October 17, 2025- Use that agency

Allow yourself to experiment, to find what helps, to find what makes things just a little easier.

~Megan Devine

We don’t get extra credit for working harder than everyone else. There is no award for completely using yourself up by the end of any given day. To be sure, effort matters, but where are we directing our efforts and are we getting an appropriate return on our investment?

We can work ourselves right into an early grave with little to show for our efforts. We can spend so much time at our jobs that we don’t have enough of it for our relationships. We can spend so much time exercising that we break ourselves down. We can spend so much time working on mending broken relationships that we break some good ones. All the while, our effort was good, but our results were not.

We are not stuck. We can redirect our effort and re-distribute our time. We can play around with taking a little bit from here and putting it there. We can experiment with balance, experiment with priorities, and reflect on what it does for us.

After controlling for the many circumstances we experience in our lives over which we have little to no control, we still have plenty of agency. Let’s use that agency to direct our time and energy to the engineering of the best version of us.