Take the reins: a field guide to practical agency
Deep thinking for proactive leaders—philosophy you can use by Friday.
You don’t need another productivity trick.
You need evidence that you’re in charge of your week.
Agency isn’t a feeling you wait for. It’s a structure you build.
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Short, usable plays to turn deep thinking into visible progress—one artifact by Friday, every Friday. Join for free; go paid if you want to back the work and get templates first.
The moment the reins return
In 1834, a teenage Frederick Douglass was forced to work for Edward Covey, a “breaker” of people. Beatings were routine; the aim was obedience.
One day, Douglass crossed an internal line. He fought Covey hand-to-hand for hours and didn’t lose. There was no speech. No tidy ending. Covey never whipped him again.
Douglass called it “the turning-point.” He didn’t win legal freedom that day, but he recovered the capacity to act. In the years that followed, he learned to read and write, planned escapes, built alliances, and eventually stepped into the public square as an editor and orator. The arc is long; the pivot is precise. He set a boundary and then built conditions that kept it.
Leadership works the same way. A single decision can hand you the reins. The work after that is building a week that doesn’t hand them back.
The agency loop
Three levers restore self-leadership and keep it steady:
Attention — where your best minutes go.
Agreements — what you promise (and close) on schedule.
Asymmetry — small actions that return outsized results.
The loop is simple on paper and slippery in real life. Here’s how to make it hold.
1) Attention: stop the leaks
If attention is water, most weeks are a cracked bucket. You pour in energy; email and calendar debris drink it first.
Practice: first-90 proof.
Before messages, give your first 90 minutes to one compounding move: publish a page, call a customer, design a handoff, write instructions you can delegate. Log a single line when you’re done: what moved + where it lives (link). Five lines by Friday. No diary. Proof.
What you’ll notice: the tug to “just check” will try to steal the block. Treat that tug as a system bug, not a character flaw. Build a wall around the block next week—calendar it publicly and name the artifact in progress.
2) Agreements: make promises small and strong
Ambition creates commitments faster than it completes them. That gap becomes stress and mistrust.
Practice: the one-page promise.
For any project that matters, write five fields:
Outcome a customer would recognize (one line)
Smallest unit that counts (what will exist by Friday)
Owner (one name)
Date and time (when it goes live)
Proof link (where people will see it)
This turns meetings into reviews of artifacts, not opinions. When something slips, the fix is specific because the promise was small enough to test.
3) Asymmetry: find moves that pay for the week
A better handoff can save hours every week. A pricing page edit can move close rates. A 90-second video can clarify a message a deck mangles.
Practice: the leverage list.
Write ten candidates that could return in weeks what they cost in days. Star three. Put one in your first-90. When the artifact exists, capture the result in your proof log. Leverage hides until you measure.
Philosophy you can feel by Tuesday
The best philosophy doesn’t float. It hands you tools.
Epictetus (born into slavery, taught freedom of mind): Write your circle of control before a hard day. List three actions no one can block. Take one. Agency begins where excuses end.
Mary Parker Follett (management thinker, “power-with”): Build shared standards that outlive mood. Spend the first 90 block creating a standard handoff or “definition of done.” Power grows when language is shared.
Simone Weil (attention as moral force): Thirty minutes of clean attention will reveal truths your dashboards hide. Give it to a teammate or customer and ask two clean questions: “What’s hard?” and “What would better look like this week?” You will build the right thing faster.
These aren’t quotes to admire. They’re prompts to run.
Boundaries that don’t break
Most boundaries fail because they live as sentences, not systems. “No meetings before 10” collapses when the calendar gets hungry. Boundaries hold when they protect a promise.
Make them visible (“Focused work—artifact in progress”), tie them to a deliverable (“handoff standard live by Friday 4 pm”), and ask the room to help (“this block keeps our promises true—pings welcome after 10:15”). Two weeks later, the boundary becomes culture.
Your personal board minutes
Companies keep minutes for meetings that matter. Could you do the same for your week: half a page every Friday?
What got my best minutes? (link the artifact)
Which promise did I keep? (paste the proof)
Where did I create leverage? (one line of effect)
What tried to pull me off-course? (name it cleanly)
What do I want more of next week? (one behaviour)
Identity follows evidence. If your minutes show “I make things that exist,” tomorrow’s version of you expects to continue.
A leader’s responsibility to self
When you give your clarity away, you and your team enter a fog where effort and outcome lose contact.
The first duty of a leader is to keep that connection alive:
this effort → that outcome → this proof.
It begins inside one human, then scales through standards, artifacts, and rhythms others can trust.
Agency is spiritual and operational at once: you become a person whose word turns into things.
Try this for five days
Pick one outcome a customer would recognize.
Write a one-page promise.
Guard your first-90 every morning.
Create one artifact that counts by Friday.
Log it with a link in your proof log.
Capture your personal board minutes.
That’s the structure. The mood follows the motion.
Why this matters now
Feeds are loud. Incentives reward hot takes and quick outrage. Deep thinking for proactive leaders looks like this: careful choosing, clean agreements, and receipts. Teams that ship. Families that feel seen. Bodies that move. Businesses that make and keep simple promises.
Frederick Douglass recovered his will in a field and kept it with a pen. Our conditions are softer; the demand is the same. Take the reins. Draw the boundary. Make a promise small enough to keep. Build the system that protects it. Repeat until your life reflects your choices.
For stuck creators who want help
Turn stalled projects into weekly wins. In 30 days you’ll have fewer meetings, faster decisions, and something live every Friday. Momentum you can point to. (Limited to a maximum of 3 clients per quarter.)
That’s a wrap
If this helps, reply with your proof. I’ll read it, learn from it, and keep building alongside you.
~Warren