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 future:

• Increase your surface area for luck
• Take every shortcut available
• Build "forcing functions" that ensure commitment
• Use 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.

Cate Hall is a former attorney and the ex-number one ranked female poker player in the world. She co-founded Alvea, a pandemic medicine company that set the record for the fastest startup to take a drug candidate to a Phase I clinical trial. Later, she served as CEO of the Astera Institute, a multibillion-dollar private foundation.

Sasha Chapin is an award-winning journalist and recovering chess enthusiast and the author of All the Wrong Moves. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, BuzzFeed, and Hazlitt.