"In my way of thinking, radical agency is about finding real edges: things you are willing to do that others aren’t, often because they’re annoying or unpleasant. These don’t always surface in awareness to the point one is actually choosing -- often they live in a cloud of aversion that strategically obscures the tradeoff.
The idea of finding real edges, as contrasted with “eking out wins by grinding harder than everyone,” first clicked for me when I started playing poker. Poker in the modern era is an extraordinarily competitive game, and even 8 years ago pros were spending nearly as much time studying as they were playing, using solver models to seek out tiny mathematical advantages. At the same time, a massive edge was available in the form of physical reads, but almost entirely ignored. (I know an example would make this more compelling, but I’m sorry, it’s like explaining a magic trick.)
Two friends and I maniacally studied reads together, and we all had out-of-distribution resul"