There’s something that happens in the moment before someone takes action without permission.
It’s not confidence, exactly. It’s not certainty. If anything, it’s the opposite. It’s a willingness to move forward while still holding the question: Will this work? Will anyone care? Am I overstepping?
Jamie Richards was 22 when she walked into her first job as a product manager at a beauty company. She had a degree in environmental policy and decision-making. She had spent years studying the psychology of why people make the choices they do. And she had something else, too: a quiet frustration she couldn’t shake.
She loved things. Materialistic things. Growing up in New Jersey, she was surrounded by them. And she also loved the environment. For a long time, those two truths felt like a contradiction she couldn’t resolve. She told me about sitting in a college class, watching a documentary about fast fashion, and realizing she was wearing a fast fashion shirt. “You are a hypocrite,” she thought. “You say you’re an environmentalist.”
That tension could have become guilt. It could have become paralysis. Instead, it became fuel.
When Jamie started her first job, there was no sustainability title waiting for her. No mandate from leadership. No one asking her to research greener options for their products. But she noticed the gap. And she started filling it, on her own time, because she couldn’t not.
She’d come back to her team with three options: good, better, best. Here’s the tradeoff. Here’s what it costs. Your call.
She didn’t pitch. She didn’t lobby. She just kept showing up with useful information, grounded in real data, and let the work speak for itself.
Pretty soon, she became the person everyone asked. When leadership finally asked what she wanted to do next, she said she’d love to turn the company into a B Corp. They said yes. By 25, she was an executive leading sustainability across multiple brands.
I keep thinking about that phrase: she started filling the gap because she couldn’t not do it.
There’s a version of agency that looks like confidence, like knowing exactly where you’re going. But I think the more common version, the one most of us actually experience, looks more like Jamie’s. It’s not certainty. It’s a kind of restlessness. A feeling that something matters, even when no one else seems to be paying attention to it.
The question I keep returning to is whether that spark can be learned. Or is it something you either have or you don’t?
I don’t think it’s fixed. I think agency is more like a muscle than a trait. It strengthens through use. Every time you act on something you care about, even in a small way, you build evidence that your actions matter. And that evidence compounds.
Jamie didn’t start with a sustainability department. She started with a spreadsheet. She started with three options and a willingness to be useful before anyone asked her to be.
What strikes me most is that she didn’t wait for the tension to resolve. She didn’t wait until she had the title, or the budget, or the certainty that it would work. She moved forward with the contradiction still alive inside her: the love of things, the love of the planet, the frustration that sustainability is still a luxury most people can’t afford.
“Part of my anger was my motivation,” she told me. “It really bothers me that sustainability isn’t accessible to everybody.”
That anger didn’t make her bitter. It made her precise. It made her someone who could walk into a room and say, “Here’s what’s possible. Here’s what it costs. Your call.”
I think that’s the part we often miss when we talk about agency. We imagine it as a feeling of empowerment, a surge of clarity. But sometimes it looks more like frustration that refuses to stay quiet. Sometimes it looks like caring about something so much that you start doing the work before anyone gives you permission.
The good news is that this isn’t rare. It’s not reserved for a certain kind of person. It’s available to anyone willing to notice the gap between what is and what could be, and to start filling it, even in small ways, even without a title.
You don’t need an invitation to begin. You just need to care about something enough to act on it.
And then, as Jamie put it, advocate for your work. Let the usefulness speak.