Once upon a time, not so long ago, I was asked to give a talk on "how to be agentic" to a room of Cambridge University students, members of a student club. The club organizer was intrigued by my story of graduating high school early to start doing AI policy research at a fellowship in Cambridge, and he invited me to their next meeting to discuss agency.

The invitation was incredibly kind, but the thought of presenting myself as some sort of "paragon of agency" made me feel like a fraud.

My mental model of agency requires deliberate choice. When I decided to graduate early, I didn't feel like I'd really chosen. I felt so dissatisfied at home that I knew I needed to escape. I was running from home, more so than I was reaching for something impactful to do.

And running from something isn't the same as reaching for something, even when the outcomes look identical. A person who sprints away from a bear and a person training for a half-marathon are both running. We don't call them the same kind of runner.

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about how, for 3.5 years of high school, I worked as hard as I have ever worked at anything. I won awards, I took eleven classes in a semester, I graduated at the top of my class… and I felt, the entire time, that I was contributing nothing of real value to the world.

I didn't have a great way to describe it then; I just had the nagging feeling that all my effort was going toward the wrong things.

Today, I wrote out a framework that clarifies what I was missing. It breaks what I believe to be the qualities required to 'succeed' — that is to say, the way I personally understand success, which might not be how you understand it — into four categories.

In high school, I over-indexed on one of them; I didn't realize that one was not enough.

framework: the four keys

Conscientiousness (Hufflepuff) – working hard, and doing a job well. The work ethic to keep going, even when the work is a slog.

Ambition (Slytherin) – the desire to reshape the world according to your view of how it should be. The grand ambitious theories and pursuit of world-optimization.

Agency (Gryffindor) – the courage to actually go out and do things, without waiting for permission. The courage to execute.

Discernment (Ravenclaw) – the wisdom to know what's worth doing, and why. The north star.

None of them is sufficient on its own, and each one, in isolation, produces a specific kind of failure.

conscientiousness without the other three

produces someone like past Sophie: someone who works incredibly hard on things that don't matter.

I took eleven classes a semester, founded three organizations, and didn't realize, until much later, that those weren't even close to the most impactful things a 16-year-old could be working on.

The work ethic was real, but my world was small. Compared to classmates who coasted, I looked like someone at the edge of what was possible; what I didn't realize was that the ceiling I was pushing against was— to borrow a term from my calculus class— a local maximum.

Outside my hometown, there were 17-year-olds publishing at the UN, founding companies, founding ed-tech startups and moving to SF for the summer to do mech interp research.

For too long, I didn't know any of that was on the table. Discernment requires seeing the full option space, and my hometown presented one that was artificially constrained.

In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message…

—Paul Graham, "Cities and Ambition"

And when I finally met students who were doing these things, I realized I didn't even know where to start.

I was at the frontier of my environment, and my environment was the problem.

Conscientiousness without discernment is the most exhausting failure mode. You work yourself into the ground, and at the end of it, you don't even have the satisfaction of having worked on something that mattered. If burnout is the breaking of a sacred pact, having high conscientiousness without discernment is one of the most surefire ways to get there.