For most of my life, I was told that talent was something you were born with. Some people were “naturals” ... good at math, good at writing, good at whatever, and others just weren’t.
That belief quietly shaped how I saw myself growing up. I was a below-average kid in elementary school. My French teacher once called me a loser for continuing to hand in Google Translated assignments. If I had internalized that, if I had believed that I was just “bad at school”, I never would’ve gotten the top grades in senior year of high school, or made it into one of Canada’s top universities, or landed jobs at places like Google and Shopify.
Looking back, I realize what changed wasn’t my intelligence. It was my agency.
Andrej Karpathy captured this perfectly in a tweet recently:
Agency is the quiet belief that your actions matter, that if you care enough to figure something out, you eventually will. It’s not loud or showy. It’s the part of you that says, “I’ll learn this,” and then actually does.
When I think about it, this isn’t a new idea in my life. It’s exactly how my parents lived. They came to Canada as refugees from Sri Lanka, not speaking English, with no savings or network. They learned to work odd jobs, learned to navigate an entirely new country, without knowing english, while raising kids. They didn’t have the option to say, “I can’t.” They just figured things out because they had to.
That’s agency.
And now, with AI, intelligence is more available than ever. It doesn’t matter what school you went to or what career you’re in. If you truly care, you can learn and do almost anything. The bottleneck isn’t access to intelligence anymore, it’s having the agency to use it.
The older I get, the more I realize intelligence is often a reflection of past agency, of what you chose to care about enough to master. The people I admire most aren’t the smartest, they’re the ones who act, learn, and adapt without waiting for permission.
That’s the kind of person I strive to be, and the kind of people I enjoy being around.