The Secret Sauce of Amazon's ExecutionIt’s not a tool or a process. It’s a specific mindset about agency that changes everything.
You ever see a below-average-looking man with an absolute stunner of a woman? Or an average-looking woman with a gorgeous man? And you ask yourself, "How did THAT happen?" The answer has nothing to do with secret wealth or hidden talents. The answer is almost always agency. That person didn't accept the circumstances they were handed. They didn't sit around waiting for the world to come to them. They rejected the reality they were "supposed" to have and decided to create the one they wanted. They acted. Nobody lands someone "out of their league" by playing it safe. Acting requires developing a thick skin. It means willingly putting yourself into uncomfortable situations and starting difficult conversations. It’s the understanding that an extraordinary prize often has a steep price tag called rejection, and having the courage to pay it. This is because high-agency people are gravitational. Their ability to create momentum and overcome obstacles is a rare and attractive quality that pulls others into their orbit. This exact dynamic plays out everywhere in life, but I saw it done at scale in my career. I spent my entire professional life at one company. From a new college grad to a Principal Engineer, my only employer was Amazon. People often ask how I survived the notorious intensity for so long. The truth is, when it’s all you know, you just assume that’s how life is. Say what you want about that intensity, but it creates a culture that knows how to execute. I can't think of any other company that does so much at such a massive scale. We have a global retail business, a streaming service, a logistics network to rival FedEx, the world's largest cloud platform in AWS, a Hollywood studio, a grocery chain, consumer electronics, and even a satellite constellation. (There I go again with the "we." You can take the man out of Amazon, but you can’t take the Amazon out of the man.) So how does one company do all of that? It’s not just about the 16 famous leadership principles on the wall. It’s about the unspoken mindset the company selects for during hiring, a meta-principle that powers all the others. It’s that same thing we started with. The secret sauce of Amazon’s execution is a culture built on high agency. High agency is the default assumption that you are responsible for the outcome, no matter the circumstances. It's the opposite of waiting for permission. A low-agency person sees a roadblock and says, "I'm stuck." A high-agency person sees a roadblock and says, "It's my job to figure out how to get around this." This mindset is the true engine of Amazon's success. But it's not exclusive to them. It's a skill you can build to make your career and life exponentially better, and it starts with one foundational belief. 1. You Are Not a Victim of Your CircumstancesYou own the outcome of your life. Everything starts here. Before you can act like an owner, you have to stop thinking like a victim. If you are reading this article, you have already won a galactic lottery. You have internet access. You can read English with high proficiency. You found me, your Uncle Steve. I got you. But that doesn't mean life is easy. You may come from a poor country. You may have a dysfunctional family. You may have faced discrimination, suffered abuse, battled a chronic illness, or been buried in debt. You may have lost a loved one, or many. Life can be incredibly hard, and when things go wrong, it is very easy to feel like a victim. The victim mindset is subtle and seductive. It sounds like perfectly reasonable explanations. "The project is late because the other team missed their deadline." "I can't get that promotion because my manager doesn't recognize my work." "My ideas never get heard because these meetings are a mess." In each of these stories, you are the passive character. You are a victim being acted upon by external forces. You have surrendered control. It’s like you're a spectator watching a movie of your own life. You have no control over the plot, and it feels like the script is a tragedy. A person who owns the outcome of their life rejects this narrative. They see the exact same circumstances not as excuses, but as problems they are responsible for solving. The project is late, so it's my job to figure out how to help the other team get unblocked. My manager doesn't see my value, so it's my job to find better ways to demonstrate it. The meetings are a mess, so it's my job to be the one who brings structure. You either cede control to your circumstances, or you claim control over your response to them. This choice is the foundation of agency. But simply changing your mindset isn't enough. Ownership is useless without action. This is where the internal decision to own your life translates into an external bias for action. It’s the understanding that progress doesn't come from waiting for the perfect plan, permission, or for 100% certainty. Progress comes from moving forward, learning as you go, and adjusting course. Deciding to act is how you truly take control away from your circumstances and begin to shape your own outcome. Actionable Advice: Find one thing at work where you feel stuck or blocked. Write down the "victim story" that explains why you're stuck. It will probably start with "I'm blocked on X because..." Then, rewrite that sentence into an "owner's statement" that starts with "To get X unblocked, I will..." This simple act of reframing is your first step in turning ownership into action. If you are finding this article useful, you might also enjoy some of the other most popular posts from A Life Engineered this year: Join over 30,000 other ambitious professionals and subscribe to get practical, non-obvious career advice in your inbox every week. Paid members get access to all articles and extended versions of the podcast. 2. Redraw the Boundaries of Your Job and LifeOkay, so you’ve decided to stop being a victim and start acting. The immediate question is, "Act on what? I have a job to do. I have tasks on my plate." This is where most people get stuck. They see their job as a fence. Their responsibilities are inside the fence, and everything else is "not my job." They spend their careers mowing the same small patch of grass perfectly, and they get frustrated when they don't get rewarded for it. Let me tell you a secret. Your job description is a floor, not a ceiling. It's the bare minimum you were hired to do. So if your real job isn't that list of tasks, what is it? Where should you direct your energy? Before you can act, you need a compass. You need to define what "winning" looks like. At Amazon, that definition was clear, absolute, and drilled into us from day one: Customer Obsession. Jeff Bezos framed the company's success as being completely synonymous with serving the customer. He taught us to start with what the customer needs and work backward. For Amazon, the customer was their North Star. For you, it might be different. Maybe success for your company is defined by groundbreaking technical innovation, flawless design, or social impact. In your personal life, maybe winning is defined by your creative work, your fitness, or the strength of your family. The specific goal doesn't matter as much as the clarity of it. High agency requires a North Star. You have to know what game you are trying to win. Once you define your mission, all the hard work that follows becomes simple. It’s the price of admission. The intensity, the uncomfortable conversations, the relentless follow-up—that’s the cost you willingly pay to win the game you’ve chosen to play. This is what gives your agency a purpose. It demands that action is about doing, not talking. Think of it like a game of tennis. Any unaddressed task that gets in the way of your mission is a ball in your court. Low-agency people watch it land and complain. High-agency people sprint to hit it back. This relentless rallying is all in service of the final, non-negotiable principle: Deliver Results. At the end of the day, your impact is measured by what you achieve against your mission. This all comes down to one prevailing question: "Am I actually doing everything I can to achieve the outcome I want?" Here is an example. Imagine your project is blocked because you need data from the analytics team.
Actionable Advice: This week, I want you to challenge the boundary. Pick your most important project. Instead of just thinking about your assigned tasks, relentlessly ask yourself one question: "And then what?" For example: "I finish my weekly report, and then what? A director reads it. And then what? They use that data to make a budget decision. And then what? That decision impacts our core mission." Follow that chain of consequences until you find a problem that is bigger and more valuable than the one you were originally assigned. That’s your new territory. Now, what’s one small action you can take to start solving that problem? 3. Agency is Built on Small Acts of CourageThis mindset of redrawing boundaries and taking relentless action can feel intimidating, not just at work, but in every area of your life. It sounds like you have to be a hero who single-handedly changes the world. This isn't true. Agency is not a personality trait you are born with. Rather, it is a skill you develop over time. You build it like a muscle, starting with small weights and getting progressively stronger. The courage muscle you build at work is the same one you use at home. It is built on hundreds of small, consistent acts of courage. I was shooting a podcast when a neighbor was doing some construction in their unit. We played the sound check back and could hear the hammering in the audio track. My first thought was whether my editor could remove the background noise. My guest simply said, “Let’s go ask them if they would stop.” For some reason, this action scared me. I hadn’t met this neighbor before, and it would involve knocking on their door and interrupting them. My guest’s simple, direct suggestion highlighted my own passivity. I was already planning a workaround for a problem that might be solvable in 30 seconds. So, I took a breath, walked over, and knocked. The neighbor opened the door, tool in hand. He wasn't annoyed. He was apologetic. He had no idea we were recording and happily agreed to pause his work for the hour we needed. The interaction took less than a minute. Turns out he’s a great dude and we are really friendly neighbors now. My fear was a complete fabrication. My low-agency solution would have cost my editor hours and still produced a worse result. The high-agency approach solved the problem instantly. At work, it’s the courage to say, "This meeting doesn't have a clear goal. What decision are we trying to make?" or to take on a messy, ambiguous task that no one else wants. In life, it’s the courage to finally start that difficult conversation with a family member. It’s signing up for the marathon you think you can’t run. It’s sending an email to a potential mentor you admire, knowing they might not reply. Starting a newsletter nobody will read. Each small act reduces your fear of taking initiative and proves to yourself that you are the kind of person who acts. But what happens if you don't? The opposite of courage isn't safety; it's regret. That uncomfortable conversation you avoid allows resentment to fester and the relationship to quietly erode. That newsletter you don't start means your idea dies inside you, unheard. A life without these small acts of courage isn't a life of peace. It's a life of "what ifs," lived in the passive voice, that slowly solidifies into a reality you never consciously chose. Actionable Advice: Find your "five-pound weight" this week, at work or at home. Identify one small, ambiguous task you’ve been avoiding and claim it. At work, it could be documenting a broken process. At home, it could be finally making that dentist appointment, organizing the one drawer that drives you crazy, or sending that one vulnerable text message. The size of the task doesn’t matter. The act of choosing to do it is what builds the muscle. You may get rejected. You may fail. Your idea might fall flat, and the conversation might go badly. That is the price of admission for a life of action. But the point is not to avoid failure. The point is to act despite the possibility of failure. Every time you choose to act, you win, because you chose to be the author instead of a passive character. The outcome of a single act is uncertain, but the outcome of a life of action is not. It is a life of growth, learning, and zero regret. Conclusion: You Are the Author, Director, and ActorWe started this article with a question about how people achieve outcomes that seem "out of their league." The answer was agency. But agency is more than just a tool to get a better job or impress your boss. It's a fundamental reframe of your entire life. Most people go through life feeling like characters in a story written by someone else. Their boss, their family, their circumstances—they all provide a script. You’re the “good employee,” the “reliable friend,” the “person who isn’t a risk-taker.” High agency is the realization that you are the author, director, and actor in your own movie. My time at Amazon taught me what the company truly values: the courage to write a better story than the one you were handed. Your job, your relationships, your skills, your past, these things are not your destiny. They are the setting and the raw material for the story you choose to write, starting today. The uncomfortable conversations, the relentless follow-up, the courage to act even when you fear failure—these are the scenes where you direct your own life Stop waiting to find out what happens next. Go make the movie with the happy ending. I challenged myself to build a browser extension and published it to the Chrome Web Store in 1 day with Warp  Warp leans into the future of coding by prompt. It’s the top coding platform right now, at #1 on Terminal-Bench and top 3 on SWE-bench Verified, ahead of tools like Gemini, Claude Code, and Codex CLI. The multi-agent system and diff review features make it feel like you're running a real engineering team. Warp brought me back to building after 18 months away from code. Warp is free to try but for a limited time, my friends at Warp are offering their Warp Pro plan for only $1. Use code LIFEENG to redeem here: https://go.warp.dev/life-engineered A Life Engineered will always be a free publication, but if you’d like to support it, we’d be honored if you upgraded your subscription. Paid subscribers get the full experience, including access to the archives.
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