Agency and Opportunity
Three days out of the week last spring, I spent almost two hours on commuter trains travelling to and from an internship. Each trip brought me face to face with people that I had never met and would likely never see again. It was, however, the two or three faces that I saw on a daily basis that taught me two important lessons about agency and opportunity that I hope never to forget.
Nearly every walk that I made through my trip’s terminal train station took me past several people asking for spare change. Previously, when I had seen impoverished individuals up close, I felt like I was looking at them through a telescope; though they appeared physically near, I still perceived that a vast distance between our worlds remained. My personal circumstances last spring, however, changed my perspective.
Within just a few months, I would be graduating from law school. It would be the culminating academic achievement of a lifetime of dedicated study. And though I was proud of my pending accomplishment, it was to come without any employment opportunities. Seeing these panhandlers with that reality in mind helped me realize just how little separated me from a cardboard-softened concrete seat next to them. For the first time in my life, I started to understand what an ancient prophet meant when he asked his people: “For behold, are we not all beggars?” (The Book of Mormon, Mosiah 4:19). I hope to never forget what it felt like to look into the eyes of poverty and see not just the suffering of another but also a reflection of my own despair.
This, of course, is not to make the seriousness of their situation analogous to my own. My earning potential remains high, and thanks to the generous assistance of family and friends, I have not had to beg any strangers for help. Nevertheless, I do believe the proximity that I felt to those individuals taught me an important lesson. Agency (or the power to choose) is an eternal principle, and we construct much of our circumstance one choice at a time. But just as material science limits the design options of an architect, opportunity constricts the exercise of agency. Within a man’s heart and mind may be the blueprint of a mansion, but without the right tools and materials, he may struggle to even construct a shack.
Malcom Gladwell recognized this in his book Outliers. In attempting to unravel the stories behind abnormally successful people (i.e., outliers), Gladwell observed that “[t]heir success is . . . grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky—but all critical to making them who they are.” According to Gladwell, “[p]eople don’t rise from nothing. . . . It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.” It is easy to think that we are where we are because of who we are. But that is really only part of the story.
This leads me to the two lessons that I learned by walking through the train station last spring. First, I could not have accomplished what I have without the unique, and often undeserved, opportunities and advantages that I have had throughout my life. Second, failure is not always the result of poor choices; sometimes it results from a lack of opportunity. Indeed, we never really know what someone could accomplish with the right opportunities. As Anton Ego in Pixar’s film Ratatouille, put it: even though not everyone can become a great artist, a great artist can come from anywhere.
Learning to see success and failure as an often unquantifiable mixture of agency and opportunity helped me realize how much more I could do to help others succeed. As Gladwell put it, our tendency to “personalize success” can cause us to “overlook just how large a role we all play—and by ‘we’ I mean society—in determining who makes it and who doesn’t.” As a result, we often “miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung.” (Gladwell, Outliers). Therefore, “let us not be weary in well doing” and as we have “opportunity, let us do good unto all men.” (Galatians 6:9-10). Let us “[p]ause to help and lift another. . . . To the wounded and the weary,” may we “show a gentle heart.” (Lord, I Would Follow Thee, Hymn #220).
.PNG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
