The Importance of Agency and Balance

Martin Seligman spent the first part of his career studying what happens when people conclude that nothing they do matters. His experiments on learned helplessness in the 1960s showed that once effort and outcome are disconnected for long enough, effort stops, even after the connection is restored. Six decades later, he has published the mirror image of that finding. In Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress (2026), Seligman argues that the belief that our actions matter is the engine behind civilisational advance, and that its rise and fall can be traced across three thousand years of recorded history.

The three beliefs that make up agency

Seligman defines agency as the combination of three distinct beliefs:

• Efficacy is the confidence that you can accomplish the goal in front of you. It is what produces trying.
• Optimism is the expectation that your efforts will pay off over the long run. It is what produces persistence.
• Imagination is the breadth of goals you can envision for yourself. It is what produces innovation.

The three do different work, and each is incomplete without the others. Efficacy without imagination executes a narrow script competently. Imagination without optimism generates possibilities that are abandoned at the first setback. A young person, a team or a society has agency when all three are present at once.

How agency shaped civilisations

The book's method is unusual for psychology. Seligman and his collaborators used AI tools to count agentic language across roughly three thousand years of texts, from Homeric Greece through the Hebrew Torah, ancient China, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the civil rights movement, and to watch the levels rise and fall.

The pattern he reports is consistent. Periods of flourishing in philosophy, commerce and social organisation follow periods in which people came to believe that outcomes depended on human effort rather than on the will of the gods, on fate, or on an arbitrary ruler. In the Iliad, decisive action is repeatedly attributed to gods intervening in human affairs; the Athens of Pericles, a few centuries later, ran on the assumption that citizens could deliberate and act on their own account, and produced an extraordinary concentration of progress. Seligman reads ancient China's Warring States period and the Qin unification that ended it as the reverse case: a legal order that organised collective effort on a vast scale while suppressing the individual variety. When agency collapses, on his account, societies stagnate regardless of their resources or talent.

The historical claims will be argued over, as any three-thousand-year thesis should be. The psychological core is on firmer ground, because it rests on the same mechanism his laboratory work established: people act when they believe acting matters.

Where Hong Kong students stand

What Seligman describes at the scale of civilisations is visible at the scale of a single school year in Hong Kong.

For most students here, the years before graduation are scheduled in detail by other people, and success is defined narrowly enough that the range of goals worth imagining stays small. A student can move through secondary school making very few genuine decisions: which goals to pursue, how to allocate their own time, what to do when a plan fails. The system asks for compliance and rewards it.

Then the demand reverses overnight. University, and working life after it, assume a person who can generate options, choose between them and navigate setbacks without instructions. Many young people meet that demand feeling confused, helpless or paralysed, and the feeling is routinely read as a lack of maturity or drive. Seligman's framework suggests a different reading: efficacy, optimism and imagination are built through practice, and these students were given almost no opportunity to practise. The helplessness is learned, in precisely his original sense of the word.

The research on youth purpose points the same way. In Bronk's study across three age groups, what connected purpose to life satisfaction among adolescents was agency, the belief that they could make progress toward their goals, rather than knowing the concrete route (Bronk, Hill, Lapsley, Talib, & Finch, 2009). A young person who does not believe their actions matter has difficulty holding a direction at all, which is much of why so many report feeling trapped on paths they did not choose.

When agency tips into control

Agency has a failure mode, and it deserves as much attention as the deficit does.

Consider a decision with real stakes: an investment that requires committing significant capital, or a career move that could alter your trajectory for a decade. A highly agentic person responds by planning, mapping pathways, modelling scenarios and optimising for the best outcome. Up to a point this is exactly what agency is for. Past that point it becomes an attempt to control what cannot be controlled, because the information is never complete and the future does not disclose itself in advance. The planning continues anyway, now as rumination, and the result is stress and anxiety rather than better decisions.

The decision research is consistent with this. Schwartz and colleagues found that maximisers, people who try to optimise every choice, report more regret and lower wellbeing than those who search until they find an option that is good enough, even when the maximisers' outcomes are objectively better (Schwartz et al., 2002). The effort of total control is costly, and the cost is paid in the same currency, confidence and forward motion, that agency runs on.

Effort within its limits

The useful boundary is between what effort can influence and what it cannot. Efficacy, optimism and imagination govern the first territory. The second calls for something older: the capacity, once you have done what can be done, to let the outcome rest.

Most traditions have a name for this. The Stoics built their entire practice on separating what is up to us from what is not. The Chinese phrasing is 盡人事，聽天命: exhaust what human effort can do, then accept what follows. Steve Jobs made the same point in secular terms when he observed that you cannot connect the dots looking forward, only looking back, and that you have to trust the dots will somehow connect.

None of these is a retreat from agency. Rumination consumes the attention and energy that trying, persisting and imagining require, so knowing where control ends is what protects agency inside its own territory.

The full skill, then, has two parts:

the belief and willpower to pursue goals as if effort decides everything, and the trust, once the effort is genuinely spent, that the parts beyond your control will resolve in ways you cannot yet see.

Implications for schools and organisations

1. Give young people real decisions early, at stakes that are safe to get wrong. Efficacy is built from acting and seeing the action matter, not from being told one is capable, and a student who reaches eighteen without practice at choosing will practise for the first time when the stakes are highest.
2. Widen what counts as success. Imagination is a component of agency, and a narrow definition of an acceptable life caps it directly. Exposure to a broader range of working lives, and adults who treat those lives as legitimate, expands the set of goals a young person can envision pursuing.
3. Treat setbacks as information about the plan, not the person. Optimism in Seligman's sense is a style of explaining failure. A revised plan framed as an adjustment builds it; a revised plan framed as evidence of inadequacy erodes it.
4. Teach where control ends. Judge decisions by the quality of the reasoning and the effort, not only by the outcome, and say so explicitly. A team or a classroom that debriefs the process rather than the result is teaching the difference between what its members control and what they do not.

Bringing it to your school or organisation

GRAAM Academy's programmes build the three components of agency deliberately: efficacy through decisions and completed steps at manageable stakes, optimism through how setbacks are framed and explained, and imagination through widening the goals a young person or a team believes are available to them. The work also covers the boundary, because the aim is not maximum control but sustained, confident effort inside the territory where effort counts.

References:

• Seligman, M. E. P. (2026). Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress.
• Simon & Schuster. Bronk, K. C., Hill, P. L., Lapsley, D. K., Talib, T., & Finch, H. (2009). Purpose, hope, and life satisfaction in three age groups. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 4(6), 500–510.
• Schwartz, B., Ward, A., Monterosso, J., Lyubomirsky, S., White, K., & Lehman, D. R. (2002). Maximizing versus satisficing: Happiness is a matter of choice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(5), 1178–1197.
• Hope and agency definitions per Snyder, Rand, & Sigmon (2005).