Welcome to Useful Fictions
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What is Useful Fictions?
This blog is my attempt to transmit the mental models (“useful fictions”) I’ve developed over the course of a life that has ranged from boring (law) to thrilling (poker), horrifying (addiction) to sublime (tk). I write most often about agency, which I think about as the entirely learnable capacity to both see and act on all of the degrees of freedom that life really offers. I’m writing a book on agency with my husband Sasha (out next spring via Harper Business), and Useful Fictions is partly a place for me to test out material for the book, and hopefully build an audience for it.
All of the illustrations on Useful Fictions are commissioned from Alexander Naughton.
Who are you?
I’m Cate Hall, the CEO of Astera, a private foundation dedicated to supporting transformative technologies across AI, neurotech, space, planetary science, and energy. My only authority for writing about agency is personal experience:
I’ve achieved success in a bunch of unrelated fields — I was a Supreme Court lawyer and the top-ranked female poker player in the world, and led operations the fastest-ever startup to take a drug into clinical trials. Now I lead one of the world’s largest foundations.
I lost years to a crippling drug addiction that zeroed out the balance of my life and forced me to start over at 37 — in debt, unemployed, with major physical and cognitive impairments. The models and approaches I write about here were the ladder I used to climb out of that hole.
You can leave me anonymous feedback here.
Where do I start?
Here are a few posts that might help you get a sense for whether this blog is likely to be interesting to you:
How to be more agentic: The first thing I published and one of my most popular — read this if you want to get a feel for what I mean by “agency” and what it looks like in action.
Maybe you’re not Actually Trying: About why highly capable people sometimes fail to notice that they’re stuck in certain areas of life, and that they can do something about it.
I used to be a high-performing robot: Read this one if you want to be disabused of the notion that agency is a fixed trait, or that it’s too late to learn it. It also explores the concept of addiction as the opposite of agency.
Testosterone gave me my life back: Reflections on a year of having my quality of life radically upgraded by testosterone replacement therapy, as a 40 year old woman.
Are you stuck in movie logic?: About how much better relationships (of all kinds) get when you reverse the movie rules and start telling rather than showing.
