What do you think?
You Can Just Do Things: How High-Agency People Get What They Want Out of Life
You’ve been taught success comes from careful planning, learning the ropes, and earning one promotion at a time. But what about the people who seem to skip all that?
We all know a few rare individuals who never stop moving, taking wild risks, and collecting public failures, yet somehow always seem to land on top. Cate Hall is one of those maddening, inspiring people. She left an elite legal career just before making partner to gamble for a living — and became the world’s top-ranked female poker player. A drug addiction left her broke and brain-damaged, but a year after emerging from it, she co-founded a biotech startup that set a clinical trial speed record. Not long after, she took the helm of one of the world’s largest philanthropic foundations.
Why don’t the rules apply to her? What if they don’t apply to you either?
In You Can Just Do Things, Cate Hall argues that the so-called “rules” of success aren’t rules at all — they’re productivity guidelines for low-agency people. Hall shows readers how to live with agency and take control of your
Increase your surface area for luckTake every shortcut availableBuild “forcing functions” that ensure commitmentUse your deepest insecurities as fuel for growth
Are you ready to cross the cringe minefield? To show up where you don’t belong, apply for jobs you’re not qualified for, call people who aren’t expecting it, and risk looking foolish in front of others? Every time you think, “Somebody should do this,” that somebody can be you.
An uncomfortable psychological journey and a toolkit for bold living, You Can Just Do Things reveals how to stop waiting and start building the life you want.
We all know a few rare individuals who never stop moving, taking wild risks, and collecting public failures, yet somehow always seem to land on top. Cate Hall is one of those maddening, inspiring people. She left an elite legal career just before making partner to gamble for a living — and became the world’s top-ranked female poker player. A drug addiction left her broke and brain-damaged, but a year after emerging from it, she co-founded a biotech startup that set a clinical trial speed record. Not long after, she took the helm of one of the world’s largest philanthropic foundations.
Why don’t the rules apply to her? What if they don’t apply to you either?
In You Can Just Do Things, Cate Hall argues that the so-called “rules” of success aren’t rules at all — they’re productivity guidelines for low-agency people. Hall shows readers how to live with agency and take control of your
Increase your surface area for luckTake every shortcut availableBuild “forcing functions” that ensure commitmentUse your deepest insecurities as fuel for growth
Are you ready to cross the cringe minefield? To show up where you don’t belong, apply for jobs you’re not qualified for, call people who aren’t expecting it, and risk looking foolish in front of others? Every time you think, “Somebody should do this,” that somebody can be you.
An uncomfortable psychological journey and a toolkit for bold living, You Can Just Do Things reveals how to stop waiting and start building the life you want.
218 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 21, 2026
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 107 reviews
July 21, 2026
Cate Hall’s book You Can Just Do Things is fun, inspiring, and scary. When reading the title, you might ask: What things? How do I do them? Will it hurt? Hall answers those questions, and more, in her book. And- yes, it might hurt!
The author has tried, failed, and succeeded many times. She shares her stories and lessons throughout the book. Using her own stories and stories of others she takes us through the following steps:
Realize SOMETHING needs to happen (The status quo does not work)
Identify what you need to do
Be willing to look stupid and fail
Try new things
Set yourself up for success
Identify your best self
Hall mixes storytelling, tips, and question prompts in a choose-your-own-adventure manner. Her advice is challenging, particularly if you are not a risk-taker and do not want to appear pushy. When I started reading, I viewed her advice as fantasy. There was no way I would do the bold things she suggests. But she is convincing. With the right goal in mind, looking silly is less of a risk.
At the beginning of the book she suggests we take the time to engage in intentional, intensive, self-questioning. An early question is: “What consequences am I trying to prevent by living in a way I do not like?” The next step may be a big change, a small change, or a nudge— it is up to you.
Hall devotes the second section of her book to being “willing to look stupid.” As expected, the advice is scary and not attractive. At least on first read. She makes a good point: we will fail to see some of our best options if we rule out everything that is socially unusual. She tells us to remind ourselves that embarrassment is the feeling of breaking the rules, and we want to break our previous rules. (Really— that does sound fun!)
The third section of the book is my favorite: “Get out of your lane.” In this section she tells us to stop using “this is the way I am” as an excuse. After reading the scary tips in the second section of the book, I was relieved to read advice about becoming more curious, becoming more skeptical, and avoiding fake life lessons. As a fan of the Enneagram system, I enjoyed the tips for selecting a counter-instinctual strategy based on the core fear of my Enneagram type.
The final sections of the book provide multiple tips to find the path of least resistance, which is not always the path that appears the easiest. There are many ways to set yourself up for success. Some of the ways involve making failure difficult or embarrassing.
I highly recommend this book. It is short (approximately 200 pages), easy to read, and encourages the reader to view their life through a different lens. Even the risk-averse will find some useful advice.
The author has tried, failed, and succeeded many times. She shares her stories and lessons throughout the book. Using her own stories and stories of others she takes us through the following steps:
Realize SOMETHING needs to happen (The status quo does not work)
Identify what you need to do
Be willing to look stupid and fail
Try new things
Set yourself up for success
Identify your best self
Hall mixes storytelling, tips, and question prompts in a choose-your-own-adventure manner. Her advice is challenging, particularly if you are not a risk-taker and do not want to appear pushy. When I started reading, I viewed her advice as fantasy. There was no way I would do the bold things she suggests. But she is convincing. With the right goal in mind, looking silly is less of a risk.
At the beginning of the book she suggests we take the time to engage in intentional, intensive, self-questioning. An early question is: “What consequences am I trying to prevent by living in a way I do not like?” The next step may be a big change, a small change, or a nudge— it is up to you.
Hall devotes the second section of her book to being “willing to look stupid.” As expected, the advice is scary and not attractive. At least on first read. She makes a good point: we will fail to see some of our best options if we rule out everything that is socially unusual. She tells us to remind ourselves that embarrassment is the feeling of breaking the rules, and we want to break our previous rules. (Really— that does sound fun!)
The third section of the book is my favorite: “Get out of your lane.” In this section she tells us to stop using “this is the way I am” as an excuse. After reading the scary tips in the second section of the book, I was relieved to read advice about becoming more curious, becoming more skeptical, and avoiding fake life lessons. As a fan of the Enneagram system, I enjoyed the tips for selecting a counter-instinctual strategy based on the core fear of my Enneagram type.
The final sections of the book provide multiple tips to find the path of least resistance, which is not always the path that appears the easiest. There are many ways to set yourself up for success. Some of the ways involve making failure difficult or embarrassing.
I highly recommend this book. It is short (approximately 200 pages), easy to read, and encourages the reader to view their life through a different lens. Even the risk-averse will find some useful advice.
July 21, 2026
“You can just do things” has become the rallying cry of a certain contingent of very online people. And while it can come across as flippant, it gets at something important: you can, in fact, just do things.
Hall (and Chapin) have written a relentlessly practical handbook for those of us (read: everyone) who lament the way things are, feel stuck sometimes, or wish our lives were different in some way. It advocates action over rumination with a positive, constructive bent that can apply to whatever situation you’re in.
While it has some of the trappings of the self help genre, it differs in important ways. First, it’s no longer than it has to be. Second, it crams in more practical tips per square inch than any similar book I’ve seen. Finally, it rewards reading through to the end - it’s not one of those books where the first few pages are insightful, but then the remainder of the book is just those same few pages repeated over and over with slight rephrasing.
It’s quick. It’s useful. It’s a good book. You can just read it.
Hall (and Chapin) have written a relentlessly practical handbook for those of us (read: everyone) who lament the way things are, feel stuck sometimes, or wish our lives were different in some way. It advocates action over rumination with a positive, constructive bent that can apply to whatever situation you’re in.
While it has some of the trappings of the self help genre, it differs in important ways. First, it’s no longer than it has to be. Second, it crams in more practical tips per square inch than any similar book I’ve seen. Finally, it rewards reading through to the end - it’s not one of those books where the first few pages are insightful, but then the remainder of the book is just those same few pages repeated over and over with slight rephrasing.
It’s quick. It’s useful. It’s a good book. You can just read it.
July 21, 2026
In a world of hustle grinders and therapy-speak posters, Cate Hall and Sasha Chapin chart the golden mean, finding the synthesis between effort and surrender. Their writing, and this book has helped me to operate in life with a fuller understanding that outcomes are not in my control, while simultaneously knowing that I can always move the odds in my favor, doing things that others would consider absurd or impossible, in pursuit of my goals.
I've learned that my locus of control is wider than I ever thought imaginable, without losing myself to the cult gospel of grinding and hustle. The book creates a synthesis between control over your actions and separation from your outcomes. It's full of thoughts like these two held in both hands:
1. "Anytime you find yourself in the enviable position of actually knowing what you want out of life, you're allowed to skip all the artificial steps standing between you and it and work on your goal as directly as possible, doing only what matters to advance the plot."
2. "...struggling is not evidence that you've tried everything. To the contrary, the continuous need for willpower may be the sign of a badly engineered life."
How great to know that anything is possible, but that if I constantly have to push myself to do things, then I'm doing the wrong things!
Sasha and Cate's writings on Substack have been instrumental in my personal formation. I'm so glad that this great book is bringing them to a larger audience!
I've learned that my locus of control is wider than I ever thought imaginable, without losing myself to the cult gospel of grinding and hustle. The book creates a synthesis between control over your actions and separation from your outcomes. It's full of thoughts like these two held in both hands:
1. "Anytime you find yourself in the enviable position of actually knowing what you want out of life, you're allowed to skip all the artificial steps standing between you and it and work on your goal as directly as possible, doing only what matters to advance the plot."
2. "...struggling is not evidence that you've tried everything. To the contrary, the continuous need for willpower may be the sign of a badly engineered life."
How great to know that anything is possible, but that if I constantly have to push myself to do things, then I'm doing the wrong things!
Sasha and Cate's writings on Substack have been instrumental in my personal formation. I'm so glad that this great book is bringing them to a larger audience!
August 11, 2026
A breath of fresh air. Feels like a self-help book — a pep talk, even — for those of us who don’t have the courage to go after what it is we truly want (or those who don’t yet know what that actually is). It comes across as a recommendation to take your time to experiment, to fuck up, and start over as many times as you like. Hall reminds us that it’s okay to take a risk, and that even if taking that risk results in face-planting the concrete, it’s never too late to dust ourselves off and try again. But I will say that this advice feels romanticised and doesn’t really take individual personal context into much consideration (but, of course, how could it? One can’t hold that against her). Life is about more than just “advancing the plot” if the road to what you want requires long-term dedication, sacrifice and commitment, e.g. an established career, a forever home, children of your own… And time is not exactly on your side, the older you get. Not all situations allow for endless do-overs. Not everybody experiences fulfilment and success as a chronic jumper. And certainly not everybody is at liberty to leave a secure, lucrative job for something as impulsive or risky as, say, pro poker. If you’re independent, financially equipped, childless and debt free, and you intend to stay that way… then yeah, maybe. But choices carry weight and responsibility, and sometimes the decision to pack up and get gone comes at an immense and irreversible cost. Obviously, it’s not healthy for anyone to stay where they’re desperately, dreadfully unhappy or when a situation becomes unhealthy. But many things worth having really do require us to stick at them, stay realistic and grind it out even when we may want to give up. I suppose this book helps people to get clearer on exactly when downsides outweigh benefits, and when it’s time to cut losses and give up. At the end of the day, only we can know in our own heart if a leap is worth taking. Mostly, I think she’s urging her readers to take more deliberate notice of that.
One thing I really like about Hall’s message is her encouragement to adopt an unfailingly optimistic attitude regardless of how things turn out in life. I am finding comfort in her reassurance that if you really do happen to screw up, you can probably hit reset with a bit of bravery, positivity and drive… as they say, “life is what you make it” and “it’s never too late to start over”. It’s an uplifting and insightful read for anyone who’s grown tired of fear steering the ship. This book has challenged some of my more cynical thinking, and helped me to feel less scared of a future I didn’t plan for, or have down as my first preference. In particular, the chapter on avoiding learning “fake lessons” (basically to steer well clear of sweeping generalisations based on anecdotal evidence) rang very true. We too easily come to negative conclusions simply because of painful data. My key takeaway is to take more notice of how I make such cynical assumptions and to challenge these before they become ingrained beliefs. To make the effort to see things as they are, rather than as I fear they are.
One thing I really like about Hall’s message is her encouragement to adopt an unfailingly optimistic attitude regardless of how things turn out in life. I am finding comfort in her reassurance that if you really do happen to screw up, you can probably hit reset with a bit of bravery, positivity and drive… as they say, “life is what you make it” and “it’s never too late to start over”. It’s an uplifting and insightful read for anyone who’s grown tired of fear steering the ship. This book has challenged some of my more cynical thinking, and helped me to feel less scared of a future I didn’t plan for, or have down as my first preference. In particular, the chapter on avoiding learning “fake lessons” (basically to steer well clear of sweeping generalisations based on anecdotal evidence) rang very true. We too easily come to negative conclusions simply because of painful data. My key takeaway is to take more notice of how I make such cynical assumptions and to challenge these before they become ingrained beliefs. To make the effort to see things as they are, rather than as I fear they are.
August 17, 2026
Came here after listening to the Magical Over Thinkers podcasts about starting over - I really liked the message in the podcast about life not having to be linear and that your identity doesn't have to be attached to your work/ achievements.
However, generally, I think I consume self help content in podcasts (in short bursts) better than books as after a while I have the same thoughts which are but what about structural constraints or institutional barriers or what about if you have kids or you're in debt etc etc.
The message of just have a go, you won't know if you don't try, can be helpful to some but in general lacks nuance which then solely blames the individual when ultimately what they wish for might not be possible anyway due to wider forces. Made me think of the subtle art of not giving a F, where the message is also just have a go.
I did really like the bit about asking for feedback and not avoiding the need to self reflect and I liked how open the author was and that it was read by the author, although ultimately I would recommend the podcast episode over the book for a short burst of reflection, perhaps this reflects my approach to this sort of content tho more than anything
However, generally, I think I consume self help content in podcasts (in short bursts) better than books as after a while I have the same thoughts which are but what about structural constraints or institutional barriers or what about if you have kids or you're in debt etc etc.
The message of just have a go, you won't know if you don't try, can be helpful to some but in general lacks nuance which then solely blames the individual when ultimately what they wish for might not be possible anyway due to wider forces. Made me think of the subtle art of not giving a F, where the message is also just have a go.
I did really like the bit about asking for feedback and not avoiding the need to self reflect and I liked how open the author was and that it was read by the author, although ultimately I would recommend the podcast episode over the book for a short burst of reflection, perhaps this reflects my approach to this sort of content tho more than anything
July 21, 2026
Hall brings a delightful candor and humor throughout the book as she shares her own experiences in the highs and lows of life. She asks pointed questions to get the reader thinking about what choices (or non-choices) are driving life.
Each section begins with a story that sets the tone for the recommendations and strategies that follow. While not everything is groundbreaking - "be willing to look stupid" - the framing and naming creates humor and helps each area feel fresh. Within the conversational nature lay acknowledgement and challenges of long-held assumptions, "we think we're doing the wrong thing if we succeed easily."
As a coach, the simplicity of the questions is what makes this thought-provoking and actionable.
Each section begins with a story that sets the tone for the recommendations and strategies that follow. While not everything is groundbreaking - "be willing to look stupid" - the framing and naming creates humor and helps each area feel fresh. Within the conversational nature lay acknowledgement and challenges of long-held assumptions, "we think we're doing the wrong thing if we succeed easily."
As a coach, the simplicity of the questions is what makes this thought-provoking and actionable.
August 11, 2026
It has an overall empowering message and some practical tips on having the ”the only thing holding you back are your fears” mentality.
But I’d say it takes that message too literally and frames anything standing in the way of achievement as fear, to the point that I got a frenetic hyperachievement undertone underneath… you absolutely can just do things, but the reason you aren’t might not be fear.
It might be enjoyment of current circumstances. There’s even a whole section about whether you’re playing to play or playing to win… enjoying a game isn’t fear of winning… enjoying life isn’t fear of achievement.
Still a good message but taken with a grain of salt
But I’d say it takes that message too literally and frames anything standing in the way of achievement as fear, to the point that I got a frenetic hyperachievement undertone underneath… you absolutely can just do things, but the reason you aren’t might not be fear.
It might be enjoyment of current circumstances. There’s even a whole section about whether you’re playing to play or playing to win… enjoying a game isn’t fear of winning… enjoying life isn’t fear of achievement.
Still a good message but taken with a grain of salt
October 5, 2026
There are no grown ups in the room and that’s both scary and comforting. Scary because it means there’s no one coming to save the world from factory farming or agi, but empowering because there is no one better to do this work than you and I.
I have this sense sometimes of am I even asking the right questions? Isn’t there someone better to do this work who knows more and is smarter? Feeling like I have sm to catch up on and someone who’s has the perfect resume and exact right choices leading up to this moment should be doing this work instead. But actually if you’re super focused and passionate, if you’ve committed 100% to an issue that in and of itself makes you the right person to do it, not an ivy league degree.
I think that stuck w me too is she seems to think she’s telling the reader shortcuts but I was honestly impressed with how clearly she was grinding. Like yes you have to be increasing your surface area for luck and emailing world experts because why not but you also have to just be spending long hours researching, working, building and it was a reminder for what I need to be doing in life rn.
I have this sense sometimes of am I even asking the right questions? Isn’t there someone better to do this work who knows more and is smarter? Feeling like I have sm to catch up on and someone who’s has the perfect resume and exact right choices leading up to this moment should be doing this work instead. But actually if you’re super focused and passionate, if you’ve committed 100% to an issue that in and of itself makes you the right person to do it, not an ivy league degree.
I think that stuck w me too is she seems to think she’s telling the reader shortcuts but I was honestly impressed with how clearly she was grinding. Like yes you have to be increasing your surface area for luck and emailing world experts because why not but you also have to just be spending long hours researching, working, building and it was a reminder for what I need to be doing in life rn.
October 9, 2026
This is not your ordinary self-help book, not at all. To me, roughly two-thirds of it felt rather conventional, even boring at times, covering ideas and advice that I had encountered many times before. But the remaining third of the chapters is something entirely different.
Those chapters are packed with thought-provoking insights and fresh perspectives that make you want to go back and reread the book, perhaps even more than once. And that is precisely what makes it stand out: despite its familiar elements, it offers genuinely valuable ideas that stay with you long after you finish reading. Cate Hall has indeed done a great job.
Those chapters are packed with thought-provoking insights and fresh perspectives that make you want to go back and reread the book, perhaps even more than once. And that is precisely what makes it stand out: despite its familiar elements, it offers genuinely valuable ideas that stay with you long after you finish reading. Cate Hall has indeed done a great job.
August 30, 2026
This book was surprisingly enjoyable. Initially it felt like another generic self-help book to add to the pile. Yet, I found the suggestions in this book to be fundamentally empowering.
Cate was a big-time lawyer, turned professional poker player, turned drug addict, turned CEO of a biotech company in the COVID pandemic. She has achieved her goals and also lived a lifestyle where she was subject to the whims of her environment and addiction. Her theory of agency, which seems to be the ability to accomplish your intentions, is not ground-breaking. It is pleasingly cliche and delivers the important rules that ought to be taught in grade school.
She focuses on overcoming pride by seeking feedback and being willing to look foolish while you learn. As she spoke, I felt as if I could actually accomplish the goals I've held in my mind for years. Her action plans are simple but life-changing. I particularly enjoyed her discussion of using negative consequences to propell yourself to action. She encouraged people to make commitments that would hurt to break. These commitments force action and put the required effort into perspective.
I intend to reread this book several times. I know that these life rules will actually help me achieve my goals and I need time to apply them. I encourage you to give this book a go.
Cate was a big-time lawyer, turned professional poker player, turned drug addict, turned CEO of a biotech company in the COVID pandemic. She has achieved her goals and also lived a lifestyle where she was subject to the whims of her environment and addiction. Her theory of agency, which seems to be the ability to accomplish your intentions, is not ground-breaking. It is pleasingly cliche and delivers the important rules that ought to be taught in grade school.
She focuses on overcoming pride by seeking feedback and being willing to look foolish while you learn. As she spoke, I felt as if I could actually accomplish the goals I've held in my mind for years. Her action plans are simple but life-changing. I particularly enjoyed her discussion of using negative consequences to propell yourself to action. She encouraged people to make commitments that would hurt to break. These commitments force action and put the required effort into perspective.
I intend to reread this book several times. I know that these life rules will actually help me achieve my goals and I need time to apply them. I encourage you to give this book a go.
August 18, 2026
Cate Hall and her husband both write lovely Substacks. That prior exposure was a prerequisite for me to go after this self-help book, whose alluring title may lead you to believe you can just... act.
The advice here is practical and usually deep. Hall serves a self-questioning exercise with prompt questions, dialogue writing, standards for improvement, reframings, communication tips, methods for gathering feedback and addressing it, paths to emotional adaptation and accepting rejection, a little cognitive behavioral therapy-sounding interventions, avoiding avoidance, meeting people, and overcoming the fear of failure.
If any of these items sounds useful, the book is useful. I find it hard to believe there is a single human being so high up on the mountain of self-improvement who can't be lifted a little further by applying the advice in here.
Naturally, awareness is not action. Reading this won't make you more agentic automatically, but it will prompt you to question why not? After all, why not act to obtain what you really want? To solve a problem? To make progress?
This is self-help with extensive LessWrong and rationalist citations, but not constrained to them. To Cate's credit, it adopts the principles of those spheres without ever diving into labels. I'll probably revisit my highlights for a long time. I hope to internalize the advice in fewer pages of the calendar.
The advice here is practical and usually deep. Hall serves a self-questioning exercise with prompt questions, dialogue writing, standards for improvement, reframings, communication tips, methods for gathering feedback and addressing it, paths to emotional adaptation and accepting rejection, a little cognitive behavioral therapy-sounding interventions, avoiding avoidance, meeting people, and overcoming the fear of failure.
If any of these items sounds useful, the book is useful. I find it hard to believe there is a single human being so high up on the mountain of self-improvement who can't be lifted a little further by applying the advice in here.
Naturally, awareness is not action. Reading this won't make you more agentic automatically, but it will prompt you to question why not? After all, why not act to obtain what you really want? To solve a problem? To make progress?
This is self-help with extensive LessWrong and rationalist citations, but not constrained to them. To Cate's credit, it adopts the principles of those spheres without ever diving into labels. I'll probably revisit my highlights for a long time. I hope to internalize the advice in fewer pages of the calendar.
August 1, 2026
A few months ago, I was agonising over one of the most difficult emotional problems of my entire life. I was tortured: to make a decision one way or the other was to choose between radically different futures, and for the life of me, no matter how much I agonised, ruminated, listed pros and cons, ground my teeth, tore my hair out, no matter how much sleep I lost, I simply could not decide one way or the other.
I was stuck.
Then, by chance, and I praise God for playing dice, because my Instagram feed (since deleted) was at the time full of the most reprehensible slop, certainly not the kind of stuff that improves one's life, I saw a reel by a man introducing and explaining the work of philosopher Ruth Chang. Ruth Chang is doing interesting research in the field of practical reason, which studies how people do in fact in the real world make choices. And her interesting research is about so-called "hard choices". Hard choices are choices between two or more options all of which are on a par: meaningfully different from each other, with different valuations, but nonetheless, with none of them decisively any better than the other. It's a modern formulation of Buridan's ass, in which a donkey that's both hungry and thirsty is placed an equal distance from hay and a pail of water and which, unable to choose between which one to approach first, dies. Hard choices are like that: all options are valuable, all are different from each other, but none is better than the other.
How do you choose?
Chang's answer was a revelation to me. You simply choose, and through choosing, and through all the actions that follow from your choice, you create reasons that retroactively justify your decision. In a sense, the question changes from, which option is better? to, which option can I mostly comprehensively commit to so as to give this choice, this decision, the greatest possible chance of success? By choosing thus, and by committing to your choice with supportive follow-up actions, your make your choice the right one. The decisive factor is not some long-sought-after fact about the world which has finally tipped the scales in favour of one answer; in archetypal hard choices, such facts cannot exist by definition; rather, the decisive factor is the motion of the human will, which by forging ahead on one path rather than another creates new facts about the world.
Sounds familiar?
This idea of hard choices started my obsession with agency.
This book by Cate Hall is the first book I've read since this revelation that deals solely with the concept of agentic choice. It has come at exactly the right time for me, which might partly explain my 5-star rating. I am not an objective judge; this book is meaningful to me for reasons that just might not hold for other people, and those people might rate this book very differently. That said, this book was a wonderful read.
People with agency get things done. They find ways to make things work. They assume that what others can do, they can do as well; they take responsibility for solving problems. They focus on their true, deep goals, which can mean a rejection of hustle culture and working for the sake of it and an obsession with finding the quickest, simplest way to get the thing they actually want. They don't agonise their way towards a perfect decision; they act now and make many small bets. They let failure be their guide. They are radically aware of and alive to the existence of alternative futures; failure isn't a statement about their personal worth, or lack thereof; it is simply an invitation to try something else. Maybe this sounds trite. And maybe it is. But what this book does really well is give you practical tools for making confident decisions under uncertainty. Developing faith in your ability to make rational, probabilistic judgements in uncertain environments, to move through the world and all its chaos with faith and conviction in your ability to figure out a way to make the next best move, to move, as Jocko Willinck said, to the next best position, is something that I have not seen tackled in any other self-help book (although I'm reluctant to call this self-help). It's worth a look-in for that reason alone.
Now I'm gonna go learn poker.
I was stuck.
Then, by chance, and I praise God for playing dice, because my Instagram feed (since deleted) was at the time full of the most reprehensible slop, certainly not the kind of stuff that improves one's life, I saw a reel by a man introducing and explaining the work of philosopher Ruth Chang. Ruth Chang is doing interesting research in the field of practical reason, which studies how people do in fact in the real world make choices. And her interesting research is about so-called "hard choices". Hard choices are choices between two or more options all of which are on a par: meaningfully different from each other, with different valuations, but nonetheless, with none of them decisively any better than the other. It's a modern formulation of Buridan's ass, in which a donkey that's both hungry and thirsty is placed an equal distance from hay and a pail of water and which, unable to choose between which one to approach first, dies. Hard choices are like that: all options are valuable, all are different from each other, but none is better than the other.
How do you choose?
Chang's answer was a revelation to me. You simply choose, and through choosing, and through all the actions that follow from your choice, you create reasons that retroactively justify your decision. In a sense, the question changes from, which option is better? to, which option can I mostly comprehensively commit to so as to give this choice, this decision, the greatest possible chance of success? By choosing thus, and by committing to your choice with supportive follow-up actions, your make your choice the right one. The decisive factor is not some long-sought-after fact about the world which has finally tipped the scales in favour of one answer; in archetypal hard choices, such facts cannot exist by definition; rather, the decisive factor is the motion of the human will, which by forging ahead on one path rather than another creates new facts about the world.
Sounds familiar?
This idea of hard choices started my obsession with agency.
This book by Cate Hall is the first book I've read since this revelation that deals solely with the concept of agentic choice. It has come at exactly the right time for me, which might partly explain my 5-star rating. I am not an objective judge; this book is meaningful to me for reasons that just might not hold for other people, and those people might rate this book very differently. That said, this book was a wonderful read.
People with agency get things done. They find ways to make things work. They assume that what others can do, they can do as well; they take responsibility for solving problems. They focus on their true, deep goals, which can mean a rejection of hustle culture and working for the sake of it and an obsession with finding the quickest, simplest way to get the thing they actually want. They don't agonise their way towards a perfect decision; they act now and make many small bets. They let failure be their guide. They are radically aware of and alive to the existence of alternative futures; failure isn't a statement about their personal worth, or lack thereof; it is simply an invitation to try something else. Maybe this sounds trite. And maybe it is. But what this book does really well is give you practical tools for making confident decisions under uncertainty. Developing faith in your ability to make rational, probabilistic judgements in uncertain environments, to move through the world and all its chaos with faith and conviction in your ability to figure out a way to make the next best move, to move, as Jocko Willinck said, to the next best position, is something that I have not seen tackled in any other self-help book (although I'm reluctant to call this self-help). It's worth a look-in for that reason alone.
Now I'm gonna go learn poker.
July 22, 2026
I really wanted to love this book. The central idea, that we often have more agency than we think we do, is compelling, and there were several concepts I'll continue to think about. The authors challenge the way we think about agency, encouraging us to question assumptions, recognize where we have more freedom than we realize, and simply take the next step. I especially liked the ideas around thinking like a crisis manager, having an inner dialogue with two conflict parts of ourselves, and treating traits as learnable skills. The short chapters also made it easy to pick up and put down.
The execution didn't always work for me. Some of the examples felt more focused on shock value than strengthening the book's central message. The story about a guy creating a fake LinkedIn company to get dates and the discussion around using shame as an accountability strategy both felt outdated and left me cringing. Those moments pulled me out of what was otherwise a thoughtful and insightful book.
That said, I can absolutely see why this book is resonating with so many readers. There are plenty of smart, memorable ideas here, and I took away several that I'll continue to apply. I just wish the examples had resonated with me as much as the core ideas did.
This is a 3.5/4 stars for me. Thank you to First Look Club for the early copy.
The execution didn't always work for me. Some of the examples felt more focused on shock value than strengthening the book's central message. The story about a guy creating a fake LinkedIn company to get dates and the discussion around using shame as an accountability strategy both felt outdated and left me cringing. Those moments pulled me out of what was otherwise a thoughtful and insightful book.
That said, I can absolutely see why this book is resonating with so many readers. There are plenty of smart, memorable ideas here, and I took away several that I'll continue to apply. I just wish the examples had resonated with me as much as the core ideas did.
This is a 3.5/4 stars for me. Thank you to First Look Club for the early copy.
August 15, 2026
You Can Just Do Things: How High-Agency People Get What They Want Out of Life (2026) by Cate Hall is a self-help book embracing the idea that we have more agency in our lives than most people believe. Hall is a Yale Law Graduate who become a professional poker player, then a drug addict and then turned her life around and founded a biotech startup before running a large philanthropic organisation.
The core tent of this book that we can take action and do things to help ourselves is well worth it. There are problems with this. Hall is obviously driven and really smart. Most of us are not nearly as able. I do think I could become a drug addict. But I really don’t think I’m smart enough to have an elite legal career. Let alone be a professional poker player. What works for Hall may not well work for the rest of us normal people. I would really like to read a book about average people who have found ways to achieve remarkable results. Alas such books are hard to come by.
There are some good ideas in the book. Trying to take shortcuts, increase the opportunities for luck and overcoming our own insecurities is something we should all try and do. She makes a good point about applying for things on occasion with a low probability of success. Almost all of us also need to have less fear about admitting what we don’t know. We also should try and exercise our own agency more.
You Can Just Do Things is a good read. Hall has had an interesting life and uses her story well. It’s also pleasantly short. You Can Just Read Things and knock this one over quickly. It’s a worthwhile self-help book even if it has limitations.
The core tent of this book that we can take action and do things to help ourselves is well worth it. There are problems with this. Hall is obviously driven and really smart. Most of us are not nearly as able. I do think I could become a drug addict. But I really don’t think I’m smart enough to have an elite legal career. Let alone be a professional poker player. What works for Hall may not well work for the rest of us normal people. I would really like to read a book about average people who have found ways to achieve remarkable results. Alas such books are hard to come by.
There are some good ideas in the book. Trying to take shortcuts, increase the opportunities for luck and overcoming our own insecurities is something we should all try and do. She makes a good point about applying for things on occasion with a low probability of success. Almost all of us also need to have less fear about admitting what we don’t know. We also should try and exercise our own agency more.
You Can Just Do Things is a good read. Hall has had an interesting life and uses her story well. It’s also pleasantly short. You Can Just Read Things and knock this one over quickly. It’s a worthwhile self-help book even if it has limitations.
July 22, 2026
Cate Hall’s “You Can Just Do Things: How High-Agency People Get What They Want Out of Life” is an engaging and thought-provoking guide to taking ownership of your life. Hall’s own journey—from corporate lawyer to the highest-ranked female poker player in the world and later to leading one of the world’s largest philanthropic foundations—gives her advice both credibility and practical relevance.
Some of the ideas that resonated most with me were her encouragement to seek honest feedback, stop fearing rejection, ask yourself, “Do I actually want this?”, and identify the core fears that may be holding you back. Her message is that the life you want often lies just beyond your comfort zone—and that there may be unexpected rewards waiting on the other side.
The book is filled with personal stories and practical insights that make these concepts feel achievable. I thoroughly enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone looking to become more intentional, courageous, and proactive in shaping their future.
Some of the ideas that resonated most with me were her encouragement to seek honest feedback, stop fearing rejection, ask yourself, “Do I actually want this?”, and identify the core fears that may be holding you back. Her message is that the life you want often lies just beyond your comfort zone—and that there may be unexpected rewards waiting on the other side.
The book is filled with personal stories and practical insights that make these concepts feel achievable. I thoroughly enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone looking to become more intentional, courageous, and proactive in shaping their future.
July 22, 2026
“You Can Just Do Things” brings clarity to the self-agency and power we all have during change – the power to do something different. As I read, I felt the author on my shoulder reminding me of my own agency in familiar situations; whispering I always have a choice –. We should never forget life is about learning, fear is expected and according to Hall, if it has been a while since you’ve felt embarrassed, more than likely you have slipped back to being a rule follower. Remember to always “plunge into the Moat”. Hall throughout the book continuously reminded me it is all about the learning. Opportunity will knock; you have been granted permission. A terrific read for anyone seeking ways to engage self-agency and excel.
September 14, 2026
Read this book over Labour Day weekend. Very much enjoyed it, it was a nice little meditation and life reflection. I particularly liked the recommendation to treat yourself as someone having the goal of making things better, that felt like a very achievable goal as opposed to having to fully optimize everything (I got this insight at the point where Cate's meant to make things better as compared to how they were in the past, but there's also support later in the book for doing things incrementally). Immediately applied you can just ask for things by asking for a later check out from my Airbnb. My host did not get back to me so I didn't get any benefit out of it, but it was worth shooting off an email for.
July 21, 2026
I came to this book already reading Cate and Sasha on Substack, so I knew what I was in for: writing that takes ambition seriously without worshipping it. The book’s central move is holding two things at once — you can widen your sense of what’s possible far beyond what feels reasonable, and you can stop treating constant struggle as proof of virtue. Then you can see hidden doors in the walls.
I’ve reorganized real decisions around that idea. Fewer artificial steps between me and the thing I actually want. Less grinding, more aim.
Five stars. I’ve already bought copies for friends.
I’ve reorganized real decisions around that idea. Fewer artificial steps between me and the thing I actually want. Less grinding, more aim.
Five stars. I’ve already bought copies for friends.
August 6, 2026
I read this because I loved Cate Hall’s Substack essays on things like taking testosterone and getting addicted to Whip-Its. She has a real insight into that sort of oddball experience. There’s a little of that in here, but not a ton. Mostly it’s standard 100%-of-the-shots type self help fare. Still, there’s enough that’s unusual or helpful to recommend it.
August 31, 2026
Quite practical and well articulated book on how to get out of your comfort zone and get stuff done.
Really helpful if you have any inclination of being an ambitious person but need a confidence boost and/or steps to do so. But like many things in life, putting these seemingly logical steps into reality will be the hard steps.
My top recommendation as you read this book would be to be honest and true to yourself. It is easy to lie and justify pretty much anything internally but to what avail?
Really helpful if you have any inclination of being an ambitious person but need a confidence boost and/or steps to do so. But like many things in life, putting these seemingly logical steps into reality will be the hard steps.
My top recommendation as you read this book would be to be honest and true to yourself. It is easy to lie and justify pretty much anything internally but to what avail?
July 25, 2026
I read this book as part of a first reads program. I loved it and would pick it up even if it wasn't just given to me. There are all kinds of great practical reminders that we have agency in our own life - to make decisions and then maybe even to decide if those decisions aren't the right ones and make different choices.
I found myself underlining a lot! Maybe you need a reminder too - that you don't have to over think everything - just do it. And if you question anything, question if you are good where you are right now or if you need to make another choice. Quit tripping over your own invisible psychologial obstacle course.
I highly recommend this book!
I found myself underlining a lot! Maybe you need a reminder too - that you don't have to over think everything - just do it. And if you question anything, question if you are good where you are right now or if you need to make another choice. Quit tripping over your own invisible psychologial obstacle course.
I highly recommend this book!
Read
July 28, 2026An actually good self-help book.
August 8, 2026
“I think of agency as the capacity to both see and act on degrees of freedom that other people overlook. It’s being able to see choices where others only see constraints—the hidden doors in the walls of life. It’s also the courage to walk through those doors, to defy the forces keeping us normal—the pressures imposed by our inner script and by the boxes other people put us in.”
“Agency entails a radically different way of relating to the world. Rather than avoiding failure and rejection, agentic people see these as the inevitable costs of personal progress, and opportunities for learning”
“fundamentally, they take responsibility. They act on the world, rather than the world acting on them”
“The kind of responsibility taken by agentic people is more like autonomy, ownership, release, liberation”
“Imagine you’re a character in what seems like a linear video game, one where you progress through a predefined sequence of levels. Your mission: Survive the gradually escalating challenges and work your way toward the inevitable conclusion. There’s a kind of comfort in this predictability, a sense of orientation, but a hollowness and constriction, too. Then, one day, you explore a mysterious unmarked door, and you realize you’re actually in an open-world game: You can go in an entirely different direction, discover new worlds, set out on wholly unrelated quests. These possibilities were just concealed by your game map, which painted a false picture of a straight-line world.”
“I consider the state of addiction to be the opposite of agency. Agency entails the ability to recognize all the degrees of freedom one has. Addiction strips them away, reduces life to one option, and subordinates everything else in service of making sure that option is selected over and over again”
“Addiction is automaticity. Agency is autonomy.”
“Agency is about seeing new options for effective action, and feeling at liberty to choose unconventional ones. Sometimes, that will involve “doing more”—more effort, more concern about outcomes, more explicit communication, more taking personal responsibility. Sometimes, it will involve “doing less”—abandoning a project that’s gone off the rails, taking a shortcut, or delegating a task to someone else.”
“What consequences am I trying to prevent by living in a way I don’t like?”
“Are you currently accepting something as “self-care” that is, in fact, an addiction? Are you living according to the expectations of others? The standards of your parents? Your partner, or an ex-partner? Do you endorse their judgment about what is valuable? Are you currently doing something that is doomed to fail? If so, why aren’t you adjusting your approach? Do you actually want to fail, because that would be more socially acceptable than just quitting, or more comfortable than radically changing the way you’re going about it? How is social pressure constraining your real desires? What belief about “who you are” has exceeded its useful life but persists because it organizes your social world? How many hours per year of “leisure” time do you blow on activities that aren’t actually rewarding, and what could you have done with the last couple years’ worth of that time instead? Is there something you really want to say to someone you’re close to—a parent, a friend—but you’re waiting until the right moment, which will likely never come?”
“What potentially true facts about the world do you refuse to consider because knowing them might require you to change your behavior? What values do you claim publicly but violate in private? Which causes do you earnestly believe you care about, but never devote time or money to? Which “mission” would you abandon tomorrow if no one could ever see you pursue it?”
“If you could go back to college and start over, would you still choose the same career path you’re on now? The same partner or friends? If not, what’s stopping you from changing them now? Imagine your child, or someone else you love, inherits your exact habits upon coming into adulthood. Which ones would you pay good money to delete from their life? Which talent or goal that you “plan” to pursue have you made zero progress on in the last year? Why does it never make it to the top of the priority list?”
“this is typically the nature of change—we are conflicted between forward motion and self-protection”
“What valuable argument or important observation is the neglected part of you making? Where might it be exaggerating its case? What are all the different ways you can imagine for this part to get its needs met?”
“Whether we are hiding our feelings behind a facade of order, or avoiding a reckoning by pursuing chaos, both are equally false ways to live, and the point of staring into the abyss is confronting the falsity.”
“the typical big reason for resisting change is this: Your identity gets in the way. You’ve spent years constructing a narrative about who you are”
“even though it can be incredibly energizing to realize that you could just start doing something or being someone new, that realization also involves a potentially devastating self-confrontation. Because if that’s true, then what does it say about all the times you didn’t start?”
“The crisis manager throws away the old to-do list and simply asks, “What is the most important priority, and what is the next thing required to achieve it?””
“Some other lines of dialogue that would make for bad movies, but good living: “I’ve noticed that lately, every time we have plans to hang out one-on-one, you invite someone else to join us—is that intentional?” “I always feel a little awkward around you, and I’m worried it comes across as me not liking you—I just wanted to say that’s not the case.” “I’ve been feeling a low-level tension between us, like maybe we’re quietly annoyed at each other but trying to stay polite. Is that just me?” “It sometimes seems like when I push back in meetings, it changes the energy in the room—like maybe you’re afraid to engage with me as directly as you do other people. Does that feel true?” “I’m all out of ways to solve this problem. Does anyone have something to suggest that we haven’t tried yet?””
“Have you ever noticed just how much of the drama in movies is generated by an unspoken rule that the characters aren’t allowed to communicate well? Instead of just naming the problem at hand, they’re forced to skirt around it until the plot’s events make it impossible to ignore”
“movie logic is endemic in dysfunctional organizations, friendships, and marriages. People prefer to take cover in a haze of denial and hope that somehow problems will just disappear. Far too often, we allow frustration or anger to intensify until we reach the boiling point and the problem can’t possibly be ignored anymore, instead of naming it well before it becomes critical”
“Before you even name an issue, ask yourself: Is this really the important issue to name? Or is this a manifestation of something deeper that would be even more powerful to tackle? For example, say you want to tell a friend that you were bothered by the way they were bragging about how lavish their wedding was. Is that really the root issue? Or is the real issue an underlying dynamic of competitiveness stoked by both parties, where the relationship is worse off because each of you fills every conversation with social status claims?”
“You are allowed to say the following: “There’s an issue I see in our relationship, and I want to address it so our relationship is stronger. But I’m nervous about naming it, because I’m worried that it could start an argument, and that’s not what I want.””
“I want to talk about this issue but it makes me flustered, and I stop making sense.”
“Self-Knowledge Is Good, but Other-Knowledge Is Better”
“the “Path of Least Embarrassment.” It’s our minds’ tendency to automatically filter potential actions based on our intense fear of looking weird to other people. This causes us to underrate the effectiveness of unusual ways of acting”
“On your first day of dance class, you don’t know how to move your body. Isn’t that exhilarating? You don’t know how to move your body. This thing you’ve been lugging around is now a whole new vehicle. It might move like a frenzied wolverine, or an indifferent spatula.”
“Unreasonable requests can open the door to reasonable requests.”
“If David Lee Roth walked backstage and saw brown M&M’s in the bowl, he had reason to believe the promoter hadn’t read the rider carefully. That meant there might also be serious safety oversights.”
“I noticed that XXXXX and XXXXX are listed on the XXX website as the president and COO. Do you have any plans to hire an executive director for the foundation? Given the degree of overlap in our worldviews and the types of projects we hope to support, I’d be interested in having a conversation about it if that’s something XXX is considering.”
“For most of my life, my motto was “I only play games I can win.” I had a loss-aversion mindset and thought that the most important thing in life was to not mess up. This may have been a side effect of being ostracized when I was young. With peers and sometimes even family, I found it difficult to fit in. But I could get good grades. This was where I could find belonging—by always coming up with the right answers.”
“With an expected-value mindset, your job is to maximize your winnings over time, not to minimize the number of times you lose”
“in expected-value thinking, if you lose 9 out of 10 times but make twenty times your money when you win, you should play that game over and over again. Over the long haul, if you’ve sized your bets correctly, it is a guaranteed path to riches—even if you start out on a losing streak.”
“As Ira Glass once said: “If you’re not failing all the time, you’re not creating a situation where you can get super lucky.””
“None of this means that failure is a goal. It just means that failure is an inevitable part of the terrain to be managed. You need to avoid total, catastrophic failure. But up until that point, you must be willing to lose”
“Better is “People don’t really spend that much time noticing me and my failures, so I can probably try stuff.” Better still: “If people do notice my failures, and I’m open about what I learned from them, that is a good thing—it helps others learn, and people seem more confident when they aren’t pretending to be perfect.””
“Emerging from addiction, I wondered why, if I was capable of such dramatic change for the worse, I wasn’t also capable of moving in the other direction”
“many attributes are nothing more than labels we attach to clumps of behaviors and skills that we can learn. They may be complicated clumps: Courage means facing fears that make us want to run screaming, which involves intelligent risk assessment combined with emotional regulation. Social attunement requires strong perspective-taking ability, getting out of our heads to consider other people’s feelings and experiences, as well as skill in reading body language and tone of voice. But cooking is also a complicated clump of behaviors, and most people are confident they can become decent cooks with practical instruction.”
“I wanted to be so good that I didn’t have to be liked. “Goddamn, that robot is indispensable,” I wanted people to think. In fact, I thought of trying to be liked as manipulative, the thing you did when you couldn’t win on substance.”
“Ask many follow-up questions in a conversation about someone else’s interest. Double-click on anything that’s ambiguous”
“a yin book about agency, called Don’t Just Do Things. It would include topics like how to attend to the system you’re a part of rather than pursuing your individual agenda, how to be patient until an intuitive solution arises naturally, and how to submit gracefully to the existing forces of change in your life rather than pushing, pushing, pushing. The book’s message would be that the search for an optimal choice, for better, sometimes causes us to foolishly overlook the possibility of skillfully, gently flowing with the momentum of what is already going to happen, of being receptive to our current character rather than trying to change it. If you’re reading this book because it flatters the way you already are—action-driven, hyperambitious, hell-bent on optimizing—perhaps Don’t Just Do Things is the book that would actually help you most”
“High-agency people aren’t like the Energizer Bunny, relentlessly exerting themselves; they don’t engage in effort for effort’s sake. Instead, they conserve their energy for the situations that require it—the complicated areas of their work and lives.”
“Most tasks are made more difficult by believing they will be difficult”
“Have you ever been joyfully soaked by rain? There’s that moment when you’re caught in a rainstorm and you realize there’s no avoiding it. You just give up and let the rain overwhelm you. In that moment, it suddenly becomes pleasant—which is odd, because nothing about the rain has changed. You just stopped fighting it.”
“Communicating honestly is much harder if you’re tensing against the assumption that you’ll receive the worst possible response.”
“What makes for a high-growth learning environment? The essential features are: Rapid, trusted feedback: An expert teacher gives you information as fast as you can handle it, with frequent quick tests. Direct learning: You are learning by doing. To learn how to speak conversational French, bumble through conversations with a native speaker. Open-ended sessions: Sessions are as long or short as needed to maximize learning. A source of motivation: You have some skin in the game and are rewarded for pushing your upper limit, not just making the grade. At the very least, this means having someone to impress.”
“To have a hope of winning against addiction, you have to make the fight as easy as possible”
“The point is to eventually find a way to frictionlessly live without the substance, to the extent possible.”
“It might be your position that you want to run a marathon. Cool, why? Is it because you want to improve your cardiovascular health? Well, interval training could be a lot more efficient. Is it because you want to impress your dad, who’s a runner? Perhaps a thoughtful gift would be better at facilitating that particular goal. Teasing apart your real underlying interest from your position allows you to ask, “What is the simplest possible way I could get what I actually want?””
“It’s almost always better to negotiate based on interests rather than positions, because your current position might not actually be the only (or best) way to achieve your interest”
“like “What is the project that no one’s doing yet but that you’d love to see someone take on?” In this way, I was able to get a sense of the field’s frontier. I also gave people space to express their hopes and frustrations, which is great fodder for bonding.”
“people who move more slowly through life, and achieve less, tend to take fewer shots on goal and have longer feedback loops”
“people really notice when you show up despite it not being a matter of duty or obviously in your self-interest. And people remember it.”
“Who’s Melvin? It’s a part of the human personality that exists in all of us, the part that’s good at avoiding blame or embarrassment by “acting normal.” Melvin is always taking the reasonable approach: Faced with a dilemma at work, rather than striving to really tackle it, Melvin executes a normal-shaped, solution-type action-thing.”
“often, when we put in a mediocre effort, it’s because we have other covert goals we’re not really acknowledging”
“Melvin often shows up when we haven’t dared ourselves to deeply want something, with all of the responsibility and potential disappointment, or even shame, that wanting it entails.”
“Melvin shows up because we fear another kind of rejection—rejection by reality”
“The delusion is: Commitment is a thing that you feel. The truth is: Commitment is a thing that you make.”
“People wait to feel committed rather than deciding to make a commitment.”
“you live more fully if you force yourself to stretch beyond what you think of as your capacity.”
“if you pick the right infinite struggle, it can provide you with infinite motivation.”
“it’s romantic that we both saw a great love on the other side of a lot of difficulty. I see beauty in the way our faith in each other allowed us to transcend our weakness and variability, that we saw something more enduring and charted a course there.”
“People who are successfully opportunistic take big leaps that make them progressively more alive”
“Agency entails a radically different way of relating to the world. Rather than avoiding failure and rejection, agentic people see these as the inevitable costs of personal progress, and opportunities for learning”
“fundamentally, they take responsibility. They act on the world, rather than the world acting on them”
“The kind of responsibility taken by agentic people is more like autonomy, ownership, release, liberation”
“Imagine you’re a character in what seems like a linear video game, one where you progress through a predefined sequence of levels. Your mission: Survive the gradually escalating challenges and work your way toward the inevitable conclusion. There’s a kind of comfort in this predictability, a sense of orientation, but a hollowness and constriction, too. Then, one day, you explore a mysterious unmarked door, and you realize you’re actually in an open-world game: You can go in an entirely different direction, discover new worlds, set out on wholly unrelated quests. These possibilities were just concealed by your game map, which painted a false picture of a straight-line world.”
“I consider the state of addiction to be the opposite of agency. Agency entails the ability to recognize all the degrees of freedom one has. Addiction strips them away, reduces life to one option, and subordinates everything else in service of making sure that option is selected over and over again”
“Addiction is automaticity. Agency is autonomy.”
“Agency is about seeing new options for effective action, and feeling at liberty to choose unconventional ones. Sometimes, that will involve “doing more”—more effort, more concern about outcomes, more explicit communication, more taking personal responsibility. Sometimes, it will involve “doing less”—abandoning a project that’s gone off the rails, taking a shortcut, or delegating a task to someone else.”
“What consequences am I trying to prevent by living in a way I don’t like?”
“Are you currently accepting something as “self-care” that is, in fact, an addiction? Are you living according to the expectations of others? The standards of your parents? Your partner, or an ex-partner? Do you endorse their judgment about what is valuable? Are you currently doing something that is doomed to fail? If so, why aren’t you adjusting your approach? Do you actually want to fail, because that would be more socially acceptable than just quitting, or more comfortable than radically changing the way you’re going about it? How is social pressure constraining your real desires? What belief about “who you are” has exceeded its useful life but persists because it organizes your social world? How many hours per year of “leisure” time do you blow on activities that aren’t actually rewarding, and what could you have done with the last couple years’ worth of that time instead? Is there something you really want to say to someone you’re close to—a parent, a friend—but you’re waiting until the right moment, which will likely never come?”
“What potentially true facts about the world do you refuse to consider because knowing them might require you to change your behavior? What values do you claim publicly but violate in private? Which causes do you earnestly believe you care about, but never devote time or money to? Which “mission” would you abandon tomorrow if no one could ever see you pursue it?”
“If you could go back to college and start over, would you still choose the same career path you’re on now? The same partner or friends? If not, what’s stopping you from changing them now? Imagine your child, or someone else you love, inherits your exact habits upon coming into adulthood. Which ones would you pay good money to delete from their life? Which talent or goal that you “plan” to pursue have you made zero progress on in the last year? Why does it never make it to the top of the priority list?”
“this is typically the nature of change—we are conflicted between forward motion and self-protection”
“What valuable argument or important observation is the neglected part of you making? Where might it be exaggerating its case? What are all the different ways you can imagine for this part to get its needs met?”
“Whether we are hiding our feelings behind a facade of order, or avoiding a reckoning by pursuing chaos, both are equally false ways to live, and the point of staring into the abyss is confronting the falsity.”
“the typical big reason for resisting change is this: Your identity gets in the way. You’ve spent years constructing a narrative about who you are”
“even though it can be incredibly energizing to realize that you could just start doing something or being someone new, that realization also involves a potentially devastating self-confrontation. Because if that’s true, then what does it say about all the times you didn’t start?”
“The crisis manager throws away the old to-do list and simply asks, “What is the most important priority, and what is the next thing required to achieve it?””
“Some other lines of dialogue that would make for bad movies, but good living: “I’ve noticed that lately, every time we have plans to hang out one-on-one, you invite someone else to join us—is that intentional?” “I always feel a little awkward around you, and I’m worried it comes across as me not liking you—I just wanted to say that’s not the case.” “I’ve been feeling a low-level tension between us, like maybe we’re quietly annoyed at each other but trying to stay polite. Is that just me?” “It sometimes seems like when I push back in meetings, it changes the energy in the room—like maybe you’re afraid to engage with me as directly as you do other people. Does that feel true?” “I’m all out of ways to solve this problem. Does anyone have something to suggest that we haven’t tried yet?””
“Have you ever noticed just how much of the drama in movies is generated by an unspoken rule that the characters aren’t allowed to communicate well? Instead of just naming the problem at hand, they’re forced to skirt around it until the plot’s events make it impossible to ignore”
“movie logic is endemic in dysfunctional organizations, friendships, and marriages. People prefer to take cover in a haze of denial and hope that somehow problems will just disappear. Far too often, we allow frustration or anger to intensify until we reach the boiling point and the problem can’t possibly be ignored anymore, instead of naming it well before it becomes critical”
“Before you even name an issue, ask yourself: Is this really the important issue to name? Or is this a manifestation of something deeper that would be even more powerful to tackle? For example, say you want to tell a friend that you were bothered by the way they were bragging about how lavish their wedding was. Is that really the root issue? Or is the real issue an underlying dynamic of competitiveness stoked by both parties, where the relationship is worse off because each of you fills every conversation with social status claims?”
“You are allowed to say the following: “There’s an issue I see in our relationship, and I want to address it so our relationship is stronger. But I’m nervous about naming it, because I’m worried that it could start an argument, and that’s not what I want.””
“I want to talk about this issue but it makes me flustered, and I stop making sense.”
“Self-Knowledge Is Good, but Other-Knowledge Is Better”
“the “Path of Least Embarrassment.” It’s our minds’ tendency to automatically filter potential actions based on our intense fear of looking weird to other people. This causes us to underrate the effectiveness of unusual ways of acting”
“On your first day of dance class, you don’t know how to move your body. Isn’t that exhilarating? You don’t know how to move your body. This thing you’ve been lugging around is now a whole new vehicle. It might move like a frenzied wolverine, or an indifferent spatula.”
“Unreasonable requests can open the door to reasonable requests.”
“If David Lee Roth walked backstage and saw brown M&M’s in the bowl, he had reason to believe the promoter hadn’t read the rider carefully. That meant there might also be serious safety oversights.”
“I noticed that XXXXX and XXXXX are listed on the XXX website as the president and COO. Do you have any plans to hire an executive director for the foundation? Given the degree of overlap in our worldviews and the types of projects we hope to support, I’d be interested in having a conversation about it if that’s something XXX is considering.”
“For most of my life, my motto was “I only play games I can win.” I had a loss-aversion mindset and thought that the most important thing in life was to not mess up. This may have been a side effect of being ostracized when I was young. With peers and sometimes even family, I found it difficult to fit in. But I could get good grades. This was where I could find belonging—by always coming up with the right answers.”
“With an expected-value mindset, your job is to maximize your winnings over time, not to minimize the number of times you lose”
“in expected-value thinking, if you lose 9 out of 10 times but make twenty times your money when you win, you should play that game over and over again. Over the long haul, if you’ve sized your bets correctly, it is a guaranteed path to riches—even if you start out on a losing streak.”
“As Ira Glass once said: “If you’re not failing all the time, you’re not creating a situation where you can get super lucky.””
“None of this means that failure is a goal. It just means that failure is an inevitable part of the terrain to be managed. You need to avoid total, catastrophic failure. But up until that point, you must be willing to lose”
“Better is “People don’t really spend that much time noticing me and my failures, so I can probably try stuff.” Better still: “If people do notice my failures, and I’m open about what I learned from them, that is a good thing—it helps others learn, and people seem more confident when they aren’t pretending to be perfect.””
“Emerging from addiction, I wondered why, if I was capable of such dramatic change for the worse, I wasn’t also capable of moving in the other direction”
“many attributes are nothing more than labels we attach to clumps of behaviors and skills that we can learn. They may be complicated clumps: Courage means facing fears that make us want to run screaming, which involves intelligent risk assessment combined with emotional regulation. Social attunement requires strong perspective-taking ability, getting out of our heads to consider other people’s feelings and experiences, as well as skill in reading body language and tone of voice. But cooking is also a complicated clump of behaviors, and most people are confident they can become decent cooks with practical instruction.”
“I wanted to be so good that I didn’t have to be liked. “Goddamn, that robot is indispensable,” I wanted people to think. In fact, I thought of trying to be liked as manipulative, the thing you did when you couldn’t win on substance.”
“Ask many follow-up questions in a conversation about someone else’s interest. Double-click on anything that’s ambiguous”
“a yin book about agency, called Don’t Just Do Things. It would include topics like how to attend to the system you’re a part of rather than pursuing your individual agenda, how to be patient until an intuitive solution arises naturally, and how to submit gracefully to the existing forces of change in your life rather than pushing, pushing, pushing. The book’s message would be that the search for an optimal choice, for better, sometimes causes us to foolishly overlook the possibility of skillfully, gently flowing with the momentum of what is already going to happen, of being receptive to our current character rather than trying to change it. If you’re reading this book because it flatters the way you already are—action-driven, hyperambitious, hell-bent on optimizing—perhaps Don’t Just Do Things is the book that would actually help you most”
“High-agency people aren’t like the Energizer Bunny, relentlessly exerting themselves; they don’t engage in effort for effort’s sake. Instead, they conserve their energy for the situations that require it—the complicated areas of their work and lives.”
“Most tasks are made more difficult by believing they will be difficult”
“Have you ever been joyfully soaked by rain? There’s that moment when you’re caught in a rainstorm and you realize there’s no avoiding it. You just give up and let the rain overwhelm you. In that moment, it suddenly becomes pleasant—which is odd, because nothing about the rain has changed. You just stopped fighting it.”
“Communicating honestly is much harder if you’re tensing against the assumption that you’ll receive the worst possible response.”
“What makes for a high-growth learning environment? The essential features are: Rapid, trusted feedback: An expert teacher gives you information as fast as you can handle it, with frequent quick tests. Direct learning: You are learning by doing. To learn how to speak conversational French, bumble through conversations with a native speaker. Open-ended sessions: Sessions are as long or short as needed to maximize learning. A source of motivation: You have some skin in the game and are rewarded for pushing your upper limit, not just making the grade. At the very least, this means having someone to impress.”
“To have a hope of winning against addiction, you have to make the fight as easy as possible”
“The point is to eventually find a way to frictionlessly live without the substance, to the extent possible.”
“It might be your position that you want to run a marathon. Cool, why? Is it because you want to improve your cardiovascular health? Well, interval training could be a lot more efficient. Is it because you want to impress your dad, who’s a runner? Perhaps a thoughtful gift would be better at facilitating that particular goal. Teasing apart your real underlying interest from your position allows you to ask, “What is the simplest possible way I could get what I actually want?””
“It’s almost always better to negotiate based on interests rather than positions, because your current position might not actually be the only (or best) way to achieve your interest”
“like “What is the project that no one’s doing yet but that you’d love to see someone take on?” In this way, I was able to get a sense of the field’s frontier. I also gave people space to express their hopes and frustrations, which is great fodder for bonding.”
“people who move more slowly through life, and achieve less, tend to take fewer shots on goal and have longer feedback loops”
“people really notice when you show up despite it not being a matter of duty or obviously in your self-interest. And people remember it.”
“Who’s Melvin? It’s a part of the human personality that exists in all of us, the part that’s good at avoiding blame or embarrassment by “acting normal.” Melvin is always taking the reasonable approach: Faced with a dilemma at work, rather than striving to really tackle it, Melvin executes a normal-shaped, solution-type action-thing.”
“often, when we put in a mediocre effort, it’s because we have other covert goals we’re not really acknowledging”
“Melvin often shows up when we haven’t dared ourselves to deeply want something, with all of the responsibility and potential disappointment, or even shame, that wanting it entails.”
“Melvin shows up because we fear another kind of rejection—rejection by reality”
“The delusion is: Commitment is a thing that you feel. The truth is: Commitment is a thing that you make.”
“People wait to feel committed rather than deciding to make a commitment.”
“you live more fully if you force yourself to stretch beyond what you think of as your capacity.”
“if you pick the right infinite struggle, it can provide you with infinite motivation.”
“it’s romantic that we both saw a great love on the other side of a lot of difficulty. I see beauty in the way our faith in each other allowed us to transcend our weakness and variability, that we saw something more enduring and charted a course there.”
“People who are successfully opportunistic take big leaps that make them progressively more alive”
August 28, 2026
When people ask me for my #1 non-fiction recommendation, I always say the same thing: Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss.
It's immediately useful and doesn't waste people's time with hundreds of pages of fluff.
And I'm happy to say that You Can Just Do Things will now be the second book I recommend. It's full of immediately useful systems and respects the reader's time.
I would love to see a publisher dedicated to succinct, high impact non-fiction like this.
It's immediately useful and doesn't waste people's time with hundreds of pages of fluff.
And I'm happy to say that You Can Just Do Things will now be the second book I recommend. It's full of immediately useful systems and respects the reader's time.
I would love to see a publisher dedicated to succinct, high impact non-fiction like this.
September 15, 2026
I very much enjoyed this book. I love how Cate writes in a very straightforward, no-nonsense way. I particularly found value where she said to imagine ourselves as an executive manager of our life when we’re feeling unable to decide on something, that really stayed with him. It’s a book that encourages one to move towards one’s goals and not rest on our laurels. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for motivation to spring into action and bring about positive change in their life.
September 4, 2026
highs: I recently saw someone on Twitter say: ‘A lot of what "high agency" people do is have no embarassment with bothering other people until they get what they want.’ I think this book is a great example of how that’s not necessarily true and Hall’s breakdown provides great examples for how to seek opportunities (at work specifically). I like how Hall mentioned that the best stamp of credibility is to partner with someone who already has it, I think it’s excellent advice that’s rarely mentioned in books about building your business.
lows: I was concerned from the title that this book might be brainrot of the startup founder variety or have a self-help written by AI slant but I was pleasantly surprised to find it didn’t have the lows I anticipated. it read more like a relaxed conversation or list-based substack article. I enjoyed it.
favorite quote: “Modern civilization has an unprecedented level of possibility, but it also spoon-feeds us, telling us what we want through advertising and received wisdom; it’s easy to feel immobilized, to not know how else you might want to live both on a large scale (what kind of career might be fun) and a small scale (what’s a new thing to do this weekend)… When you start wondering what you could ask for, you build your imaginative muscles by asking the simple question: what else is possible that might currently seem unreasonable?”
Overall rating: 5/5
lows: I was concerned from the title that this book might be brainrot of the startup founder variety or have a self-help written by AI slant but I was pleasantly surprised to find it didn’t have the lows I anticipated. it read more like a relaxed conversation or list-based substack article. I enjoyed it.
favorite quote: “Modern civilization has an unprecedented level of possibility, but it also spoon-feeds us, telling us what we want through advertising and received wisdom; it’s easy to feel immobilized, to not know how else you might want to live both on a large scale (what kind of career might be fun) and a small scale (what’s a new thing to do this weekend)… When you start wondering what you could ask for, you build your imaginative muscles by asking the simple question: what else is possible that might currently seem unreasonable?”
Overall rating: 5/5
September 6, 2026
Very enjoyable and maybe useful
This is not normally my kind of thing, being very agentic whilst hating that term, but I enjoy Cate's blog and wanted to support her. Her style is humorous, self-deprecating and occasionally cringe, but there's no denying she has the goods. My favorite line was "if this book tickles your ego maybe you need the m its anti-book "you don't have to just do things". Made me LOL, then go "Hmmm." Like much of the book. But it. Read it. If you hate it blame me. 🤣
This is not normally my kind of thing, being very agentic whilst hating that term, but I enjoy Cate's blog and wanted to support her. Her style is humorous, self-deprecating and occasionally cringe, but there's no denying she has the goods. My favorite line was "if this book tickles your ego maybe you need the m its anti-book "you don't have to just do things". Made me LOL, then go "Hmmm." Like much of the book. But it. Read it. If you hate it blame me. 🤣
September 8, 2026
This book gave me a much, needed kick. You Can Just Do Things challenges the idea that you need permission, perfect qualifications, or a flawless plan before taking action.
What stuck with me most was the reminder that sometimes the person you’re waiting for to make something happen can simply be you. Bold, uncomfortable, and genuinely motivating.
What stuck with me most was the reminder that sometimes the person you’re waiting for to make something happen can simply be you. Bold, uncomfortable, and genuinely motivating.
August 24, 2026
You Can Just Do Things was exactly the book I needed at this point in my life.
Cate Hall has a way of confronting uncomfortable truths without turning self-improvement into a quest to become a “perfect” human being. The book made me question whether some things I think of as fixed parts of my personality are really just habits, fears, or stories I have been telling myself—and reminded me that it is never too late to change them.
The chapters on feedback and rejection particularly resonated with me. I know that honest feedback is essential to getting better, yet I realized how much I instinctively fear receiving it. Hall offers a useful filter: Will this feedback help me tackle one of my actual priorities in life? If it is simply feeding the fantasy of becoming a flawless human being, let it go.
I also loved her idea of building your “rejection muscle.” Make audacious requests. Take more shots. Treat rejection as information rather than a verdict on who you are. Instead of avoiding failure, think in terms of expected value: make enough worthwhile bets and accept that some won't work out.
Perhaps my biggest takeaway was that we don't need to wait until we become more confident, courageous or charismatic before acting differently. These qualities can be practiced. Choose the behaviors of the person you want to become and start doing them.
Sometimes you really can just do things.
Cate Hall has a way of confronting uncomfortable truths without turning self-improvement into a quest to become a “perfect” human being. The book made me question whether some things I think of as fixed parts of my personality are really just habits, fears, or stories I have been telling myself—and reminded me that it is never too late to change them.
The chapters on feedback and rejection particularly resonated with me. I know that honest feedback is essential to getting better, yet I realized how much I instinctively fear receiving it. Hall offers a useful filter: Will this feedback help me tackle one of my actual priorities in life? If it is simply feeding the fantasy of becoming a flawless human being, let it go.
I also loved her idea of building your “rejection muscle.” Make audacious requests. Take more shots. Treat rejection as information rather than a verdict on who you are. Instead of avoiding failure, think in terms of expected value: make enough worthwhile bets and accept that some won't work out.
Perhaps my biggest takeaway was that we don't need to wait until we become more confident, courageous or charismatic before acting differently. These qualities can be practiced. Choose the behaviors of the person you want to become and start doing them.
Sometimes you really can just do things.
July 31, 2026
Tagline: Trade caution for possibility.
Although this book may be categorized as self-help, it is refreshingly different from the typical self-help book. It is not research-heavy or built around a review of other self-help titles. Instead, Cate Hall draws on her own experiences to develop broader, practical principles about agency, courage, and opportunity.
The book is captivating and written in a style that feels honest, direct, and trustworthy. It gives you permission to be yourself while offering ideas and examples of how taking greater personal agency can lead to new opportunities and possibilities.
This is an essential read for anyone struggling with their career, considering their next steps, or simply looking for more challenges and opportunities in life.
Key Themes and Insights
The author supports her central thesis by sharing stories and lessons from her own life. Key themes include:
* The value of honest feedback, both anonymous and direct
* Personal growth and self-improvement
* Confidence and assertiveness
* Career and life design
* Overcoming fear and rejection
* Building agency and taking action
Final Verdict
You Can Just Do Things is a highly relatable and engaging book packed with actionable ideas that can apply to almost anyone. As someone who has recently entered a new phase of life—retirement—I’m excited to become more agentic and pursue what I truly want out of life.
It’s never too late.
Although this book may be categorized as self-help, it is refreshingly different from the typical self-help book. It is not research-heavy or built around a review of other self-help titles. Instead, Cate Hall draws on her own experiences to develop broader, practical principles about agency, courage, and opportunity.
The book is captivating and written in a style that feels honest, direct, and trustworthy. It gives you permission to be yourself while offering ideas and examples of how taking greater personal agency can lead to new opportunities and possibilities.
This is an essential read for anyone struggling with their career, considering their next steps, or simply looking for more challenges and opportunities in life.
Key Themes and Insights
The author supports her central thesis by sharing stories and lessons from her own life. Key themes include:
* The value of honest feedback, both anonymous and direct
* Personal growth and self-improvement
* Confidence and assertiveness
* Career and life design
* Overcoming fear and rejection
* Building agency and taking action
Final Verdict
You Can Just Do Things is a highly relatable and engaging book packed with actionable ideas that can apply to almost anyone. As someone who has recently entered a new phase of life—retirement—I’m excited to become more agentic and pursue what I truly want out of life.
It’s never too late.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 107 reviews