Passion Struck with John R. Miles - The Agency Paradox: Why Real Adaptability Starts Inside the Box | John R. Miles - EP 819

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

What if having more freedom doesn't always make you more free?We tend to believe that adaptability means having more options, more resources, more independence, and more control. But after conversations with Martin Seligman and David Epstein, I began to see a different pattern.Sometimes unlimited freedom creates paralysis. Sometimes individual willpower becomes isolation. And sometimes our greatest breakthroughs happen not when we escape our constraints, but when we learn how to work intelligently within them.That's the paradox at the heart of this episode.David Epstein's Inside the Box shows how constraints can focus creativity and turn seemingly small problems into breakthroughs. Martin Seligman's Agency asks a deeper question: What happens when human beings believe their actions can actually change the future?Put those ideas together, and a new definition of adaptability emerges.Real adaptability isn't about controlling everything. It's about knowing where you have agency—and using it well.In this episode, I explore:Why General Magic's enormous freedom became one of its greatest weaknesses—and how smaller, more focused ideas became eBay and the PalmPilot. Why Mendeleev's breakthrough began with a textbook deadline rather than a magical dream. The first question of the Agency Check: What constraint are you running away from that might actually contain your focus? What my experience at Lowe's taught me about the danger of trying to solve enormous problems all at once. Why UPS discovered that its routing challenge was ultimately a human learning and change-management problem, not simply a technology problem. Martin Seligman's distinction between "I can" and "we can"—and why sustainable progress requires both individual and collective agency. Why unlimited information can create a poverty of attention, and what Gloria Mark's research reveals about the cost of constant task switching. David Epstein's Hemingway Principle for protecting tomorrow's most important work from today's urgent distractions. How to conduct your own Constraint Check and Agency Check when you're feeling stuck or helpless. The question isn't whether you can control everything. You can't. The question is whether you can identify what is actually within your agency, stop wasting energy fighting what isn't, and then act with intention inside the reality you've been given.Because adaptability isn't unlimited freedom. It's agency within reality.Click for the full shownotes Pre-Order The Mattering Effect: https://matteringeffect.com/. Take the 90-second diagnostic to see if you're disappearing.Explore the Show: https://passionstruck.com/starter-packs/. New to Passion Struck? Start with the best episodes curated for you.Connect with JohnWebsite: https://johnrmiles.comBook John to Speak: https://johnrmiles.com/speaking/Substack: https://www.theignitedlife.net/Children’s Book — You Matter, Luma: https://youmatterluma.com/Support the Movement: https://startmattering.com/. Every human deserves to feel seen, valued, and like they matter. Wear it. Live it. Show it.Passion Struck — #1 Alternative Health Podcast. 85M+ downloads.DisclaimerThe Passion Struck podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. The views and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Passion Struck or its affiliates. This podcast is not a substitute for professional medical or psychological advice. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

At age 84, after more than six decades at the forefront of psychology, Marty Seligman sat down in front of a computer screen and did something almost no one with his resume would ever have the courage to do. He began feeding hundreds of millions of words into AI, using tools like Claude and Chat GPT to test assumptions he had spent a lifetime developing, Even when the results told him he might be wrong. Somewhere in your own life right now, there is a belief, a project, or a routine you are protecting with everything you've got. Not because it's working, but because your ego can't afford to let it go. And on the other side of that screen is a world that has already moved on.

Today, we're going to figure out whether you are adapting to reality or just defending a past version of yourself. It's your friend John, and welcome to Passionstruck. I'm so glad you're here. Whether you're a longtime listener or someone who just discovered the show, thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've built the life you were supposed to want, but you've quietly wondered why it still doesn't feel like enough. If that's you, you're in the right place. Every week, I sit down with the world's top scientists, researchers, and thinkers to uncover what it actually takes to build an intentional life that matters. Thanks for joining me. Let's get into it.

Welcome back to episode 819 of Passionstruck. Before we get into today's conversation, I want to take a brief moment to acknowledge the date. Today is September 11th. For so many of us, this state will always carry a quiet gravity. It reminds us of profound loss, but it also reminds us of what human beings are capable of when everything is on the line. The quiet courage of first responders running toward danger and the way ordinary people reached out to lift up strangers in the middle of unimaginable ruin.

As a Navy veteran and as an American, my heart heart is with the families, the survivors, and everyone who still carries the weight of that day. If 9-11 taught us anything about the human spirit, it's that we were never meant to navigate tragedy or uncertainty alone. In our darkest hours, we found our strength in each other. And in many ways, that exact resilience, how we face an unpredictable world together, sits right at the heart of today's conversation. We are in the middle of our series, The Adaptive Human, How We Thrive in a Changing World. Earlier this week, I had two back-to-back conversations

that completely rearranged how I think about human capability. On Tuesday, I had the privilege of interviewing the father of positive psychology, Marty Seligman, about his landmark new book, Agency, The Psychological History of Human Progress. And then on Thursday, I'm I sat down with number one New York Times bestselling author David Epstein to discuss his brand new book inside the box. At first glance, these two men seem to be asking completely different questions. Marty was asking, why did human progress, suddenly break out across ancient civilizations, and what gives human beings the power to believe tomorrow can be better than today? David was asking how to high performers channel boundless curiosity into tangible execution without getting paralyzed.

Two completely different fields. But the moment I placed their work side by side, I realized they were both circling the same exact paradox. Most of us believe that to adapt to a changing world, we need unlimited freedom, infinite options, and sheer individual willpower. Both of these thinkers challenged that instinct. Unchecked freedom often creates paralysis rather than adaptability, and individual ambition left completely unmoored from collective connection or grounded constraints easily leads to burnout and distress.

By the end of today's episode, you're going to walk away with one diagnostic tool, I'm calling it the agency check. It takes about 15 seconds, and it cuts straight through the noise whenever you find yourself spinning your wheels or feeling helpless. We're going to use it live on every story in this episode. So keep a hand near your notes app, and let's get into it. Thank you for choosing Passionstruck and choosing me to be your hosting guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters.

Now, let that journey begin. Let's start with the story David Epstein shared that blew my mind. In the late 1980s, a Silicon Valley startup called General Magic was formed. It was spun out of Apple, backed by Goldman Sachs in the first concept IPO in history, and staffed with the most brilliant minds on the planet. Their CEO, Mark Perot, drew a schematic in 1989 that looked remarkably like the future iPhone. A small glass touchscreen, rectangle with apps, mobile messaging, and a virtual marketplace they literally called the cloud. At one point, one of the CEOs of a major Japanese company literally chased an executive down a train platform, begging them to take his money.

They had capital. They had extraordinary talent. What they didn't have were clear constraints. When you believe you have infinite freedom, you try to do everything. When their device finally shipped years late, it arrived with a 200-page user manual, and nobody had any clear idea what problem it actually solved. The company went from doubling its stock price one day to essentially worthless within two years. Meanwhile, engineer Jeff Hawkins recognized a single narrow customer problem. Busy professionals just wanted their contacts.

calendar, and MemoPad on the go, and built the Palm Pilot, a massive commercial hit. And a General Magic engineer named Pierre Omidjar built a small side project on his own, called Action Web, to facilitate commerce between strangers. General Magic leadership dismissed it as too small, so he took it outside the company, and it became eBay. David explained that we suffer from a massive cultural myth. We assume breakthroughs emerge from unconstrained freedom. We look at Dimitri Mendeliof and repeat the popular myth that the periodic table came to him in a magic dream. The reality, Mandalayov was under a publishing contract to deliver volume two of a beginner's chemistry textbook. He had fit eight elements into volume one, and he had 50

remaining. He didn't have enough pages and he was running out of time. So he began grouping elements into families to solve a beginner's organizational problem and that smaller problem opened into a framework that changed science forever. He didn't need a dream. He needed a textbook deadline. This brings us directly to the first question of the agency check. Question one. What is the single constraint I'm running away from, that actually contains my focus. Look at your own week. Are you feeling overwhelmed because you lack resources or are you drowning because you haven't yet drawn a box around your priorities? Adaptability isn't having unlimited doors open,

it's having the agency to close 99 of them so you can walk through the one that matters. Take a moment and let that sit with you. We're going to take a short break for our sponsors. While you listen, open your calendar and ask yourself, where am I pretending I need more options when what I really need is a clear boundary? When we return, I'm going to share some hard feedback from my executive days at Lowe's and the radical hypothesis, Marty Sillidman, developed by analyzing ancient civilizations. And now, a quick break for our sponsor. Thank you for supporting those who support the show. You're listening to Passionstruck.

Welcome back. Before the break, David Epstein showed us why endless options can become a trap. Now let's talk about what happens when you pour hundreds of millions of dollars into solving an ambitious problem and forget the human beings who have to live with the solution. I live through my own version of that lesson, and it's still humbling to look back upon. Years ago, when I was in charge of application development at Lowe's, we launched a massive initiative called Total Closed Loop. Our vision was audacious. Create a frictionless customer experience where someone was recognized and understood across every channel.

Call centers, physical stores, mobile apps. We managed roughly 200 sub-projects. We built data tools with a 92% percent. matching accuracy, we spent hundreds of millions of dollars. And after years of development, we had to shut it down. I remember sitting in a meeting with our SVP of strategy, a blunt executive named Scott, who looked me dead in the eye and said, John, you guys are absolutely incredible at delivering projects that have zero value by the time they're finished. It was brutal to hear, but Scott was right.

We had fallen in love with the technology, fallen victim to the Sun Koss fallacy, and tried to deliver one giant monolithic waterfall solution instead of solving small, tangible customer problems along the way. David Epstein saw that exact same pattern when studying UPS. UPS spent years remapping the country to build an algorithm called Orion to optimize delivery routes. On paper, the algorithm was brilliant. In practice, drivers initially rejected it and hated it. The system would tell a driver to zigzag across a cul-de-sac or skip a package on a side street just to save a few meters,

ignoring the fact that the driver knew Mrs. Jones was working around the corner or that a school zone was about to back up with traffic. The breakthrough came when UPS stopped treating the algorithm as a black box. They engaged the drivers directly, let them challenge the system with routing games, and gave them insight into how the calculations were made. The key learning here is that technology projects don't feel. because technology doesn't work. They fail because people don't want to change. Visions of change only work when they include a vision of continuity. If you design an environment that ignores human agency, people will quietly sabotage it to protect their dignity. This is where Marty Sligman's groundbreaking research changes the conversation entirely.

For 60 years, Marty was famous for discovering learned helplessness, the psychological condition where animals and humans, after experiencing repeated unavoidable hardship, simply give up and stop trying. In his new book agency, he asks a much larger question. How did human civilization break out of learned helplessness in the first place? looked at the axial age. That period between roughly 1,000 BCE and 500 BCE were across five distinct traditions, the Greeks, Hebrews, Chinese, Parisians, and Indians, human progress, commerce, law, and philosophy accelerated. Marty used AI to analyze ancient texts across Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Persian, and Sanskrit.

What his analysis suggested was striking. Around 1,000 BCE, those cultures showed far less language associated with human agency. Early texts often described events as entirely dictated by the gods. But over the next five century, his textual analysis indicates that new vocabulary for human choice, ability, and personal initiative emerged across all five traditions. Marty's provocative argument is that human progress didn't begin simply with new tools or technology. It began with the psychological shift, the shared belief that human action could meaningfully alter the future. Marty also points out another crucial dynamic when analyzing agency in China

compared to the West. When individual agency, I-Ken, dominates without balance, productivity, and measurable economic metrics climb. But depression and psychological distress often rise alongside them. When collective agency, we can, suppresses individual initiative, eurisconformity, stagnation, and bureaucracy. Marty's emerging argument is that true flourishing and sustainable progress depend on maintaining a balance between I can and We Can.

Think about that in your own life. How many of us have maximized I can, white-knuckling our schedules, solving everything alone, while starving the weekend that keeps us grounded. This brings us to the second question of the agency check. Question number two, am I trying to solve this entirely through isolated willpower, or am I building the collective trust to carry it forward?

So how do we practically live this out when our days are pulled in a thousand directions? Herbert Simon wrote in 1970 that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. When I sat down with Dr. Gloria Mark a few years ago in episode 301, we spent hours digging into this exact dilemma. Gloria is a chancellor's professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and widely considered one of the foremost authorities on human attention. and how technology impacts our ability to concentrate.

In her research, she tracked office workers and found that our focus has fractured at an alarming rate. 25 years ago, people switched tasks every three minutes. Today, it's down to roughly every 45 seconds, checking emails dozens of times a day. Worse, she discovered that this relentless switching directly spikes our psyched psychological stress, meaning our fractured focus isn't just an efficiency problem, it's actively draining our physical well-being. David Epstein and I talked about this because task switching leaves what psychologists call attention residue. Even after you look away from your inbox, your mind remains partially tethered to that

previous message, making it harder to engage deeply with what's right in front of you and here's the unsettling part Gloria discovered your attention becomes accustomed to that cadence of interruption so even when you finally sit in a quiet room you find yourself self-interrupting at the exact pace you've trained yourself to expect to counter this David adopted the Hemingway principle Ernest Hemingway famously stopped writing sentence, so he knew exactly where to begin the following morning. At the end of every workday, David writes down the single important task he will tackle

first tomorrow. It protects him from what psychologists call the mere urgency effect. The tendency to prioritize minor urgent tasks over significant work that creates lasting value. If you don't structure your attention and you don't structure your attention and you're not. inside a box, the world will happily structure it for you. So let's bring all of this together. David Epstein showed us that real breakthroughs happen when you embrace the constraint.

General magic faltered under boundless freedom. Mendeleev organized the elements under the pressure of a textbook deadline. Marty Slugman's work suggests that lasting progress requires the belief in I-Can balanced by the support of weekend. True adaptability isn't having unlimited options. It's knowing what reality requires, choosing where to act, and exercising your agency inside the constraints you cannot control. Here is your assignment, and I want you to do it tonight or this weekend. First, the constraint check. What is the one project or problem where you are suffering from too much freedom. Pick the single deliverable and draw a hard boundary around it. Second, perform the agency

check. Identify where you've slipped into learned helplessness, telling yourself that there's nothing you can do. Write down one direct action you can start with tomorrow morning, using the Hemingway principle, and invite one other person into the work so I can becomes weekend. It's something from today's conversation resonated with you. I'd love to hear about it. Send me a message on Substack, LinkedIn, or Instagram, or share this episode with someone who could use a different perspective on how to navigate an unpredictable world. And make sure you're following passion struck so you don't miss what's coming next. Because next week, we're taking everything we've been talking about, adaptability, uncertainty, constraints,

and the ability to keep moving forward and putting it to the ultimate test. I'm joined by Cole Brower. Cole became the first American woman to race solo, non-stop, and unassisted around the world. 77,000 miles, alone at sea, facing storms, exhaustion, isolation, and moments when everything could have gone wrong. But what's most fascinating isn't simply that she finished, it's what she discovered about herself along the way. At one point after repeatedly being told that her size would make this kind of sailing impossible, Cole found herself at what she describes as one of the lowest points in her life, and then something changed. She decided to go anyway. She went from being told she couldn't

do it to sailing around the world alone. And there's one moment in our conversation. that captures the spirit of this entire series. Take a listen to this. When you hit rock bottom is exactly what I need to go back up. While I'm at the bottom, all I can do is go up. I can't really go any lower. I wish I didn't have to hit rock bottom to find exactly where I am going in life. But maybe that's kind of the beauty of it too.

That's next week on Passion Struck. Because David reminded us that we don't always need to escape our constraints. sometimes we need to learn how to work within them. And Cole shows us what happens when you take that idea to the edge of what you believe is possible. Until then, remember, you don't have to know exactly where you're going to take the next step. Sometimes you just have to be willing to take it.

I'm John Miles, and as always, stay curious, stay intentional, and stay passion-struck.