hard thing, avoiding the victim mindset, and having faith in yourself (and your partner) when the going gets tough (Audio)
Watch: The YouTube version of O.A. Podcast Episode 50
P.S. “You don't ever have to do anything sensational in order to love or to be loved." — Fred Rogers
