The Six Pillars of Agency: Insights from Poker Pro and Entrepreneur Cate Hall
I recently talked with Cate Hall on my podcast. Cate is a former Supreme Court advocate turned professional poker player who has since co-founded startups and explored various creative pursuits. Her journey of embracing agency resonated deeply with my own experiences of leaving the default path.
- 00:00 – Intro
- 01:25 – Guest introduction
- 02:43 – The scripts that Cate grew up with
- 07:08 – Yale — doors-opening credentials?
- 10:59 – Leaving law for poker
- 14:32 – Video cuts off
- 16:38 – The surprising reaction from her parents
- 19:13 – Developing agency, learning from the others
- 24:18 – Deterministic vs probabilistic economy
- 27:29 – Risk and the diminishing prestige of the traditional paths
- 31:46 – Burnout
- 37:56 – Asking dumb questions
- 42:35 – Defining ambition
- 44:14 – Seeking actual feedback
- 46:40 – Everything is learnable
- 50:46 – Imagining the surface area of luck
- 58:21 – Closing remarks
Cate shared insights from her popular article on agency, which outlines six key principles:
- Don’t work too hard
- Learn to love the moat of low-status
- Court rejection
- Seek real feedback
- Assume everything is learnable
- Increase your surface area for luck
One quote that stood out was Cate’s reflection on burnout:
“People who haven’t experienced burnout have a really wrong model of what it does to somebody’s brain…I think it’s a much, much deeper thing that can take actually years to recover from and some people just don’t recover from it.”
We discussed how embracing rejection, seeking honest feedback, and being willing to look foolish can open up new possibilities. Cate emphasized that personality traits are more malleable than most people assume:
“I think that there are way more degrees of mental freedom than people realize…I think that this is true of almost nothing. I think general intelligence is difficult to change. That seems like pretty close to fixed, though you can do some stuff arguably, but most other big determinants of success seem to be pretty malleable.”
