I had a conversation recently with someone who runs a small business, and somewhere in it he said, almost in passing, “I feel like everything’s just happening to me.” His inbox, his clients, his suppliers, the latest pricing change from a vendor — all of it landing on him like weather. He wasn’t lazy and he wasn’t short on ability. But somewhere along the way he’d started to believe the events of his day were the ones in charge, and he was only along for the ride.

That belief — that the world acts on you, rather than you acting on the world — is the most expensive idea a person can carry. And I’ve come to think the most important quality anyone can develop is its opposite: the quiet conviction that you have power. Not power over other people, or over outcomes, or over the economy. Power in the plainest sense of the word — the ability to act.

Here’s the part that’s easy to miss. No matter what is going on around you, you still get to decide what you do next. That’s the whole thing. Circumstances can narrow your options, sometimes brutally, but they never remove the choice entirely. There is always a next action, and you are the one who chooses it.

The wheel is closer than it feels

Most of the people I work with aren’t short on skill. They’re short on the sense that they’re driving. The day arrives as a flood and they meet it by reacting — answering whatever shouts loudest, putting out whatever’s burning. By five o’clock they’ve been busy for nine hours and couldn’t tell you what they actually decided. Reacting feels like working, but it isn’t the same as choosing.

I notice this most clearly in the morning, in front of a full inbox. Two hundred messages can feel like two hundred small demands, each one acting on you. But that feeling is a story, not a fact. The moment I ask Copilot in Outlook to summarise a long thread and tell me what genuinely needs me, the pile stops being weather and starts being a list — and a list is something you work through on your terms. The tool didn’t hand me more hours. It handed back the moment of choice.

Tools can’t give you agency, but they can return it

This is where I think the conversation about AI usually goes wrong. People talk about it as something that will do the work for them, as if the goal is to act less. I see it the other way around. The value of Copilot catching me up on a meeting I missed in Teams, or pulling the three figures I need out of a forty-page document in Word, isn’t that I get to disappear. It’s that the noise stops dictating my next move and I get to.

Agency was always mine. What gets in the way is the volume — the sheer weight of information and obligation that makes it feel like there’s no room to decide anything. Clear some of that weight and the choice that was there all along becomes visible again. You stop being a passenger in your own day.

So I’d offer this, for whatever it’s worth. When the next thing lands on you and the old feeling rises — this is just happening to me — pause on it. It almost never is. You still have the next move. You always do. Everything that matters tends to follow from remembering that.