Something clicked recently when thinking about the difference between control, influence and agency. People think a lot about the first two. Almost nobody thinks clearly about agency.
Control
Having control over something is surprisingly rare.
If I asked you whether you control your body, you’d say yes. You can wave your arms, walk across the room, stand up whenever you want. But if you’re sick and I ask you to make yourself not sick, you can’t do that. If you’re swimming in a frozen lake and you want to be warm, you can’t will your body temperature up.
So how much control do you actually have?
It’s the same at work. You might think you control your career. You pick what to work on, how hard to work, when to switch jobs. But you don’t control whether your company gets acquired, whether your industry gets disrupted, whether your manager decides she doesn’t like you. You control your inputs. You don’t control the outcomes.
The pattern repeats everywhere. You have control over a much smaller slice of your life than you think. And thinking you have control when you don’t is painful. If you’re like most people, you’ll exhaust yourself trying to control things only to discover it’s futile.
Influence
What you actually have is varying degrees of influence.
Influence means you can affect an outcome but can’t determine it. You do things that make a result more or less likely, but the final outcome depends on other people, other forces, other variables you can’t see.
A manager trying to get their team to hit a deadline has influence. They can set clear priorities, remove blockers, keep morale up. But they can’t force each person to do great work. Everyone on the team has their own motivations, their own problems, their own capacity on any given day. The manager’s job is to push the probability of a good outcome higher. That’s influence.
A founder pitching investors has influence too. They can tell a compelling story, show strong metrics, build a relationship over time. But the investor has their own thesis, their own portfolio constraints, their own mood that morning. The founder can do everything right and still get a no.
The hard part about influence is you can’t measure it precisely. With control, the feedback is clean. You flip the switch, the light turns on. With influence, the feedback is noisy. You did ten things, the outcome went your way, and you don’t know which of those ten things mattered. Or you did ten things, the outcome went badly, and you don’t know if it would’ve been worse without them.
Most of your life operates in this zone. Not control but not helplessness either. You have influence. The sooner you accept that most outcomes are probabilistic, the sooner you can stop demanding clean feedback and start playing the long game.
Agency
Agency is the belief that you have influence. It’s the psychological layer on top of whatever influence you actually have.
Belief changes behavior. Take two people who get laid off from the same company on the same day. Same job market, same industry, roughly the same skills. One updates their resume the next morning, reaches out to ten contacts, starts interviewing within a week. The other sits at home for a month telling themselves the market is terrible and nobody’s hiring. Same influence over what comes next. Different agency. The first person doesn’t know their outreach will work. They just believe it might, so they act.
The person who acts isn’t smarter or more connected. They just produce more attempts. More attempts means more chances for something to work. Agency doesn’t change the odds on any single attempt. It changes how many attempts you make.
Well-calibrated agency looks boring. You do the things that tilt odds in your favor. You follow up. You prepare. You adjust based on feedback. No single action looks decisive, but the cumulative effect is large. You believe your actions matter, so you keep acting.
Poorly calibrated agency looks dramatic. You swing between “I can make anything happen” and “nothing I do matters.” You bet everything on one big move instead of doing the ten small things that compound. When it doesn’t work, you blame the system or double down on the wrong lever. The problem isn’t your influence. It’s your belief about your influence.
People with no agency are miserable and bitter. They complain about how unjust the world is. They only feel bad for themselves. Unsurprisingly, they never amount to much and are generally miserable to be around. Not because they lack ability. Because they’ve decided ability doesn’t matter.
The opposite failure exists too. You can have lots of agency and very little actual influence. You believe you can change things, but the situation genuinely doesn’t give you room. You keep pushing, keep trying different approaches, keep getting the same result. Without recalibrating, you burn out. Or worse, you blame yourself for outcomes you never had the influence to change.
Conclusion
Oddly, people tend to overestimate how much control they have but underestimate how much influence they have.
Overestimating control leads to frustration. You try to force outcomes that can’t be forced. Underestimating influence leads to passivity. You stop trying because you’ve told yourself nothing you do matters.
Underestimating your influence is probably a defense mechanism. If you admit you have influence, you have to take responsibility when things don’t work out. You can’t blame the system or bad luck. The outcome is at least partly on you. That’s uncomfortable, so most people opt out of believing it.
The trick is to hold a roughly accurate view of your agency. Overestimate it wildly and you’ll burn out chasing outcomes you can’t reach. Underestimate it and you won’t try.
But if you had to be wrong in one direction, you’d want to be wrong on the side of overestimating. A little. Not so much you’re fooling yourself. Just enough to keep you acting when a perfectly rational person might stop. The person who sends one more email, makes one more ask, runs one more experiment. They’re probably overestimating their influence a little. And they tend to get more out of life than the person who sized things up accurately and decided it wasn’t worth the effort.
If you had to pick a bias, pick that one.