Situational Agency
The skill that determines whether you navigate what’s next—or just endure it.
In Stop Fighting Gravity, I drew a line between circumstances and situations.
Circumstances are the external conditions you can’t directly control.
Your situation includes those conditions—but it also includes you. Your resources, your constraints, your next move.
The distinction matters because confusing the two is expensive. Treating a solvable problem like an immovable circumstance wastes your agency. Treating a genuine constraint like a problem to bulldoze wastes your most precious, finite resources (time, attention, money, energy, and reputation).
But here’s what I’ve been sitting with since that post: knowing the distinction isn’t enough.
Plenty of smart, self-aware people can accurately map what’s circumstance and what’s situation—and still not act. They see the lever, but don’t (or won’t) pull it. They know they have a next step, but they don’t take it.
Why?
Seeing what’s actionable and actually exercising agency within it are two different skills. The first is diagnosis. The second is something I’ve started calling situational agency.
Situational Agency
Situational agency is the practice of acting on what you can influence from where you actually stand—not from where you wish you were, not from where you used to be, and not from where someone with more resources would stand.
It may sound obvious. But it isn’t.
Most of the creators, freelancers, and solopreneurs I work with don’t lack intelligence or drive. What they lack is an honest, embodied reckoning with where they actually are—and a willingness to move from there.
They want to launch the thing, but they’re comparing their resources to someone three stages ahead. They want to make the change, but they’re waiting until conditions feel less risky. They know the bottleneck—they named it last month—and they’re still walking around it.
Situational agency isn’t about optimism or grit. It’s about acting from your actual position with your actual resources inside your actual constraints. It’s unglamorous. And it’s where all the leverage lives.
Knowing the difference between circumstance and situation is step one. Knowing what to do about it is where the real work starts. Paid subscribers get the full framework—including why the biggest threat to your agency might be a story you’re telling yourself. Save big with an annual plan now. Tap the button for details.
The Internal Circumstance
In Stop Fighting Gravity, I framed circumstances as external—the economy, the algorithm, the competitor with deeper pockets. And they are.
But there’s a more insidious version of circumstantial thinking, and it lives inside us.