erika

There is an inverse correlation between how many people attend an event and how good it is. Hosting some of the most curated events out here in Singapore. Our goal has always been to build incredible brands digitally and physically! More to come!

My company receives thousands of job applications every year. We hire maybe 3–5 people. The single most important trait I hire for is agency. I think there are fundamentally two types of people: 1.) People who happen to the world. 2.) People who the world happens to. I find it exhausting, poisoning, and eventually corrupting to spend too much time around the latter. Because the world is unbelievably conquerable. It is malleable. Negotiable. Far less fixed than it appears. With enough intelligence, persistence, and sheer output, reality has an astonishing tendency to yield. Most people never discover this. We inherited brains optimized for a world of scarcity. Avoid danger. Conserve energy. Seek acceptance. Follow the tribe. Repeat what worked yesterday. Those instincts kept our ancestors alive. Today, many of them keep us mediocre. We live in an age where a 22-year-old with a laptop can build a company, reach a billion people, raise millions of dollars, learn almost anything, and communicate with virtually anyone on Earth. Yet most people still navigate life as if the map has already been drawn for them. I think humans have a responsibility to test how much of that map is actually real. There are two major obstacles: 1. Culture The moment you become genuinely high agency, you violate the social contract of mediocrity. The proper career. The proper timeline. The proper opinions. The proper amount of ambition. The proper definition of enough. The second you deviate, you encounter the contamination most people have unknowingly absorbed: A world meant to be followed. A script meant to be obeyed. A life subordinated to peers, algorithms, institutions, and the mythology of the “proper life.” Society has an immune system. Behave differently enough and it activates. You will be mocked, dissuaded, ostracized, misunderstood, and occasionally punished. This is predictable. Just as a bubble rises through water, groups exert pressure on individuals to return toward equilibrium. If you intend to escape that equilibrium, expect some period of exile. 2. Mental models Thinking without a script is cognitively expensive. Your brain is a prediction machine. Like an LLM predicting the statistically probable next token, your mind constantly predicts the statistically probable next action. Familiar inputs produce familiar outputs. School. Job. Promotion. Mortgage. Retirement. The path has been pretrained. Agency requires interrupting the prediction. You have to deliberately train yourself to generate actions that your previous experience would never have suggested. This is exhausting at first. Then it becomes addictive. You begin excavating something underneath the conditioning: Insatiable curiosity. Provocative reasoning. Intellectual sovereignty. An almost pathological belief that problems are solvable. So how do you train it? Reason from outputs backwards. I always say: A dream gets you nothing but sleep. Stop asking: “What do people normally do?” Ask: “What would need to be true?” That question is one of the most powerful cognitive weapons I know. It forces your brain out of analogy and into first principles. “I want to build a monopoly marketing agency.” Okay. What needs to be true? I need to dominate the three fundamental components of the business: Lead generation. Sales. Fulfillment. What needs to be true to dominate lead generation? When a prospect searches for us, asks a founder, talks to a VC, asks an LLM, opens X, or enters the relevant ecosystem, Arcadia needs to be unavoidable. What needs to be true to dominate sales? We need the superior product, the superior pitch, or preferably both. What needs to be true to dominate fulfillment? We need to engineer the conditions that make the desired client outcome overwhelmingly probable, then make that impact impossible to misunderstand. Then you recurse. “What needs to be true?” Again. Again. Again. Until the impossible goal has been decomposed into a collection of painfully ordinary inputs. I have spent years recursively applying this framework to every layer of my company. It has forced us to build better products, measure actual impact, question inherited assumptions, and almost never reason from “how everyone else does it.” This is what agency ultimately is: The refusal to treat the current state of reality as an instruction. Most people inherit their lives. High agency people architect them. Free thinkers, sovereign entrepreneurs, and relentlessly high agency individuals will build the future. The rest will live inside the world they create.