You Can Accomplish More Than You Think: The Power of Agency in an AI World

My wife carries a mindset that shapes everything she does. When faced with any problem, she asks herself, “Why not me?” This question fuels her to tackle almost anything – fixing the dryer when it breaks down, building a sturdy fence around our property, raising a cow from calf to adult, or teaching complex anatomy and physiology courses—you know, the basics.

YouTube stands as her faithful ally in this approach. With a few searches, she finds step-by-step guidance from others who’ve walked the path before her. She watches, learns, and then puts her hands to work.

I hold similar attitudes toward entrepreneurship and business challenges. My body limits me in other ways – a stubborn bad back and chronic joint problems have crushed my handyman ambitions. This physical reality often puts me in situations like this .

Alas.

But this mindset – this refusal to see problems as belonging to “experts only” – has a name. Andrej Karpathy, former Tesla AI director and OpenAI researcher, calls it “Agency” in his recent X post. He points out something profound: in our AI age, raw intelligence is fast becoming a commodity. What stands more valuable now is Agency – the ability to identify problems and take action to solve them.

Strip away the fancy term, and you find that simple question again: “Why not me?”

Don’t know how to write Python code to clean up 10,000 duplicate contact records? ChatGPT can walk you through it step by step. It knows how. You just need to tell yourself, “Why not me? I can follow clear instructions.”

This shift in how we work with AI tools runs deeper than most grasp.

What if you want to do something so new that you don’t even know what questions to ask? What if you can’t craft a prompt that will start you down the right path? No problem. Begin with: “I want to do X, but I don’t know where to start. Ask me enough questions to help me build an effective prompt that will point me in the right direction.”

This works as a “meta prompt.” You don’t need to know how to prompt well because – guess who does? ChatGPT. It stands as a prompting expert just as much as it holds expertise in almost everything else.

Think about what this means. You now work with an expert on nearly everything, sitting beside you all day long.

All you need is that “why not me” attitude. All you need is to grip your own Agency.

Consider three examples:

  1. A marketing manager who never touched video editing crafts a full campaign by working through AI-guided steps.
  2. A small business owner builds a complete customer database system without knowing SQL by describing what she wants and following AI guidance.
  3. A teacher creates custom lesson plans for 30 different student learning styles in under an hour through structured AI collaboration.

The line between “things I can do” and “things others must do for me” has shifted. The question isn’t whether you have every skill. The question is whether you hold the Agency to find a path forward.

The tools stand ready. Your mind must simply open to the possibility.

Why not you?