How High Agency People Can Get What They Want Out of Life

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:07)
You're listening to Bloomberg Businessweek with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Radio.

**Tim Stenovec** (0:14)
Well, on the surface, Cate Hall's career sounds pretty great. Yale Law, two top clerkships, a prestigious job at a Washington DC law firm working on Supreme Court cases.
She leaves Law 31 to play professional poker and become the top ranked female poker player in the world.

**Carol Massar** (0:28)
It sounds pretty good. And then the pandemic hits, right?

**Tim Stenovec** (0:32)
She becomes a co-founder of a pandemic drug company. She leads a foundation that decides the best use of philanthropic moon shots.

**Carol Massar** (0:39)
It sounds really, really great. And yet, as she writes in her new book, there's a second version not included in the conference bios. The burning out in college, leaving law because she couldn't handle the lifestyle, quote, losing her mind in the form of drug induced psychosis, and years of quote, devastating drug addiction, excuse me, years of devastating drug addiction that left her unable to get a job. So we can see that her life was not just, as some would say, all success.

**Tim Stenovec** (1:11)
And that's just the first two pages of her new book. Cate Hall is the author of the new book, You Can Just Do Things, How High Agency People Get What They Want Out of Life. She joins us from Berkeley, California. Cate, good to have you. We have the new book right here. It's on our desks. It's on our desk right here in the studio. It's up behind us. For people who are not familiar with the story, I gave the Cliffs Notes version.
But give us a little more detail, and then I want to talk to you about high agency versus low agency and how we can shift those characteristics around.

**Cate Hall** (1:41)
Great. Thank you. Thank you both so much for having me. I'm really excited about this.
So the book draws on my experience, which you sort of alluded to of a life with a lot of high highs and low lows. I have had this sort of non-traditional career track that has gone all over the place in the last decade in particular, along with a very low bottom of about three years of serious drug addiction.
The book draws on both of those sets of experiences. So it attempts to be a how-to that is based not only on my experience sort of switching careers multiple times, but also in particular, my experience of clawing my way back out of this total pit that I was in during addiction. And I think that that process of getting unstuck can be a source of a lot of wisdom and general advice as well.

**Carol Massar** (2:40)
You know, when you look back, do you see a moment, like is the highs what ultimately led to the lows? Like when you think about the course of things, I do a lot of looking back at life. And I'm just curious as you look back, is it just extremes that maybe were part of your life that, I don't know, that would have happened no matter what? And that the highs are why you hit some lows?

**Cate Hall** (3:08)
Oh, I think that there's definitely a relationship between them. I have a tendency toward extremity. Moderation has never been my strong suit. So I think to some extent, the same mindset that caused me to go after a lot of things that I wanted in life in a sort of single minded way and led to a lot of my focus was also the kind of, unfortunately, single minded focus that I brought into addiction as well. And so there is this running theme that I think you correctly identify of just being kind of an extreme person.
I do think that there are unhealthy aspects of that and there are also healthy aspects of that. And the book is, to some extent, my attempt to draw lessons out of the healthy parts of it while hopefully not doing so with the unhealthy parts of it.

**Tim Stenovec** (4:04)
Well, I want to talk a little bit about this concept of agency because it takes center stage and is this sort of theme, this thread that runs through the book. First, just distinguish for people high agency versus low agency when it comes to a personality trait or a characteristic. How do you define those things?

**Cate Hall** (4:22)
So my favorite definition of agency is the capacity to both see and act on degrees of freedom that other people overlook. So it is sort of a dual capacity to notice ways in which we have more freedom than we might immediately appreciate, and also having the courage to act on that freedom once it is recognized.