The Art of Becoming is about turning obstacles into opportunities. Drawing from philosophy, resilience, and real-life experiences, I share lessons on navigating adversity, cultivating wisdom, and living with purpose. Because in the end, life isn’t about avoiding hardship—it’s about becoming someone who thrives in it.

We won’t always have the answers, but we can search for them together.

Today, we stop being a victim.

I hope you’ll join me.

Most people walk through life like leaves carried on the wind, tossed by circumstance, pushed by the opinions of others, and waiting for permission to move, speak, and act on our own accord.

They complain about the government. Climate change. Covid. Their boss and spouse. Children. Their crappy job or lack of one. Inflation. Everything wrong with the country is because of China or the Democrats or Trump or Biden. Everything they are or are not is someone else's fault or out of their control.

Victimhood is their state of being. Their comfort zone.

That’s not living. It's reacting to someone else's simulation of reality. To another person's decision.

Agency is what separates leaders from followers, creators from consumers, the fulfilled from the frustrated, survivors from victims.

The truth is is that agency can’t be given. It must be defined, claimed, and owned.

There are many ways to claim agency, but in my life, in business, and my own personal trials, there are five ways I learned to create agency in my life.

This isn't pop psychology or something found on some influencer's Instagram post. Some of this wisdom are hard-won truths I learned from philosophers who chose character over safety, integrity over comfort, even when the stakes were life and death.

And the other truths I learned from the hundreds of failures I experienced, the moments that demanded control or collapse, and from the times I allowed another man or woman's reality to be my own.

I discovered agency when my life fell apart, when I thought I lost my daughter to cancer, when my mother put all her businesses in my name and failed to pay the IRS. I had to choose to be the author of my life or play victim for the rest of it.

Agency is when you decide who YOU choose to be.

Let’s get to it.

1. Own Your Response (Viktor Frankl)

You don’t control the market.

You don’t control your boss.

You don’t control whether your child gets cancer.

But you do control how you respond.

Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist, wrote:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude.”

When business deals fall apart, when presidents play games with the market, when life feels unfair—your response is your power.

Every time you choose peace over hate, grace over resentment, action over paralysis, faith over despair, you take back control. You create agency.

2. Control Your Mind (Epictetus)

There’s a Stoic principle that remains just as relevant today as it did over two thousand years ago:

“It is not things themselves that disturb us, but our opinions about them.” — Epictetus, Enchiridion 5

My first sales manager told me this story about opportunity:

Two salesmen were sent to a remote village to sell shoes.

After arriving, one called his company and said,

“Bad news—no one here wears shoes. There’s no market.”

The other called and said,

“Incredible opportunity—no one here wears shoes yet!”

Two people can face the same challenge—one sees disaster, the other sees opportunity.

Same problem. Same pressure. Different mindset.

You will be tested. People will challenge you. Family will disappoint you. You could lose everything. But the moment you take control of your inner narrative, you stop being a victim.

When you choose to see opportunity instead of problems, you become the author of your life.

3. Live in Alignment (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor and theologian who stood against the Nazi regime at a time when silence was safer.

In 1939, Bonhoeffer was in the United States—safe from the growing darkness in Europe. But he made a deliberate decision to return to Germany, saying,

“I must live through this difficult period in our national history... Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation or the defeat of their faith.”

He joined the underground Confessing Church, helped Jews escape persecution, and was eventually linked to a plot to assassinate Hitler. Arrested in 1943, Bonhoeffer was executed just weeks before the end of the war.

Bonhoeffer knew the risks. He had the chance to avoid them. But to him, moral clarity without action was betrayal.

He chose alignment over safety. Conviction over compromise.

That’s agency.

It isn't control over outcomes—but the final determination of your values and the courage to live by them, no matter the cost.

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4. Focus Only on What You Can Control (Stoic Principle)

The Stoics were obsessed with the “dichotomy of control”—the idea that life is split between what’s up to us and what’s not.

You can’t control your competition, the weather, if your father dies of stroke, your spouse cheats on you, or something as mundane as the weather.

But you can control your preparation, your attitude, your effort.

I used to obsess over other people's opinion of me. I fear that cancer will take my daughter from me. I wonder if anyone will ever like my writing.

Though it may seem normal and understandable, that fear and worry and the contant obsessing over everyone’s opinion was exhausting—and paralyzing.

Agency returned when I focused only on what I could do and control—my thoughts, choices, and actions.

Everything else became noise.

5. Anchor Yourself to Purpose (Harriet Tubman)

Agency isn't just about reacting well to life’s challenges—it’s about knowing why you’re moving forward in the first place.

Harriet Tubman escaped slavery in 1849, but she didn’t stop there. Guided by a fierce sense of purpose, she returned to the South nearly 13 times to lead over 70 enslaved people to freedom through the Underground Railroad.

She faced enormous risk every time—capture, torture, death—but she never wavered in her commitment. Why? Because she was anchored to something larger than herself.

“I had reasoned this out in my mind: there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other.”

Tubman didn’t need permission or wait for perfect conditions.

She chose her purpose—and lived it with conviction.

Agency is sustained by purpose. When you know what matters most, fear becomes smaller. Distractions fall away. And no one—not critics, not setbacks, not even death—can pull you off course.

Final Thoughts

Agency isn’t a gift.

It’s isn’t a rite of passage. You weren’t born with it.

You earn it. You build it. You choose it.

It’s a muscle you grow every time you say:

“This is hard, but I choose to show up anyway.”

“I can’t control that, but I can control how I think about it. I can control what I will do next.”

“I’m not waiting for someone else to decide for me. I make my own decisions.”

It’s a choice you make when you’re with your family, driving to work, how you think about the world, in the boardroom, or in the quiet moments—agency is how you reclaim your life from the noise.

But it starts with you choosing not to be victim. Or making someone else yours.

Thanks for reading. Remember: you are not a victim. So don't act like it.

Love to you and yours,

Michael

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